Gabriel comments on Rationality meditation theory. - Less Wrong

-5 [deleted] 11 January 2012 03:50AM

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Comment author: pjeby 11 January 2012 05:03:56PM 2 points [-]

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what creativity is. Read "Serious Creativity" to dissolve the idea that creativity and craziness are related. (It's actually an optimization and search process -- and as per the Sequences, you can't improve such a process much by adding randomness to it. That is, above a certain small level of randomness, you won't be making things better, compared to changing the higher-level processes as per Serious Creativity. SC's author offers a proper reductionist explanation of creativity, at the, "AI people wanting to implement creativity should read this" level.)

Comment author: Gabriel 12 January 2012 01:59:12PM 3 points [-]

Does the book have a strong empirical basis? Does the author quote experimental studies and then draw conclusions from them or does he rely on intuition and personal experience in coming up with his thesis? I'm asking because the book's Amazon page tells me that the author is a business consultant and the whole thing has a very self-helpy feel to it.

And there was a story some time back about scientists who found similarities in brain function of highly creative people and schizophrenics so the idea that creativity and craziness are related might be somewhat true.