= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on Don't estimate your creative intelligence by your critical intelligence - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (20)
Good writers are not necessarily good critics. Just a different skill. You can be smart at one and dumb at the other.
I personally don't think it's a matter of skill. I think everyone is better at criticizing than at creating. It's just easier.
Sounds like a P vs NP thing. Easy to recognise whether something is good than to discover something good.
Actually, there are three tasks, not two. There's recognizing whether something has flaws, recognizing whether something is good, and creating something good.
You're also comparing criticizing others with creating yourself. If you compared criticizing yourself, you might find it's the same quality as your writing.
I'm not sure what that means. If I write an article and find no errors in it, am I a great writer, or a lousy critic?
It's hard to know. If others found problems, then you're a bad self-critic. If others didn't find problems, you're a good writer, but we don't know about your critic abilities.
What I meant was really along the lines of comparing how good your self-criticism is of stuff you've written a long time ago with your criticism of others. If you're better at criticising others (my guess), then you could try to account for that deficit when comparing that to your writing ability. I don't know how far that will get you.
I agree that it can't be compared directly.
Writing is often taught by showing examples of bad or mediocre writing and asking the students to critique and improve on it. Similarly, in writing workshops you learn by having others critique your work, but also by critiquing the work of others. This would suggest that these are at least partially the same skill: I know that on occasions when I've read someone else's text and pointed out things that could be improved in it, I afterwards end up also being more aware of those things when writing something of my own.
It's easy to make mistakes, so it's easy to find flaws in other people's work.