I wrote a couple posts on my personal blog a while ago about creativity. I was considering cross-posting them here but didn't think they were LessWrong-y enough. Quick summary: I think because of the one-way nature of most problems we face (it's easier to recognize a solution than it is to generate it), pretty much all of the problem solving we do is guess-and-check. That is, the brain kind of throws up solutions to problems blindly, and then we consciously check to see if the solutions are any good. So what we call "creativity" is just "those algorithms in the brain that suggest solutions to problems, but that we lack introspective access to". The lack of introspective access means it's difficult to pass creative skills on - think of a writer trying to explain how to write well. They can give a few basic rules of thumb, but most of their skill is contained within a black box that suggests possible sentences. The actual writing process is something like "wait for brain to come up with some candidate next sentence", and then "for each sentence, make a function call to 'is-sentence-good?' module of brain" (in other words, guess and check). Good writers/creative people are just those people who have brain algorithms that are unusually good at raising the correct solution to attention out of the vast possible space of solutions we could be considering. Of course, sometimes one has insights into a rule or process that generates some of the creative suggestions of the brain. When that happens you can verbalize explicitly how the creative skill works, and it stops being "creative" - you can just pass it on to anyone as a simple rule or procedure. This kind of maps nicely onto the art/science divide, as in "more of an art than a science". Skills are "arts" if they are non-proceduralizable because the algorithms that generate the skill are immune to introspection, and skills are "sciences" if the algorithms have been "brought up into consciousness", so to speak, to the point where they can be explicitly described and shared (of course, I think art vs science is a terrible way to describe this dichotomy, because science is probably the most creative, least proceduralizable thing we do, but what are you gonna do?)

Anyway, I don't know if all of this is just already obvious to everyone here, but I've found it a very useful way to think about creativity.

Edit: I missed your last sentence somehow. The above is definitely just plausible and/or fun to read.

When I first heard of creativity tests I was surprised that this should be possible but I was quickly convinced that at least some aspects can indeed be tested relatively straitforward:

1) Originality - statistical infrequency of response 2) Fluency - number of responses 3) Flexibility - the degree of difference of the responses, in other words do they come from a single domain or multiple domains 4) Elaboration - the amount of detail of the response

(these are from the web here but recurr in standard tests like William’s Creativity Assessment Packet (CAP) and real scoring instructions that I have seen are interestingly simple to do. More interesting are actual examples provided which show the range of creativity. And that is where I think one can actually learn to be creative: By reproducing certain dimensions of creativity. That may sound like a contradiction in terms but I have found from self-practice that many creative ideas build on earlier ones. And the earlier ones apparently don't neccessarily need to be your own :-)

While looking for accessible material online I found these: A marketing campaign which stimulates creativity and a thesis which adapts the CAP to an online setting and may give you a feel of creativity tests in practice.

In music, creativity is the ability balance newness with repetition. To introduce new ideas and frame them in terms of old ones, or reconnect old ideas in a new way. To give a very simple example, sing Yankee Doodle.

You'll notice that the beginning of the first two lines "Yankee doodle" and "Riding on a" are exactly the same notes, but they finish differently, a new listener can understand the the second line in terms of the first, but his expectation of how the second line will end is broken.

The is a very simple example, but balancing a listener's expectations, while having enough repetition or consistency* across multiple instrument lines and across larger sections of the music, so that there is global structure in addition to local structure is what makes real music. Komponisto has much more to say on this, but its scattered throughout many comments. I took me 2 years of bashing my head against traditional music theory, his preferred music theory, and composition classes to understand this, but I've become much more aware of what's going on inside a musical work.

I think that creativity is more generally the same thing, the ability to understand new ideas in terms of old ones or to reconnect old ideas in an interesting way. The question of how creative someone is, has to do with whether it feels natural for them to do this. Do they have to manually try out connecting ideas one by one, or does their brain seem to do it automatically? They can't help but try to find links and analogies in everything. And more interesting, can "brute force" creativity ever lead to creativity on auto-pilot? Extensions to physics are obvious (special relativity giving rise to general relativity) and fiction (narrative tropes).

*Stylistic consistency is more broad, it doesn't have to include the exact notes, it can include just the rhythm, or for example playing lots of leaps would be a type of style.

What makes you think SA's ability to write interesting posts has anything todo with rationality? He's mentioned that at least one member of his family is very talented, and that he won writing contests when he was a child (and so, before he encountered LW).

In general, in many ways creativity is correlated with insanity, not rationality.

I don't know what to say exactly, but I'm in awe of how creative Kanye West is. I just watched this freestyle of his and read through the Genius annotations. It's soooo deep! I genuinely can't imagine how someone could come up with something that complex/interrelated/deep/etc. so quickly, in such rhythm etc. Thoughts? Maybe there's hints as to how to be more creative in people like him.

A bit of background: I was talking to a friend and he mentioned how much he admired Kanye West and how smart he thinks Kanye is. My first reaction was very skeptical because Kanye has that reputation for being crazy and stuff, but I think I was way too quick to judge now.