Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

datcreativity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 156 posts

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#131

Post by kqr »

ALittleLight wrote: post #84
adverbly wrote: post #52

I don't buy it. Seems to measure vocabulary + problem-solving-specific-to-this-question. I bet plenty of "uncreative" people could easily do well if you just told them to pick specific things from different topics(e.g. an obscure food, an obscure job, etc...), which is all I did and I scored in the top 1%. You don't have to be creative at all to do that. You only have to think of such a strategy, and then pick some o…

I got 90th percentile by rhyming my way through - box, fox, socks, locks, rocks, etc.

But that, I would say, is a display of creativity. Instead of using mental associations between concepts to generate words, you deconstructed them into symbols and found associations through symbols that have little to no connection to the underlying word.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#133

Post by xlii »

Ansil849 wrote: post #24

Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quit…

I got 82 using rather simple vocabulary (cat, milk, office plant, chess, rock, range).

Those aren’t random and I have connection in my mind between them but I did make a “stretch” to make them different but not a really huge effort (like 3 seconds max). E.g. plant is a well plant but also can mean putting something in place, and that could be game piece and chess is a game where game pieces are used etc.

This can be absolutely gamed and that’s why I believe authors want test taker to first take it and only later read about them.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#134

Post by 0x20cowboy »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #116
Ansil849 wrote: post #24

Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quit…

> I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense. A robust finding in the educational literature is that creativity is generally limited by how many things you know that are relevant to the topic at hand e.g. people who've never programmed before are not actually good at writing creative programs (th…

> It's not exactly, but from first principles, using it as a proxy does make some sense.

How so? If I asked you to take a test in Mandarin Chinese, I would assume you would know less words, but wouldn't you be just as creative in your mind?

(I admittedly did not take the test.)

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#136

Post by sva_ »

Fwirt wrote: post #48
Ansil849 wrote: post #24

Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quit…

One justification for this might be that the greater the number of words in your vocabulary, the more "colors" with which you can paint your linguistic constructs. More complex words can have a subtlety of meaning that distinguishes them from one another, so you can "pack" your sentences with more meaning. The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. E.g. He had a gree…

That reminds me of this research:

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/language-statistics-category-th...

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#137

Post by Closi »

Ansil849 wrote: post #24

Two observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quit…

Also to get a good score you need to think about multiple meanings of each word - for instance I entered gas and can as separate words, however I was thinking of gas (as in fart gas) and can (as in can of beans) and that was chosen as an example of being close (because a gas can is a petrol container).

But during the test I realised this about half way through and was then checking for double-meanings. I almost wrote pot to describe marajuana for instance, then decided to go for Satvia because i thought pot would cross with Flower.

Having said all this, I did score very well anyway, although I do improv and listing unassociated words or “a to c” connections is a pretty common excercise.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#138

Post by axiosgunnar »

wazokazi wrote: post #23

Your score is 97.52, higher than 99.83% ———————- paternity chocolate snowblower troglodytes sediment dictionary ricochet ———————— This could be a fun wordle type game that one could play everyday.

> no jargon

> troglodytes

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#139

Post by Kaibeezy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #88
Tade0 wrote: post #5

My score is better than average, but looking at the highest scoring sets they seem to not follow the rules, because they use specialised terms like "trichrome" or "pustule". I'm not a native English speaker, but I don't suppose the mentioned words are used in normal conversation.

Pustule isn't a common word, unless you work in a medical context perhaps, but I'd expect a native speaker to know it.

My work group uses it all the time, but always preceded by “festering”.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#140

Post by elefanten »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #138
wazokazi wrote: post #23

Your score is 97.52, higher than 99.83% ———————- paternity chocolate snowblower troglodytes sediment dictionary ricochet ———————— This could be a fun wordle type game that one could play everyday.

> no jargon > troglodytes

Takes a troglodyte would think "troglodyte" is jargon.
Post reply on HN