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Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

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Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#41

Post by Someone »

rm999 wrote: post #33
arikrak wrote: post #27

"Write as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick... average students had much more diverse answers than students with high I.Q.’s. " Asking a question like list things you can do with a brick is meaningless, since there's no metric to measure the ideas by. Anyone can list an unlimited number of completely ridiculous (and diverse) ideas if they want to, just many would find that p…

>And ridiculous creativity isn't helpful either, what's needed in life is good ideas. I think the point is to separate creativity and intelligence as two orthogonal concepts. A creative person will filter out fewer thoughts, an intelligent person will make better decisions from their thoughts. It's possible to have both, and I think those are the most successful people. When I think of the combination of creative and…

But the OP's complaint that there is no objective way to count 'ways to use a brick' still stands. IMO, it also may be the reason for the negative correlation with IQ. When thinking of this challenge, I soon started to abstract away solutions (throw, hit, shield, sink, etc). That, for instance, gives one 'kill an animal' way to use a brick, with subordinations 'in defense', 'for food', etc. If you don't spend time abstracting this, you can rattle of 'kill a mouse, kill a cat, kill a dog, kill a rat, kill a raccoon, kill an elephant, etc.) for an insane amount of 'different' uses. I would rate that lower than the single 'kill a plant' category that I thought of (as in 'use brick as a nutcracker' or 'use brick to mill flour')

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#42

Post by vertis »

archgoon wrote: post #37
tokenadult wrote: post #2

This was a better and more original blog post than I expected from the title. The finding from the Terman study is rather important, and should be more widely known. The definitive book about the Terman study, written by a Stanford University Press Office science journalist who was the first independent researcher to have access to study files, is Joel Shurkin's Terman's Kids (1992). https://www.kirkusreviews.com/boo…

>> I admire people who participate here even though they didn't grow up speaking English at home. I concur. It is, however, why I wish that there was a side-channel specifically for notifying someone of grammar or spelling issues. It'd be useful to let people know if they're using non-standard constructions without the notification being public. Email would be overkill for this purpose.

Something like TL;DR ... maybe ESL (English Second Language) at the top would work.

Though starting that practice means someone will eventually come on hacker news and complain that putting ESL at the top is redundant because they can tell from the writing that the person has English as a second language ;)

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#43

Post by ippisl »

bennyg wrote: post #10

This blog post doesn't do Creativity much justice, especially this nice little summary quote at the end: The best models come from biology, physics, mathematics, microeconomics and psychology. Just think about what every freshman knows, and thats what you need to know. Creativity is a function on a lot of different things at once, and is different for a lot of people. For one, it's a function on curiosity. Highly cur…

One interesting question that i haven't seen mentioned too much regarding creativity, is:How can we use computers to increase our creativity ?

Because definetly they can help with creativity. Just looking at a discussion threads around a subjects can expose one to various mental models. And searching google for interesting stuff(not directly related) is also very helpfull.

I wonder though, are there other useful techniques ?

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#47

Post by tmoertel »

This makes a great example of conflating correlation and causation. (I don’t mean this as a criticism of the original post. Rather, I think it’s an opportunity to discuss something that’s fascinating and counterintuitive and that even researchers often get wrong.)

The original post says a researcher (Liam Hudson) was surprised to discover that average students seemed to be more creative than high-IQ students. Thus the question arises: Does having a high IQ make you less creative? The problem, however, is that the question is causal whereas the evidence that prompts it is observational and tricky for humans to interpret causally.

To see why it’s tricky, let’s imagine a universe in which IQ and creativity are completely unrelated. Nevertheless, if both factors contribute to success (and it’s easy to believe that they do), they will have a negative correlation, conditional upon success. And guess what? Almost all creativity/IQ studies are implicitly conditioned upon success because researchers don’t want to compare “A” students to “C” students, for fear of biasing their results.

For example, let’s model our imaginary universe in R. First, let’s assign normalized IQ and creativity scores to 100 students, completely randomly and completely independently:

    n
And now let’s say that success is some increasing (causal) function of creativity and IQ, plus chance:

    success
And now let’s pretend that some researchers have captured this very data. We know that IQ and creativity are completely unrelated (because we created the universe), but they don’t. Here’s what happens when they try to tease out the relationship between IQ and creativity, conditioned upon success:

    Call:
    lm(formula = creativity ~ iq + success)

    Coefficients:
                Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
    (Intercept) -0.08848    0.08042  -1.100    0.274    
    iq          -0.58801    0.09394  -6.259 1.05e-08 ***
    success      0.57538    0.05431  10.594
Note that the IQ coefficient is negative. That is, given knowledge of a student’s success, if we also learn that the student has a higher IQ score, we should update our state of knowledge to decrease our belief that the student has a higher creativity score.

I know that that claim may sound counterintuitive, but if you do the probability math, you’ll see that it makes sense. It only seems counterintuitive. That’s because your brain can’t help but try to interpret the relationship causally.

That is, it’s all too easy to take this relationship that exists between states of knowledge about the universe and think that it actually exists within universe for real. (This mistake is what E. T. Jaynes called the “mind projection fallacy” in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.) And lots of researchers make this mistake, too.

I don’t know for sure if that’s what’s happening here, in the IQ vs. creativity research, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it has at least contributed to some of the unexpected findings.

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#48

Post by looser »

Creativity is a tricky area to dive in.

Sometimes the more you fill your mind with (judgemental?) thinking, the more the creativity escapes.

Sometimes the more you empty your mind with secondary thinking, the more the creativity appears.

Sometimes playing a musical instrument is a good thing.

Sometimes doing a query without joins is incoherent yet good results come.

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#49

Post by tmoertel »

tmoertel wrote: post #47

This makes a great example of conflating correlation and causation. (I don’t mean this as a criticism of the original post. Rather, I think it’s an opportunity to discuss something that’s fascinating and counterintuitive and that even researchers often get wrong.) The original post says a researcher (Liam Hudson) was surprised to discover that average students seemed to be more creative than high-IQ students. Thus th…

Please help me improve my comments: Why the downvote?

Re: Does having a high IQ make you less creative?

#50

Post by gnosis »

joelmaat wrote: post #38

To respond to the title, having a high IQ does not make you less creative. Simple. As for the Terman study, I think people with high IQ scores don't "go places" mainly due to laziness, lack of ambition (failing to see the point in it all), or due constant harassment by those envious of their intelligence or those that feel inferior, or those that see an easy target. After years of taking a beating many end up leading…

Ambition and perseverence is really the key. Over and over again, I've read of famous people attributing their success to perseverence.

Some examples:

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur

"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton

"What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it." -- Doris Lessing

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