Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity

Subsequent comments bringing up solely the issue of being downvoted are being downvoted on sight, because those sorts of comments are never constructive to the discussion and are disfavored by the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

By the way, the premise is false that there is any rule here against downvoting without commenting. Implicitly, some comments should be downvoted on sight.

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

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The site founder has commented that downvotes for disagreement are permitted here.

(In order of time of posting, with the last post quite recent.)

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

"I sometimes downvote things that seem mistaken. I think most users do."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006808

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. . . .

"The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The 'U R a fag's get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the 'comments' link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

Also, you didn't address my argument about how you're drawing conclusions that are irrelevant to the news article, but instead you made personal attacks against me. Stay classy.

https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/publications/david-lubinski/

https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/publications/camilla-benbow/

I know some of the study participants.

The theme of the article is that research has revealed spatial reasoning plays a larger role in intelligence than we previously thought. Your post that you are sick and tired of people searching for the sole cause of intelligence is a hastily applied trope with little actual relevance.

Unfair or not, when people scroll down and see your posts in this thread many of them will feel compelled to downvote them as a way of telling you "please be more thoughtful with your comments". If you can't see why then maybe you are the one who needs to take a run in the park.

However there were some problems which were very unusual which I would look at, think for just a few seconds, and have a delightful path to the solution -- and often times, many. My friend, otoh, would usually look into the question, think for quite some time, and move on to the more straightforward ones, although with adequate time he would definitively solve it, and with adequate study, he would get consistent, as he did. But at once I discovered his whole process was fundamentally different. He found the solutions thinking algebraically, not geometrically. This algebraic skills allowed him to plow through most problems with speed, but when he needed to think creatively, to have a geometric intuition on something, he was slowed down.

He is a wonderful programmer however, and I'm sure he is "algotihmically creative".

For me this indicates that a lot of science lends itself a lot to have a spatial intuition to be effectively creative. Einstein famously came up with relativity through thought experiments, not algebraic reasoning of the laws of nature. Planck however, with equal notoriety introduced the quanta as an algebraic "trick", and Maxwell formulated an electromagnetic theory of light by manipulating differential equations. Computer science and a fraction of math, lend themselves to algebraic reasoning and I believe what drives those is an algebraic type of creativity, in contrast to say physics, architecture and mechanical engineering -- although I believe we need both types of thinkers everywhere.

It's a funny Yin and Yang aspect of our minds!