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Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

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Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#111

Post by c3534l »

jedberg wrote: post #110
c3534l wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if those are better. They sound like the same superstitous interviewing techniques that led Google to ask engineers to estimate the number of ping pong balls that would fill up a Boeing 747.

I think that's actually a pretty good question. It shows how someone tries to tackle a very nebulous problem with no clear answer. And keep in mind that these questions were for internships in making TV and film, where exactly this kind of creativity is necessary.

Except that extensive internal tracking showed that the question was useless. The whole point of why I brought it up is because it sounds smart to the interviewer, but doesn't actually measure anything. Actual, validated psychometric tests are typically quite boring and seem intuitively insufficient, while the creative and fun questions never pass validation.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#112

Post by julianlam »

jedberg wrote: post #105
Ansil849 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Show me a dictionary that actually refers to it as such. Here you go: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/chow-mein Note how it is listed as "noun", not nouns. Just like living room: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/living-room Note that there is no entry for "brown pants". Do you understand why both living room and chow mein are listed, but brown pants isn't? > and it's most definitely two words in English. No, it…

Your condescension is not necessary, nor is it correct. But I don't feel like continuing to debate someone who is so rude.

He is not being rude by asking you to consult a reference text.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#114

Post by jedberg »

julianlam wrote: post #112
jedberg wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your condescension is not necessary, nor is it correct. But I don't feel like continuing to debate someone who is so rude.

He is not being rude by asking you to consult a reference text.

> Do you understand why both living room and chow mein are listed, but brown pants isn't?

I already told him I know what an open compound is. This is just rude.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#116

Post by Hermitian909 »

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 (there's a subtle distinction here where the end goal of the program may be creative, but how they go about getting there is unlikely to be creative).

So, very roughly, if you consider someone knowing more words as a proxy for them knowing both more concepts and having more connections between those concepts, you would expect them to have more creative output on topics of general interest (on average).

source: former educator

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#117

Post by Jupe »

Interesting study. However, I rather disagree with the premise that "creativity" is akin to random juxtaposition of nouns. I consider that "imagination"...

Years ago, I saw small poster which read (paraphrasing): "Imagination is making the simple complicated, while creativity is making the complicated simple"

The idea being that one can imagine almost anything (and "random" nouns is really just that), but creative results are "elegant", "simple" or even "obvious". It's a perspective I keep in mind when hearing and/or seeing "creative" things.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#118

Post by prutschman »

lom wrote: post #60
jedberg wrote: post #58

This isn't really a creativity test. I'd love to see their baseline and how they show this stacking up against other creativity tests. I've taken real creativity tests before (the ones that movie studios give for entrance to their internship programs). They are hard to grade but I think far more accurate. They have questions like: - Name as many uses for a brick as possible in 10 minutes. - You've been told that a sc…

> uses for a brick unrelated, but how many can you come up with? I’m struggling after only 4 or so uses..

Crimping an IDC cable.

(It works very poorly for this, and I speak from recent personal experience)

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#119

Post by procarch2019 »

lifeformed wrote: post #107
procarch2019 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed. I used the word hose, thinking garden hose, and vacuum, thinking of absence of matter. That specific pairing came to 47. I now see why based on the explanation of the test. However, even if I had meant vacuum like the cleaning tool, I would not associate it with hose naturally because I use a stick vacuum.

A garden hose and vacuum are still very close semantically though, at least in the entire domain of nouns. They're both household objects.

Understood, but the point I was making is that I would not associate the word hose with vacuum unless someone else makes the connection for me.

I guess the broader point I’m making is the same as others have said. It’s a poor measure of creativity as context is important. A word on its own doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to you as it does to me.

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