Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test • Hacker News Board

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#121

Post by nopassrecover » Mon, May 02, 2022, 5:56 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #62

jyap wrote: post #22

Having taken the test and scoring an average 73 or so and then looking at the Twitter high rankings this is definitely rigged against simple terms. Yet the criteria “No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms)” should rule out a lot of words. Words like moon and elephant will get you an average score but using those words are following the criteria closely. Is it really an accurate test when you can look at…

I scored 90.88 points on my first and only try with the following words: frenzy ghoul protocol concept autocracy hymn nephew screwdriver bail molecule. (Of which only the first seven words are scored when all are valid.) “Autocracy” is arguably the least commonly used word of those. After seeing the resulting scoring matrix, I realized that some of the words were too close to each other like frenzy with ghoul and pro…

I scored 85.86 first try with a surprisingly similar mix: lion, asteroid, easel, nostalgia, monarch, dilemma, paradigm, molecule, angst, corn.

Likewise I didn't appreciate the possibility that lion may have primed me for a monarch, dilemma for angst etc.

The order of our 7 may have changed the score.

We seem to each have a Tool (Screwdriver/Easel), Political Construct (Autocracy/Monarch), Abstraction (Concept/Protocol/Paradigm), "Animal" (Ghoul/Lion), Emotion (Frenzy/Nostalgia/Angst), and Scientific Object (Molecule/Asteroid/Molecule).

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#122

Post by 314 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

c3534l wrote: post #101

I think the idea is, actually, valid. But I don't think the measurement is. I think this plagues all creativity measures: you're asking the subject to be very open in their thinking, but the evaluation method must be narrow and objective.

I would agree: first attempt I scored 74 and analyzing their distance matrix it looks like their measure is broken. e.g. hammer and time are relatively close because "hammer time" is a phrase so their proximity frequency is high, not because the words are semantically related. Second attempt was 89 after a trivial change to account for the broken measure. Nice idea for an experiment but the execution is lacking.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#123

Post by Ansil849 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #114

julianlam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I apologize if my tone came off as rude. I try to match the tenor of the person I am responding to. My question was also asked in good faith. If you understand what an open compound is, but don't consider chow mein to be an open compound and have earlier compared it to being the equivalent of 'brown pants', then how do you in your understanding reconcile chow mein being in a standard English dictionary, but not brown pants?

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#124

Post by PartiallyTyped » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

95.14 in less than 3 minutes.

Eucalyptus, Zircon, Pistol, clay, anarchy, ovaries, interface, noodle, octopus, fan.

The process in my head was more or less mental navigation of the world + filtering. The problem with random search over our vocabulary is that our recall is highly correlated so to find something that is very unrelated we need to go through 5+ mental hops. Given sufficient working memory, it is feasible.

Sex also matters, in this case, I exploited my visuospatial abilities to become passthrough and walk through the world quickly to observe as many items as possible, with the idea being that given sufficient exploration, I'd find things that are uncorrelated.

Somebody whose primary sex hormone is oestrogen will have better odds of doing what I described 2 paragraphs above since their language centre sees far more activations than mine.

I had tried this task before, and the highest score I have gotten was around 110.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#125

Post by PartiallyTyped » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:19 AM UTC

jyap wrote: post #22

Having taken the test and scoring an average 73 or so and then looking at the Twitter high rankings this is definitely rigged against simple terms. Yet the criteria “No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms)” should rule out a lot of words. Words like moon and elephant will get you an average score but using those words are following the criteria closely. Is it really an accurate test when you can look at…

Considering I got >95 on my first try and I have been frequently told that I find obscure associations, I think it is.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#126

Post by PartiallyTyped » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:20 AM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #28

jyap wrote: post #22

Having taken the test and scoring an average 73 or so and then looking at the Twitter high rankings this is definitely rigged against simple terms. Yet the criteria “No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms)” should rule out a lot of words. Words like moon and elephant will get you an average score but using those words are following the criteria closely. Is it really an accurate test when you can look at…

Yes, definitely this. I do not see how this test claims to measure creativity. It is essentially a vocabulary test.

The argument behind this test is that the words we generate are highly correlated, and therefore a person who is capable of generating a diverse set of words also exhibits diverging train of thought.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#127

Post by harperlee » Mon, May 02, 2022, 6:50 AM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #87

Fwirt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're writing a story and trying to flesh out a character, someone who leases an olive drab Jeep is likely (a) someone who has money and (b) someone who likes to go off-roading, or at least give the appearance of being rough-and-tumble. Olive drab is also a color commonly associated with military usage, so that plays into it. On the other hand, you could have a character who owns a lime Honda Insight. That is an…

> And yet both characters could be said to have a green car. But the more detailed word choices can help give the story more life. Given that 'green' encompasses _all_ of the scenarios you describe, whereas olive/lime narrows the scenario, that would then seemingly be an argument that more specific words actually inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios you can imagine with just a 'green' car.

> inhibit creativity by limiting the potential scenarios

Constraints are a typical tool for augmenting creativity, by restricting the easy path to a solution.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#128

Post by kqr » Mon, May 02, 2022, 7:04 AM UTC

Fwirt wrote: post #80

Ansil849 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more nuance in a word, the more potential cognitive distance between it and another word. I don't see that. What is the cognitive distance between a more common color and a more obscure color? They're both colors. In your example, describing the color as olive instead of just green is certainly more specific, and maybe more accurate, but how is it more creative? If anything, it is less creative because it's mor…

If you're writing a story and trying to flesh out a character, someone who leases an olive drab Jeep is likely (a) someone who has money and (b) someone who likes to go off-roading, or at least give the appearance of being rough-and-tumble. Olive drab is also a color commonly associated with military usage, so that plays into it. On the other hand, you could have a character who owns a lime Honda Insight. That is an…

Is exposition-by-possessions really that powerful though? I would not infer all of the military off-roading stuff from a car, even if it was a camouflage painted Humvee.

I'd argue the creative writer would put this person in a situation where they make choices in a way that reveals their affluence and fondness of terrain driving.

Unless maybe this part of their personality is a shallow veneer and not really who they are at their core, in which case I guess possessions might work because it's also not as critical that the reader understand it.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#129

Post by tshaddox » Mon, May 02, 2022, 7:04 AM UTC

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…

Using it as a proxy would make more sense if the instructions said to try to choose the most obscure words you know.

Re: Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test

#130

Post by kqr » Mon, May 02, 2022, 7:10 AM UTC

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…

They should really limit the test to the most common 10,000 words or something.

I tried in good faith to not select obscure words (knowing from previous experience how the exercise works), but then I ended up typing in autoclave anyway, starting to wonder if it was too obscure or not. In hindsight, it was. It would have been nice to get that feedback before I submitted.