Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?

Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." - Steve Jobs

I think if you've ever been exposed to music your mind could come up with different melodies, and who hasn't been exposed to some sort of music in their life. Even if they were the only human on the planet, they'd probably still encounter songbirds, at least.

I disagree that you have to be exposed to a lot of music to even have a chance at coming up with something. Maybe coming up with something good, sure, but not having that spark of inspiration. People can have flash inspiration for garbage ideas too, it happens all the time in startups :P

That being said, the spark might happen more often the more you practice doing something about it, to your point.

Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer of all time. He has 742 games credited to him on BoardGameGeek (some of those are rethemes of older games of his, but he still has probably at least 500 different games released).

About half of my prototypes are about on the level of cleverness and completeness as the lower rated half of the games he has published, at least, and maybe even a couple might slip into the top half somewhere (at his most brilliant his games are way, way better than mine though). But his name carries a lot of weight so he doesn't struggle to find publishers for a good chunk of the games he comes up with.

Meanwhile I've mostly switched back to video game development because at least that way I can easily publish the game myself when it's ready (game development is super hard in other ways, though). I tried for six years and got one signed board game that still hasn't been released after four years. Meanwhile there was a time where I was releasing 1-2 Flash games a year. If I had just made video game versions of my game prototypes instead I probably could have some basic playable version of it out on a website somewhere.

Although I do still submit some board game designs to unpublished game design competitions (I was a finalist in one of the biggest ones, for a design which still hasn't found a publisher) and go to conventions and set up meetings with publishers when I can afford to do so (I couldn't afford to this year, my spouse took a break from work and our income cut almost in half).

There absolutely is a need for fact checking and basic scientific literacy and you're helping foment the opposite by suddenly making this about academia and scientific journals. What's the harm of that? Snake oil promotion and creation of filter bubbles.

There's absolutely an expectation of not rejecting science just as with discussing global warming or Covid.

But explain, why do you pervert an expectation of scientific literacy into an expectation of professional scientific expertise?

Just as there are scientifically informed books and articles on a e.g. health and fitness and dieting, there is a ton of material on education psychology. Why do you allow the author to not do due diligence and at least read the basics which are very much accessible to nonexperts? Why make an exception when in every other STEM topic this would be incredibly ignorant?

If it were a Time magazine article or a newspaper article they would surely include scientific sources in an effort to be truthful. Surely any high-school student knows the steps to write a well-researched essay, so why are you making this about the irrelevant standards of professional academia here? Could it be due to a misunderstanding of the role of science in public education? Are you some kind of Covid vaccine denier or anti-science on some other topic?

In summary, you have wrongly conflated scientific literacy, being scientifically informed, public scientific awareness on a topic, etc., with professional academic scientific expertise. That is irrelevant and absurd. It also offends me that you made a bad faith construal of my statement.

As to your remark about HN, my criticism applies to ANY scientifically informed public discourse, even as HN is a STEM website.

Finally: I'm a reader giving my time and attention to a badly written essay because it got posted on a forum. It is not my job to fix their essay if it is antiscience in the way an antivaxxer makes up pseudoscience reasons why their idea is right. I'm not going to patiently explain to the nth antivaxxer why they are spouting pseudoscience, I'm just going to say that bluntly. This endless handwringing that HN people have over self help and rote memorization is just more of that, it's on them to have read a few simple books and articles on the topic before choosing to write about it for the public.

PS. In "real life", people express sarcasm and maybe your 'disorder' (completely out of line of you to say that, BTW, and against site guidelines to use personal attacks of that sort at fellow users) was failing to detect a sarcastic comment if you actually, literally, thought I meant "the author needs to memorize scientific literature" in context of their argument about memorization. That would have nothing to do with the actual accusation of pseudoscience, where being scientifically informed on a topic is just a basic standard of discourse to avoid misinformation and snake oil promotion.

Except that commenter had construed my sarcastic point and made it about academia. It is an irrelevant reading of the remark. They had a reading comprehension problem.

Without sarcasm, my point was/is not that you need to know all the theories or engage with academia or write a formal paper.

Rather, my point is that if you're going to write on a topic, at least know what the basic science has to say on it. You wouldn't write about mask wearing, or recycling plastic, etc., based purely on anecdotal evidence. You would include information from scientific sources and consensus.

Doing that raises the level of discourse and forces you, the author, to be responsible for not propagating misinformatiom and pseudoscience. Especially so in the area of self-help and learning psychology.

So again, my original comment while making a sarcastic remark about memorizing scientific literature was really about communicating your ideas in a scientifically literate way just as any lay person has a personal responsibility when discussing a topic, be it about technology or psychology or sociology, etc.