Standard Definition of Creativity: Being able to produce something which is both novel and valuable. Random noise is novel but not valuable, and the 1000th manufactured chair is valuable yet not unique. Creativity is at the edge of both of these.

Lots of different ways to measure it, Torrance Tests, AUT, etc.

Also so many different definitions. Boden has her 3 categories of transformation, combinatoric, and something else. I think her definition might be wrong, I think it all might be combinatoric.

Odd result, why is it that people prompted with creative/diverse ideas come up with more ideas that have those traits? Is it really just being surrounded by excellence that causes people to also inhabit those? That seems like a really tough trait to communicate, so it’s wild that it is.

Questions

• What keeps people creative?
  • Making great places could be an answer here
• Can you train creativity?
• Can you ossify it?
• Do creative people enable more creative people?
  • How do you start/slow this flywheel down?
• Can you mechanize creativity?
  • Although people seem to think that creativity is some general thing that doesn’t translate between fields, I’m not certain that the mechanized version couldn’t be field agnostic. The same way that AlphaZero can learn across a bunch of domains but humans would struggle, we could make some general combinatoric system like this.
• What yardstick do you measure creativity by?
  • In science, it’s the real world. But in the fine arts?
• How is it that there are critics that can judge a piece but can’t produce a masterpiece?