people often say that limitations of an artistic medium breed creativity. part of this could be the fact that when it is costly to do things, the only things done will be higher effort
a medium with less limitations is strictly better for making good art, but it’s also harder to identify good art among the sea of bad art because the medium alone is no longer as good a signal of quality
Yes, but this also happens within one person over time, and the habit (of either investing, or not, in long-term costly high-quality efforts) can gain Steam in the one person.
This seems the likely explanation for any claim that constraints breed creativity/good things in a field, when the expectation is that the opposite outcome would occur.
My own expectation is that limitations result in creativity. Writers block is usually a result of having too many possibilities/choices. If I tell you “You can write a story about anything”, it’s likely harder for you to think of anything than if I tell you “Write a story about an orange cat”. In the latter situation, you’re more limited, but you also have something to work with.
I’m not sure if it’s as true for computers as it is for humans (that would imply information-theoretic factors), but there’s plenty of factors in humans, like analysis paralysis and the “See also” section of that page
My other explanation probably has to do with the fact that it’s way easier to work with an already almost-executed object than a specification, because we are constrained to only think about a subset of possibilities for a reasonable time.
In other words, constraints are useful given that you are already severely constrained, to limit the space of possibilities.
people often say that limitations of an artistic medium breed creativity. part of this could be the fact that when it is costly to do things, the only things done will be higher effort
a medium with less limitations is strictly better for making good art, but it’s also harder to identify good art among the sea of bad art because the medium alone is no longer as good a signal of quality
Yes, but this also happens within one person over time, and the habit (of either investing, or not, in long-term costly high-quality efforts) can gain Steam in the one person.
This seems the likely explanation for any claim that constraints breed creativity/good things in a field, when the expectation is that the opposite outcome would occur.
My own expectation is that limitations result in creativity. Writers block is usually a result of having too many possibilities/choices. If I tell you “You can write a story about anything”, it’s likely harder for you to think of anything than if I tell you “Write a story about an orange cat”. In the latter situation, you’re more limited, but you also have something to work with.
I’m not sure if it’s as true for computers as it is for humans (that would imply information-theoretic factors), but there’s plenty of factors in humans, like analysis paralysis and the “See also” section of that page
My other explanation probably has to do with the fact that it’s way easier to work with an already almost-executed object than a specification, because we are constrained to only think about a subset of possibilities for a reasonable time.
In other words, constraints are useful given that you are already severely constrained, to limit the space of possibilities.