BTW, I’m not a fan of the word “generativity”. I don’t understand how it’s different from “creativity” and I haven’t heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
BTW, I’m not a fan of the word “generativity”. I don’t understand how it’s different from “creativity” and I haven’t heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
Seconding this. Needless propagation of jargon is bad.
But even if anyone here thinks this bit of jargon is necessary, nevertheless it is very bad to use jargon without having defined it first. If you insist on using jargon, write a definition! (It needn’t be precise, or intensional, but it has to communicate what you mean by the word, such that someone who’s not encountered the concept before, can understand you.)
Otherwise we get the absolute worst of both worlds: writing made inscrutable by jargon, but without the benefit of clarity and precision for those who know the jargon’s meaning—because there is no one who knows the meaning (possibly not even a term’s original user).
EDIT: Needless to say, the practice of hyperlinking to the definition whenever you use a new, less-used, or unusually tricky term of jargon, ought to be considered mandatory on a forum like this.
It does seem that “creativity” could technically be used instead. A guess for why someone initiated “intellectual generativity” instead is that creativity primarily has connotations of the creative arts: painting, fiction, poetry, music. So when I think of someone being “intellectual creative”, I’m imagining them coming up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses. “Generative” has less of that connotation to me, it’s more about just having lots of intellectual output.
Yes, yes, this is all fine, but do you see the problem? Say I read the OP, I ask “what does ‘generativity’ mean”—and your response is to speculate on what you think when you hear the term, to “think out loud” about connotations and so forth.
So this is what you think of when you hear it, because… why? No particular reason, just, this is what associations the term happens to trigger in your mind. What does the OP mean by it? The same thing? Probably not. But what? How do we know? What does anyone else who reads the post think of when they read it? Something else entirely, different from what you think when you read it, and from what the OP meant? Quite possibly!
I hardly think I need to point out that this is an extremely sub-optimal way to communicate anything of any importance, or anything of the least complexity or rigor, or—god forbid!—anything that is both important and complex and/or rigorous.
Compare what happens if I write a post about, say, optimization processes. “What on earth is an ‘optimization process’,” asks a reader; and I respond:
(Or, of course, I could’ve included those links in my post in the first place.)
“Aha!” says the reader, “I see.”
(Note, by the way, that since the term “optimization process” is well-established among rationalists, anyone else could’ve responded to this hypothetical confused reader with those very same hyperlinks. But how did it get to be this way? Simply that Eliezer explained, explicitly and in detail, what he was talking about!)
I see the problem. As you identified, there are two questions here. 1) Is it necessary to have new jargon here? Can’t we just say “creativity”? 2) Assuming new jargon is warranted, how do we ensure it is properly defined and introduced?
I was addressing the first question, though I completely agree the second is awfully important. I’m not sure how much of a definition is warranted at this put, but I do thing the OP should have offered at least a few sentences describing the thing rather than introducing solely as a term which is often used in their circle.
I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses—some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don’t necessarily present their work as zany when they’re trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here’s Claude Shannon:
Another approach for a given problem is to try to restate it in just as many different forms as you can. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle. After you’ve done that, you can try to look at it from several angles at the same time and perhaps you can get an insight into the real basic issues of the problem, so that you can correlate the important factors and come out with the solution. It’s difficult really to do this, but it is important that you do. If you don’t, it is very easy to get into ruts of mental thinking. You start with a problem here and you go around a circle here and if you could only get over to this point, perhaps you would see your way clear; but you can’t break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain ways of looking at a problem. That is the reason why very frequently someone who is quite green to a problem will sometimes come in and look at it and find the solution like that, while you have been laboring for months over it. You’ve got set into some ruts here of mental thinking and someone else comes in and sees it from a fresh viewpoint.
Another thought from Shannon I think LW could stand to internalize:
The first [research trick] that I might speak of is the idea of simplification. Suppose that you are given a problem to solve, I don’t care what kind of a problem — a machine to design, or a physical theory to develop, or a mathematical theorem to prove, or something of that kind — probably a very powerful approach to this is to attempt to eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials; that is, cut it down to size. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution. Now, in so doing, you may have stripped away the problem that you’re after. You may have simplified it to a point that it doesn’t even resemble the problem that you started with; but very often if you can solve this simple problem, you can add refinements to the solution of this until you get back to the solution of the one you started with.
I don’t think Shannon is the sort of person who would use multiple different terms to describe the same thing without a good reason. If you use a single term, all of your knowledge about that concept gets consolidated on a single mental handle. IMO, this kind of thinking can be an extremely powerful way to generate insights. Shannon’s greatest work was arguably on Boolean logic and electronic circuits. In a certain way, all he was doing there was consolidating two different areas onto a single vocabulary.
[As a case study, let’s consider whether we should consolidate “generative” and “creative”. Asking that question generates its own question: what are the fundamental differences between “generativity” and “creativity”? In this case I’d argue there aren’t really any. But if there were, we’d get something else interesting: The beginning of a taxonomy.]
Notice again how the prestige view of research differs from how Shannon does it. In the prestige view, you accumulate technical vocabulary like a war hero accumulates medals. Mastering vocabulary becomes a way to gain insider status. My impression is the best researchers tend to be Richard Feynman types who care more about playing with ideas than winning these kind of status games. (Note: It’s valuable to master lots of concepts. Shannon has a section on that too. But I think it’s a bit better to be motivated by expanding your mental toolkit than demonstrating your superior vocabulary—though obviously you should use whatever motivation works best for you.)
BTW, Shannon himself seemed comfortable with the term “creative”—he used it in the title of the talk I linked.
The term generativity was coined by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in 1950 to denote “a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation.”[1] He first used the term while defining the Care stage in his theory of the stages of psychosocial development.
Any chance you could write up a summary of the video?
I’m not sure the definitions I can come up with “creativity” and “generativity” are that obviously distinct, but I feel like I have particular associations with creativity, and different associations with generativity.
A property I associate with generativity (curious if others think of it that way) is that it’s sort of self reinforcing once it exists.
When I type “generativity” into google, it autofills “generativity vs stagnation.” (apparently this is because it’s part of a particular psychological theory, although I think the dichotomy makes sense independent of that). When I type “creativity vs” into google it autofills a few things like “creativity vs innovation” and “creativity vs logic” and “creativity vs productivity.”
And I think this is getting at something important. The connotations of creativity are generally contrasted with particular other ways of being productive, whereas the contrast of generativity is “not being generative” – being more like a dead zombie that can shamble forward but cannot create anything new. Contrasted with a healthy ecosystem with lush soil, flowing water, lots of flora and fauna that are fecund and which can feed on each other.
I like this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
BTW, I’m not a fan of the word “generativity”. I don’t understand how it’s different from “creativity” and I haven’t heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
Seconding this. Needless propagation of jargon is bad.
But even if anyone here thinks this bit of jargon is necessary, nevertheless it is very bad to use jargon without having defined it first. If you insist on using jargon, write a definition! (It needn’t be precise, or intensional, but it has to communicate what you mean by the word, such that someone who’s not encountered the concept before, can understand you.)
Otherwise we get the absolute worst of both worlds: writing made inscrutable by jargon, but without the benefit of clarity and precision for those who know the jargon’s meaning—because there is no one who knows the meaning (possibly not even a term’s original user).
EDIT: Needless to say, the practice of hyperlinking to the definition whenever you use a new, less-used, or unusually tricky term of jargon, ought to be considered mandatory on a forum like this.
It does seem that “creativity” could technically be used instead. A guess for why someone initiated “intellectual generativity” instead is that creativity primarily has connotations of the creative arts: painting, fiction, poetry, music. So when I think of someone being “intellectual creative”, I’m imagining them coming up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses. “Generative” has less of that connotation to me, it’s more about just having lots of intellectual output.
Yes, yes, this is all fine, but do you see the problem? Say I read the OP, I ask “what does ‘generativity’ mean”—and your response is to speculate on what you think when you hear the term, to “think out loud” about connotations and so forth.
So this is what you think of when you hear it, because… why? No particular reason, just, this is what associations the term happens to trigger in your mind. What does the OP mean by it? The same thing? Probably not. But what? How do we know? What does anyone else who reads the post think of when they read it? Something else entirely, different from what you think when you read it, and from what the OP meant? Quite possibly!
I hardly think I need to point out that this is an extremely sub-optimal way to communicate anything of any importance, or anything of the least complexity or rigor, or—god forbid!—anything that is both important and complex and/or rigorous.
Compare what happens if I write a post about, say, optimization processes. “What on earth is an ‘optimization process’,” asks a reader; and I respond:
Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 (etc., etc.)
(Or, of course, I could’ve included those links in my post in the first place.)
“Aha!” says the reader, “I see.”
(Note, by the way, that since the term “optimization process” is well-established among rationalists, anyone else could’ve responded to this hypothetical confused reader with those very same hyperlinks. But how did it get to be this way? Simply that Eliezer explained, explicitly and in detail, what he was talking about!)
I see the problem. As you identified, there are two questions here. 1) Is it necessary to have new jargon here? Can’t we just say “creativity”? 2) Assuming new jargon is warranted, how do we ensure it is properly defined and introduced?
I was addressing the first question, though I completely agree the second is awfully important. I’m not sure how much of a definition is warranted at this put, but I do thing the OP should have offered at least a few sentences describing the thing rather than introducing solely as a term which is often used in their circle.
I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses—some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don’t necessarily present their work as zany when they’re trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here’s Claude Shannon:
Another thought from Shannon I think LW could stand to internalize:
I don’t think Shannon is the sort of person who would use multiple different terms to describe the same thing without a good reason. If you use a single term, all of your knowledge about that concept gets consolidated on a single mental handle. IMO, this kind of thinking can be an extremely powerful way to generate insights. Shannon’s greatest work was arguably on Boolean logic and electronic circuits. In a certain way, all he was doing there was consolidating two different areas onto a single vocabulary.
[As a case study, let’s consider whether we should consolidate “generative” and “creative”. Asking that question generates its own question: what are the fundamental differences between “generativity” and “creativity”? In this case I’d argue there aren’t really any. But if there were, we’d get something else interesting: The beginning of a taxonomy.]
Notice again how the prestige view of research differs from how Shannon does it. In the prestige view, you accumulate technical vocabulary like a war hero accumulates medals. Mastering vocabulary becomes a way to gain insider status. My impression is the best researchers tend to be Richard Feynman types who care more about playing with ideas than winning these kind of status games. (Note: It’s valuable to master lots of concepts. Shannon has a section on that too. But I think it’s a bit better to be motivated by expanding your mental toolkit than demonstrating your superior vocabulary—though obviously you should use whatever motivation works best for you.)
BTW, Shannon himself seemed comfortable with the term “creative”—he used it in the title of the talk I linked.
Good comment. Strong upvote.
Huh, apparently generativity has an existing weird psychodynamic definition:
Any chance you could write up a summary of the video?
I’m not sure the definitions I can come up with “creativity” and “generativity” are that obviously distinct, but I feel like I have particular associations with creativity, and different associations with generativity.
A property I associate with generativity (curious if others think of it that way) is that it’s sort of self reinforcing once it exists.
When I type “generativity” into google, it autofills “generativity vs stagnation.” (apparently this is because it’s part of a particular psychological theory, although I think the dichotomy makes sense independent of that). When I type “creativity vs” into google it autofills a few things like “creativity vs innovation” and “creativity vs logic” and “creativity vs productivity.”
And I think this is getting at something important. The connotations of creativity are generally contrasted with particular other ways of being productive, whereas the contrast of generativity is “not being generative” – being more like a dead zombie that can shamble forward but cannot create anything new. Contrasted with a healthy ecosystem with lush soil, flowing water, lots of flora and fauna that are fecund and which can feed on each other.