Creativity

The beauty of windmills and power lines

Posted on by John

Windmills were considered eyesores in 17th century Holland. Now we believe they are beautiful. And so they are. But there is a prejudice to presume that industrial things are not beautiful. We learned to see the beauty in windmills after artists painted them.

Alain de Botton discusses the beauty of windmills and power lines in his interview on EconTalk.

Many of the industrial things in the world are considered ugly, not because they are ugly, but because nobody has come along to point out that they might be beautiful. … A lot of times we call things beautiful or ugly because artists have been there and shaped our sensibilities. … and in a small way, that’s what my book is about: finding beauty where genuinely there is beauty but it gets missed.

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Inside the multitasking and marijuana study

Posted on by John

A study came out in 2005 saying that multitasking lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. David Freedman interviewed Dr. Glenn Wilson, author of the study. Wilson’s first response was “Oh, that damned thing.”

Someone from Hewlett-Packard contacted Glenn Wilson and asked him to conduct the multitasking study.

Encouraged by his sponsor at HP to keep the budget extremely low, and assured there was no pretense of trying to obtain scientifically valid, peer-reviewable, journal-publishable results, Wilson dragged eight students into a quiet room one at a time and gave them a standard IQ test, and then gave each of them another one — except that the second time, he left either a phone ringing continuously in the room or a flashing notification of incoming e-mail on a computer monitor in front of them.

Wilson said “It didn’t prove much of anything, of course.” But the study made a huge splash.

I don’t imagine anyone would be surprised that a constantly ringing telephone would reduce your ability to concentrate on an IQ test.  And comparing the result to marijuana use is pure sensationalism. While hearing a phone ring and smoking marijuana both impair concentration, they’re obviously not comparable.

Artificial studies like this one fail to answer the more important question of what effect  voluntary multitasking has on creativity and productivity. As Tyler Cowen says

To sound intentionally petulant, the only multitasking that works for me is mine, mine, mine!  Until I see a study showing that self-chosen multitasking programs lower performance, I don’t see that the needle has budged.

Paul Graham made a similar observation.

The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds.

I’m convinced that multitasking, even voluntary multitasking, does decrease creativity and productivity. But I reached that opinion from personal experience, not based on any study of people taking IQ tests while listening to a phone ring. And of course some activities pair more effectively than others. Sweeping floors while listening to an iPod works better than checking email while taking an IQ test.

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John Cleese on creativity

Posted on by John

Here’s a 10-minute talk by John Cleese on creativity:

From about 6:20 into the video:

If you’re racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.

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Trading education systems with China

Posted on by John

American creativity is declining according to a recent Newsweek article. The article says that America is embracing rote learning just as China is embracing creativity.

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. … When faculty of a major Chinese university asked [Jonathan] Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Ken Robinson argues in his TED Talk that rather than encourage creativity, schools kill it.

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Endless preparation

Posted on by John

In his book Made by Hand, Mark Frauenfelder quotes Peter Gray on what’s wrong with contemporary education. Gray says that school is about

always preparing for some future time when you will know enough to actually do something, instead of doing things now. And that’s such a tedious approach for anybody to take to life—always preparing.

Related post: “Just in case” versus “just in time”

Deconstructing Thomas Edison

Posted on by John

I’m reading Remarkable Engineers to write a review for a website. The prose is pretty bland, though it got spicier in the chapter on Thomas Edison. It seems the author felt he needed to take Edison down a notch.

The career of Thomas Edison was not that of a great man of science, or even that of an inventive genius … His only major scientific discovery was the fact that a vacuum lamp could act as a rectifier, passing only negative electric currents. … He was said to have invented the business of invention.

So Edison was an engineer rather than a scientist. This criticism seems odd in a book devoted to remarkable engineers.

Surely Edison was an inventive genius; he held over a thousand patents, more than anyone has ever held. That is not to say anyone believes he came up with over a thousand unprecedented ideas completely by himself. He built on the work of others. He coordinated the work of his employees. He took ideas that were not being used and commercialized them. Perhaps he was more of an entrepreneurial genius than a scientific genius, but he was a genius nonetheless.

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Many hands make more work

Posted on by John

Frederick Brooks is best known as the author of The Mythical Man-Month, a book on software project management first written in 1975 and still popular 35 years later. Brooks has a new collection of essays entitled The Design of Design that was just released this month. In his chapter on collaboration in design, Brooks notes

“Many hands make light work” — Often
But many hands make more work — Always

Collaboration may reduce the amount of work per person, but it will certainly increase the total amount of work to be done. In addition, collaboration is likely to reduce the quality of a design. Earlier in the same chapter Brooks says

Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds.

He gives a long list of designers to support this claim: Homer, Bach, Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, Michelangelo, Watt, Edison, the Wright Brothers …

The great works Brooks alludes to may have been implemented by teams, but they were not designed by teams.

You can hear Brooks explain why he believes design work doesn’t partition well in his talk “Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design.” There’s a link to the audio in my blog post on Brooks and conceptual integrity.

Adding simplicity

Posted on by John

Simplicity is costly. You have to give up something to achieve it. You can’t just add it on top. William Bridges illustrates this in his book The Way of Transition where he describes his moving out to the country.

… I had been infatuated with Thoreau’s Walden and its story of living a basic life, close to nature. The heart of that undertaking, he had written, was to simplify your life. … In retrospect, I can see that although I thought that this was what I was doing, I was really just trying to add simplicity to my life. In addition to all the old things I had been doing … Of course, my life grew more and more complicated in the process.

A simplification has to remove or replace something else. You can’t just add on simplicity.

There may be an exception to this. Sometimes you can add a few missing pieces to make something more symmetric. In that case, the additions simplify the whole. (Mendeleev did something like this when he drew his periodic table.) Even then, I suppose you could say you’re removing the asymmetry. In any case, achieving simplicity usually requires more subtraction than addition.

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The world has changed. Do work that matters.

Posted on by John

The latest episode of the Startup Success Podcast features Seth Godin talking about his new book Linchpin.

Bob Walsh: What’s next for Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: This. This is my life’s work. This is what I didn’t realize I was working on for the last ten years but I am. There’s no new book in the works. There’s just this mission to help people see how the world just changed really violently and to encourage them to do work that matters.

Seth Godin has always been passionate about his projects, but this one is different. His clarity and intensity are remarkable.

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