
Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy? - jodooshi
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-there-a-tension-between-creativity-and-accuracy/
======
whack
One way to look at creative thinking, is as local-maxima vs global-maxima
searches. Someone who's searching for a local maxima, very close to the
current state of the world, will produce ideas and work that show steady and
consistent improvements. At some point, these finding-local-maxima will hit
diminishing returns, but at least the process is predictable and very likely
to bear some fruit.

In contrast, attempting to jump far away from the current state, and finding a
brand new global-maxima, is a much more risky endeavor. The first couple
iterations may produce results that are even worse than the current state of
the world. But in the long run, it avoids the problem of diminishing returns,
and can lead to occasional breakthroughs that are vast improvements over the
status quo.

It seems to me that creativity is basically about foregoing the easy and
predictable local-maxima-search, in favor of a more adventurous global-maxima-
search. The first few iterations of your bold new idea may sound kooky and
klunky, but once it's been developed with sufficient rigor and polish, it has
the chance to give a much bigger payoff. Someone who's too focused on the
small details, and getting every detail ironed out before committing to
something, may find such an endeavor far too uncertain to undertake, thus
missing out on what could be the next big thing to change things up.

~~~
westoncb
Another way of thinking about this is to consider the different means
available for navigating 'idea space': one can crawl up hills to local-maxima
using discursive thought, or one can sort of teleport around via analogical
processes (as you point out, it's not clear what sort of valley you may end up
in by doing this, though). Discursive thought has more of an 'if, then'
character, while analogical processes seem to be kicked off by wondering about
which things might have a similar structure to (i.e. are isomorphic to) some
other thing of interest.

Edit: and another way: the local-maxima situation has to do with finding
solutions within some particular framework, whereas you get a shot at global
maxima in the search for/attempt to build new frameworks.

~~~
edward_rolf
You both make great points.

Can we find this conundrum in other domains, say, neural networks? Can a
machine become creative when we teach it to adhere to common knowledge?

~~~
MrQuincle
Neural networks also need to balance exploration and exploitation. You will
find it in the form of:

\+ generalization / overfitting

\+ cross-domain knowledge transfer

In a more embodied approach it is free energy minimization as advocated by
Friston. Consider us divided by the world through a Markov blanket, or even
better consider our actions and perceptions divided by one. How do we
continuously surprise ourselves without getting mad?

A guy who would say it's the same thing is probably Polani with empowerment:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863](https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863). The
rational choice is to navigate to that location in state space where you have
most decisions.

I think curiosity-based research is quite interesting from the perspective of
rationality and creativity.

------
Mathnerd314
> To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts [...] And
> if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative
> cocoon around them

This seems really close to the standard creativity advice, to write down ideas
before discarding them: [https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2008/03/05/how-to-
speed-up-...](https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2008/03/05/how-to-speed-up-
highly-creative-tasks/) [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/22/will-
self-rule...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/22/will-self-rules-
for-writers)

------
aaimnr
This naive belief in rationality on her part is troubling. It reminds me the
simplicity of XVIII century enlightenment thinkers. No wonder that Nielsen,
being accustomed with how DNNs work. represents the opposite view.

"Rationality" is at best a filter of rule constraints applied to small part of
solutions that reach consciousness in any solution-seeking process. As we know
eg. from Lakoff and Johnson ('metaphors we live by' etc.) most of reasoning is
actually done using our sensory faculties, mostly spatial, which barely
guarantee any kind of correctness.

If you try to be rational and cling to concepts while trying to figure out an
answer to difficult problem, you obstruct the process rather than help it.
Hence the popular advice to 'forget about the problem' so that the mind can
figure it out by itself. How on earth is it rational? Rationality is only
applied when checking a solution, like checking a proof, which - as we know -
is orders of magnitude less computationally complex than finding a proof.

The mind is all about 'what works' not 'what's correct', rationality is pretty
modern invention and to honestly think that we're primarily rational is a
delusion. Tversky and Kahneman's work is another obvious counterexample.

~~~
hammock
This is why I can't stand lesswrong and the comments of lesswrongers here.

I believe you would love the book "The Romantic Economist" by Richard Bronk
which outlines romantic ideals of creativity, entrepreneurship, and other
magic as a necessary ingredient of progress that is missing from modern
philosophy and science.

~~~
aaimnr
Well, it's really hard to tell which myth is causing more harm in our culture
- myth about rationality or myths carried over from Romanticism. I'm not
contrasting rationality with 'romantic' feelings (term that doesn't explain a
lot), but rather conceptual with pre-conceptual.

------
kyleschiller
Derek Parfit's Persons and Reasons deals with this question a little more
formally, resolving the tension with the concept of "rational
irrationality"[0, p12]

I think what Nielsen is getting at here is the idea that a commitment to
accuracy doesn't necessarily entail an unwillingness to be wrong. As in
Weber's case, the wrongness of one's work doesn't necessarily imply it's
unimportance.

[0] [http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-
Parfit-...](http://www.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/161777473-Derek-Parfit-
Reasons-and-Persons.pdf)

~~~
amasad
I think this is the most important part of this discussion. Rationality,
roughly defined is about achieving your goals. And Parfit's example about
becoming temporarily irrational to achieve a goal that otherwise wouldn't be
achievable then it's still rational .

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starchild3001
Great observation! In my experience, too, there's a tradeoff between
creativity and precise thinking. Namely creative people often have some
inherent randomness built into their brains, and precision comes later with
more effort; while always-precise thinkers are usually not the most creative.
In my teams, I try to balance the two.

~~~
kartickv
A related point is to not quickly dismiss an idea though it's wrong or
unworkable, because a different version of it may be the best solution to the
problem.

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mrdrozdov
I love this provocative title. For clarification, the author's argument is
related to a person's ability to follow a path determined by intuition in the
absence of proof. The examples given are of scientists who found ultimate
success even though they initially only had a kernel of an idea, in contrast
to someone who would have found success but at the onset had a clear vision of
how they might get there. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, and
early in graduate school my cryptography professor gave a concrete example:
Diffie and Hellman knew there should be some way to securely exchange a key
long before publishing their now famous exchange protocol (I'm paraphrasing
heavily what the professor said, but hopefully this illustrates the point).

The "tension between creativity and accuracy" came up in a slightly different
context at a party this past weekend. I was discussing with some other recent
grads the flawed method of peer review in research journals, especially as it
relates to reproducing results of well known papers. The crux of the
discussion was whether the progress of science has benefited from the lack of
strict guidelines for reproducing results and whether some papers are still
important because they described an interesting idea although were later found
to be irreproducible or based on false data. I would say that definitely the
field has progressed, although there is certainly an intrinsic (and expensive)
cost in having papers that are irreproducible and scientists should certainly
strive to make their results as easily reproducible as possible. In the
absence of necessity, I'd go further to say that having easily reproducible
research is so valuable that the contrary is simply not worth it.

Unrelated to "value of research", there is a notion of fairness that should be
considered. If being flexible on accuracy is a "competitive advantage" of
sorts in research, then it's important that this is made obvious. When the
principle of accuracy is implied it becomes a hurdle to newcomers who would
follow unnecessarily difficult path given they have no way of knowing a priori
that being inaccurate (even slightly) is allowed, possible, or beneficial.

------
westoncb
Another way of looking at it: effective creativity is the result of tension
between a generative process and a filtering/selecting process.

You need both, but people vary widely in how much they emphasize on or the
other: too much on the filtering side, you may end up a critic, but not an
artist; too little on the filtering side, you may end up a crackpot; too much
on the generative side, you may never get anything done; too little on the
generative side, you may never come up with something worth working on.

------
greggman
I know the article is about science and solutions but the title reminded me
more of creative writing and at least in my experience it requires far MORE
creativity to be acccurate than not. It's easy to cut corners and just decide
things happened because I wrote them that way. It takes far more creativity to
actually write and make logical sense. Constraints seem to lead to more
creativity. So, adding the constraint of "being accurate" would seem to also
lead to more creativite solutions.

------
dkarapetyan
Gotta disagree on basically all counts. Mathematics is a very precise and yet
creative game. And going back to Feynman, one of his most famous quotes is

 _The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the
easiest person to fool._

So I don't get why he's using Feynman as an example here. Feynman was a very
inventive and precise thinker. I think the post starts with a false dichotomy
so whatever conclusions are drawn are resting on pretty shaky grounds.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
The end result of mathematics is precision; the inception of an idea, not so
much. Indeed, if you look at the early papers on a topic, they are -- for lack
of a better term -- "fuzzy" and very often contain technical mistakes. The art
of mathematics -- which it shares with all arts -- is to make the leap in
understanding and then carve out something to show others the same path in a
saner manner, using technical skill. But that initial leap very often doesn't
take place in a purely technical framework, and is fuzzy and imprecise.
Usually, it takes many drafts of an idea until a suitable technical framework
is found.

"Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey
into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should
be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real
explorers have gone elsewhere."

\-- W. S. Anglin

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics#A](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mathematics#A)

~~~
dkarapetyan
But you see how you are making my point. Mathematicians as a bunch are very
creative and precise at the same time. Going back to my point about the
article setting up a false dichotomy. Mathematicians study formal systems
which are as precise a thing as humans have managed to make so far. Even if
their initial exploration of new territory is not precise it is always in the
context of formal systems.

I think the problem is the article is trying to put vaguely defined terms on
some spectrum and the tension he is talking about is just an artefact of his
own special mapping. Really there is no tension and this mapping is not
canonical because the terms are not well-defined. So comparing accuracy,
creativity, etc. on a single spectrum doesn't make sense. Mathematics being an
existence proof that you can do both things at the same time.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I had the same reaction. It's like
comparing cheese with bedsprings.

The most powerful ideas in science are concise, unexpected, predictive, _and_
mathematically rigorous.

Creativity generates the unexpected. It opens up new spaces for exploration.

But it's easy to confuse it with mimicry, which is formulaic repetition of
existing practices in existing spaces that may or may not have useful
outcomes.

Einstein's development of SR and GR was creative. Weber's gravity waves claims
were exploring a space that Einstein created, not generating a new space.

There's nothing wrong with mimicry - it's an essential process in human
culture. We think of the arts as creative, but in fact most art is made by
somewhat modified mimicry of existing tropes, not by outstanding originality.

Original creativity is much rarer and very different phenomenon. It expands
human experience into spaces that weren't previously accessible _at all._

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
It's because you and the person you're replying to have the tail wagging the
dog when it comes to being precise.

Powerful ideas are made precise, but they don't spring into being that way --
their inception is usually a fuzzy mess of analogy and hunch. Similarly, if we
had an idea in mathematics that didn't fit in a formal system, we wouldn't
just bin it, we'd change the formal system so we could implement it. (It's not
like we have _a_ formal system, or even a formal system we think implements
all the things one should. Formalisms research is a major ongoing topic only
~200 years old.)

The precision and formality are the final product, but almost no ideas would
be had if we required that they met our standards for formality when they were
first conceived.

Creativity happens without being precise, and precision is usually a sign that
the creative portion of the work has moved elsewhere.

------
mkagenius
I do not exactly get the arguments author present here. What the author sees
as a tension is only for a moment -- the accuracy/truth prevails eventually
even if a scientist fools himself into believing a wrong theory for some time
(and eventually deriving the correct result). Its like when people assume the
opposite when trying to prove some theorem in mathematics (ex: assuming there
is an intergral solution to fermats theorem.. so on)

~~~
nikki93
What about in cases where there is no one "solution" due to an environment
that you are embedded in or something: like writing a good song or making a
painting or writing a nice poem for a friend?

~~~
cJ0th
Art is a bit like white noise or a fluffy cloud: You can see everything you
want in it – and that's exactly what you see. So basically everything
qualifies as a solution. This is easy to see with poems or more abstract music
(like drones). But I think the same holds true for pop music only that there
are some rules on top of it and a marketing department that "assists" the
consumer a bit in what they should see in it.

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binarymax
This is well covered, though not directly, in the book "Art & Fear"[1]. The
more creative ideas and iteration one performs, the more skilled and accurate
the end result. Approaching problems from scratch and settling on one approach
too early can result in a long and flawed project outcome. The tension is that
more ideas are better than less, and when on a deadline can result in less
attention to detail for a specific iteration. The paradox of our craft in the
technical business setting, is that deadlines are typically imposed
arbitrarily.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-
Artmaki...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-
Artmaking/dp/0961454733/)

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kruhft
Creativity is Intelligence having fun.

Accuracy is not so much fun, but computers do it well.

The computer should be accurate and the people be creative with them. That's
the proper way to use tools.

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sddfd
Haven't read the article, but from personal experience I'd say yes.

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an27
This reminds me very much of the tension between conservatives and liberals,
where the liberals are generally higher in openness (-> creativity) and the
conservatives higher in conscientiousnes (-> accuracy).

Here's an interview with Jordan Peterson that discusses this:
[https://youtu.be/01Tln_6Bxk0?t=9m40s](https://youtu.be/01Tln_6Bxk0?t=9m40s)

Sorry for pulling in the two-party system, I'm in it for the theory on
openness vs. conscientiousness.

