On Uncreative People
There is no shortage of deeply intelligent but characteristically uncreative and cynical people. This is wildly unfortunate. This piece is about one piece of advice I would give this archetype of people.
the sum of the total is not the total of the sum
Think about cooking. The product has much more “value” than the constituent ingredients alone.
A painting is much more than just paint and a canvas.
A song is much more than some 808s and a nice melody.
This process of turning profane things into something sacred (though not strictly divine) is the creative process.[1]
An artist is someone who achieves brilliance by operating on and arranging seemingly common discrete pieces into a continuous, highly compelling piece of art.
what does this mean
The people I am writing this article about are the type of people to analytical ascribe value to discrete pieces, sort them by value, and assemble the highest value pieces into their end product. This won’t scale superlinearly.
To them, it’s like a test. Each problem is worth x points and you just have to string together enough problems to pass. In this case the sum of the total equals the total of the sum.
They thrive when given clear goals and metrics. The perfect employee. These type of people are likely to fall into a local maximum.
Every big or creative idea is attacked, reason is shoehorned to reduce said idea to its “objective” merits. Risks are overly-calculated and conviction is generally low.
Their intelligence is used to reduce to analyze to, for the lack of a better word, antagonize. Not create. Not to have wild ideas or shift away thinking from the mainstream.
They live predictably and try to section themselves off from the highly chaotic world we are subject to. In order to get highly “lucky” or escape probabilistic mediocrity you need to be creative.
Though, there are people who are characteristically unintelligent and uncreative/cynical, these people are liable to be contrarian and wrong. I am not talking about them in this article.
[1] This parallel between profane/sacred and what divinity really even means in the hyperreal age is highly interesting. Eliade mostly wrote about prehistoric humans, but the parallels between prehistoric and (for the lack of a better term) “post-modern” humans is worth exploring.
Consider this excerpt for an example of a “sacred” (from the text: “religious experience”) and hyperreal (from the text: “taking pictures of pictures”) object in modernity.