Creativity

Where does creativity come from? I don't know. Everything I thought I know has been deconstructing in my mind into one massive inconsistency.

Reason tells me this: The more inputs, the more ideas, the more lateral your thinking the better the problem solving and problem solving is the creative process.

Thus things like the 'user generated content' should work. Market research should produce better products not worse ones. People who seek others opinions and feedback should be more creative not less.

But this isn't what I see going on. I call 'user generated content' driven by social networking platforms that have allowed people to distribute their own output in greater numbers than ever before 'loser generated content' for me the quality of music, movies, tv shows has in general gone down or remained constant. The best stuff seems to be coming from the same places it used to.

Or look at reality tv, all those model shows, America's Top Model, Search for a Supermodel is anybody looking at the outputs of these shows? They haven't produced any supermodels yet. A few models maybe, but it's debatable whether the vast pools of raw talent they tap into are better resources than what modelling agencies have used.

Same same for American Idol and it's global franchisees, it produces one middle of the road star a year overshadowed by the record companies promoted stars. Yet these are people that are voted on by vast numbers of the public.

It's consistent with Darwinian evolution, you take as many variables as you can and make them fight off against eachother, only a few will survive and they will be the ones that have the base qualities ideal for surviving in the given field.

Though I've never really been a fan of what I considered an ADD riddled technology in user generated content and reality tv, it is still a disillusionment to see it produce... well... next to nothing.

It leads me to one conclusion as to why this process is fundamentally flawed:

People don't know what they want.

Thus here is my actual experience. The more you intervene in somebodies creative process the (generally) worse the result. The more inputs you have, the more conservative the idea.

It would also seem that their are people out there call them 'talent pickers' or 'record execs' or 'art curators' etc that know what the public want better than the public itself does.

My best explanation for the two above phenomenas are thus and thusly:

1. Average expertise. Our average expertise in any given field is zero. When you take large samples in statistical studies you will find that the incidents cluster around the 'mean' or 'average' which will be zero. So the more people you involve in a creative process or creative vetting, the more likely you will diminish the value of the output.

2. Taste. In the crudest sense. Your hunger or appetite. You may be craving some chocolate now, but if you eat the equivalent quantity of chocolate as the sum of all your easter blessings, chances are you will feel sick. You will have no taste for chocolate and crave something new.

Both revolve around a sort of expertise. I feel reassured by these explanations because they have precedents in other fields. For example, investment. The more diversified your portfolio of shares as Warren Buffett puts it 'the greater your chances of making no money at all'. This is surprisingly consistent with Portfolio Theory which aims to correlate all your various investments so your net capital gain will be zero, you only make money off your dividends.

So in a creative process, the more inputs the more compromise between creative visions diverging from the average - the conventional/predictable vision. The net effect is that the competing divergences will cancel eachother out or compromise in such a way that the overall impact is reduced.

See what's crazy is that in shares you only like one kind of variation, the upwards kind. In creative processes you may like both, all you want to do is not be cliched. So why try to offset creative visions against eachother?

This is why I think the best results are the ones where you just let somebody go off on their own tangent and don't interfere or try and steer it back to appease more markets or whatever.

That handles the 'creatives' side of things, but that's no good as a revalation unless you can get to the decision makers, the ones who have the money, who hold the reins.

This is where the second kind of expertise, the taste comes in. The old model you had somebody who was the equivalent of a film critic or food critic picking the projects to give the green light. If you are film critic you have a different objective to the average movie goer. Same same for food critics.

They eat a lot of food, they see a lot of musics. They go to a lot of bands' gigs. They see a lot of highschool basketball. More than your average joe. Thus, the products all blur to them. They see the patterns and cliches of the time much faster than we do for sheer lack of exposure.

Sooner or later the only thing that catches their eye are things that are different, risky, they stand out. They know talent when they see it. They talk about 'it' but find it hard to define, because 'it' is simply something they haven't seen before.

The public by comparison, identifies with the familiar, they stayed, the known. They don't take risks, thus they role over the deviations because they don't identify with their pre-concieved notions of success. They like all the sugary candy because they aren't forced to eat/offered as much as the experts. They have no expertise and they were never going to try something as questionable as pesto unless somebody holds their hands.

Of course, it is relatively risk-free. Hence the success of a process that is uncreative. But creativity is all about risks, and the market generally pays a premium for risks. But this is the way the market works.