Misconceptions of Creativity

I think that people generally misunderstand creativity. There's the obvious forms of creativity like with art and music, but not a lot of people realize that academics¹ requires a lot of creativity as well. In academics there is a lot of need for creativity as easy/obvious stuff is generally guaranteed to be thought up of and done before. The system of academic publishing, research, education, and peer review makes fields like math and engineering able to make progress, and the long history of these fields contribute to this effect. Thus a lot of creativity is needed to see what thousands of others haven't seen before. For instance, Galois made Galois Theory and solved a 350 year old problem by approaching the problem in a completely different, general, and creative approach that formed the basis for a lot of modern algebra. Many, many mathematicians had tried to solve this problem that he solved by proving it true, but Galois proved it false instead. As a simpler example, consider the Calkin-Wilf Tree. This is a mathematical tree that contains every single positive fraction exactly once with the very simple operations of going left from a fraction p/q as p/ p+q and right as p+q /q and 1/1 as the base. This is a very different, very elegant proof that the number of fractions is equal to the number of positive integers from the pervasive diagonalisation proofs [1]. Also consider how original artistic ability shown by AI like Dall E 2 [2]. As far as I know, there is no AI that has shown a similar aptitude to solving math or science or engineering problems. This suggests that art is easier to take the creativity out of with an algorithm, especially considering that AI developers are probably more interested in problems in math and science/computer science than artistic problems. This misconception is understandable though. The stereotypical sources of creativity tend to be beautiful in a visual or musical sense, which are easy to enjoy, while the creativity of academia require a mental appreciation of the beauty. Also, the "arts" require little skill to appreciate, any typical person can see or hear the art and enjoy it. This is not the case with math or science, which require background knowledge. Unfortunate. As an aside, I really hate the misconception that math is just about computing or is just rote work. IMO, math requires the most creativity of anything. Math needs a lot of abstracting ability, and the ability to think of new ways to put those ideas and concepts together (i.e. creativity) is necessary as well. I'm sure this need for creativity is there for every field at some high-level, so nowadays I try not to judge people's choice of field.

Creativity is also typically associated with child-like youth. I imagine a common experience for parents is the amazement at what "crazy" idea their child comes up with, and reminisce on the lack of that in adults. This is a common lament of the school system: that it destroys creativity. Yet this isn't really the case. For one, creativity seems to be an intrinsic attribute of people. I believe free-will is the source of our creativity, and the evolution of free-will on a spectrum implies that all of us have a genetic level of free-will, and thus creativity. Hence schools can't "destroy" creativity. Also, it is natural that as we learn more about what is and what isn't possible that ideas that seem to be creative aren't thought of. In my mind, the icon of this child-like creativity is the unicorn. But as we learn more about the world, we learn that unicorns don't exist. Thus it would be silly to be creative with a unicorn. Also, schools help us specialize by allowing us to learn more depth about certain topics, especially in university. Thus there is less ability for others not in that field to appreciate the creativity in the field, as they don't understand it. Thus the child-like creativity is less obvious because of schools, but it isn't gone. As established above, these fields need a lot of creativity, so the creativity of a child is just being transferred to something else.

¹By academics, I mean research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument
[2] https://openai.com/dall-e-2/