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Here's my anecdote: Many interesting ideas I had back in the day came to me under the influence of pot. Some of those ideas brought me a great deal of money.

I never said this doesn't happen, but your reasoning is post hoc ergo propter hoc: your ideas came to you while you were stoned, therefore they must have come from the pot. In order to conclude that you'd have to have done all of your thinking about the problems while you were stoned.

As I said, I think it quite plausible that drugs can, at the right time, help you escape the limitations of self-censorship in your thinking. But in my experience people who are stoned all the time certainly have novel ideas, but those ideas aren't particularly useful. That's because creativity actually involves a kind of interplay of critical and imaginative thinking. Enough people have anecdotes like yours to think there's something to it, but the very nature of creativity -- at least as I'm defining it -- makes me doubt you can get it entirely out of a bottle.

For the record, I consider creativity the finding of novel approaches to a thing that are better in some way than pre-existing approaches. This almost certainly presupposes an intimate familiarity with pre-existing approaches, unless we count pure dumb luck as creativity. Picasso, for example, didn't draw the way he did because he couldn't to realistic work. He had very good drawing skills, and his early works were representational. That level of draftsmanship doesn't come without struggle; and from that he derived his interest in geometric figures, most easily seen in the development of his landscapes. Note if "House in the Field" seems a bit crude, it was painted when he was twelve years old.

Here's my anecdote: Many interesting ideas I had back in the day came to me under the influence of pot. Some of those ideas brought me a great deal of money.

I never said this doesn't happen, but your reasoning is post hoc ergo propter hoc: your ideas came to you while you were stoned, therefore they must have come from the pot. In order to conclude that you'd have to have done all of your thinking about the problems while you were stoned.

As I said, I think it quite plausible that drugs can, at the right time, help you escape the limitations of self-censorship in your thinking. But in my experience people who are stoned all the time certainly have novel ideas, but those ideas aren't particularly useful. That's because creativity actually involves a kind of interplay of critical and imaginative thinking. Enough people have anecdotes like yours to think there's something to it, but the very nature of creativity -- at least as I'm defining it -- makes me doubt you can get it entirely out of a bottle.

For the record, I consider creativity the finding of novel approaches to a thing that are better in some way than pre-existing approaches. This almost certainly presupposes an intimate familiarity with pre-existing approaches, unless we count pure dumb luck as creativity. Picasso, for example, didn't draw the way he did because he couldn't to realistic work. He had very good drawing skills, and his early works were representational. That level of draftsmanship doesn't come without struggle; and from that he derived his interest in geometric figures, most easily seen in the development of his landscapes. Note if "House in the Field" seems a bit crude, it was painted when he was twelve years old.

Waterhouse? Waterhouse was a porn artist, plain and simple. The only difference is medium. So you would be ok of the students used : http://www.wikiart.org/en/john... instead of the Lena image? Talk about objectifying and sexualizing women. Just because someone took the time to paint something does not somehow make it automatically better than a photograph. Just because something was done a couple hundred years ago does not make it better than something that was done 40 years ago. Most playboy centerfolds have at least as much right to be called art as anything Waterhouse created.

But not because they were necessarily happening, but because they were coded in such ways that made them the common weapons of every agenda.

Kind of like in America we are constantly accusing the other political party of being nazis, or trying to become a dictator. And yet in reality probably no president has ever actively tried to become a dictator (much less a nazi), and have all voluntarily stepped down.

What is your thesis about?

Also, on the tangentially related topic of ancient gestures, if you don't mind me asking, what do you think of these two painted hand gestures? Would they be effeminate? Or is it too far removed to do any speculation?

But not because they were necessarily happening, but because they were coded in such ways that made them the common weapons of every agenda.

Kind of like in America we are constantly accusing the other political party of being nazis, or trying to become a dictator. And yet in reality probably no president has ever actively tried to become a dictator (much less a nazi), and have all voluntarily stepped down.

What is your thesis about?

Also, on the tangentially related topic of ancient gestures, if you don't mind me asking, what do you think of these two painted hand gestures? Would they be effeminate? Or is it too far removed to do any speculation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Marie-Louis O'Murphy was 14 when this nude portrait of her was painted by Francois Boucher in 1752. It seems pretty obviously erotic. (A nude portrait of her caused her to come to the king's attention, and he took her on as another of his lovers.)

I guess anyone in the UK who views this famous painting (which currently hangs in a German art gallery) and thus has the image in their browser cache might get in legal trouble.

I think you mean Whaam!.