Slashdot Mirror
Spatial Ability a Predictor of Creativity In Science
HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "The gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — is sometimes referred to as the 'orphan ability' for its tendency to go undetected. Now Douglas Quenqua reports that according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, spatial ability may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields. 'Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don't capture with traditional measures (PDF) used in educational selection,' says David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. 'We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.' Spatial ability can be best defined as the ability to 'generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images.' Some examples of great inventors who have used their high levels of spatial ability to innovate include James Watt, who is known for improving the steam engine, and James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Nikola Tesla, who provided the basis for alternating current (AC) power systems, is said (or fabled) to have been able to visualize an entire working engine in his mind and be able to test each part over time to see what would break first. Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school. 'It's not like math or English, it's not part of an academic curriculum,' says Dr. David Geary. 'It's more of a basic competence. For that reason it just wasn't on people's minds when developing these tests.'"
Posit two things that are really not measurable (spatial ability and creativity) and then suggest they are correlated.
A whole lot of rainbows and moonbeams on this one.
The link to ny times should be
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/us/study-finds-early-signs-of-creativity-in-adults.html
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Dozens of posts will be made in this discussion where people will manage to mention that they have well above average spatial reasoning skills.
I know this will happen because of my highly developed spatial reasoning skills - it gives me great insight into human behavior.
#DeleteChrome
You can easily measure them. Getting people to agree on what the measurements mean in practical terms is where we fail.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Intelligence is not just one or two traits. It's many traits, probably well over a dozen. But the master trait that helps unlock the rest, may be the ability to motivate oneself to work harder than one's peers.
I have seen a correlation as well. I have always had a knack for spatial relations, and some of the best IT folks I know do as well. I know it is anecdotal, but a large collection of anecdotal evidence is called data. :)
I'll expand on this.
What can you do with two sticks and a string?
Someone who is creative can take the sticks and string and make a variety of things or use them in a variety of ways.
Someone with spacial abilities doesn't need to actualize those things or uses, they can visualize them in memory and then describe them (assuming they have language to do so - which is typically where formal education enhances existing abilities).
Try it yourself. First get the supplies though. You may find that you are creative with them in your hands but may struggle to come up with ideas in memory. Children are especially better at handson creativity and struggle with spacial abilities.
Some ideas.
Tools, toys, art, machines, instruments. Don't forget that sticks bend and can be broken. Also you could make a component of something more complex.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
First off, it takes multiple types of people to make any real breakthrough. Most of the scientific names we remember were either extrordinarily lucky or were only the part of the team that was most adept at PR. Edison had a stable of scientists working for him, some would say all he did was steal their creativity. Watson was half of the duo credited with discovering DNA, the other half did LSD, and there were multiple other people who may have deserved more credit than Watson anyway. We find the idea of one lone idiot savant appealing, but really the people who advance science the most are more often than not part of a team. And spatial ability doesn't seem to correlate with team player skills.
Second... okay, we might be able to identify the few lone wolf scientists better. What then? We tell them they're the next Tesla and encourage them to enter STEM, while someone who is not good at the Rubix cube, we tell them to go into finance? Perhaps colleges would have an incentive to include spatial ability on the SAT or ACT, but we're not exactly telling people they can't go to college if they can't picture a combustion engine in their heads.
Put this together for me, what does it mean?
how is creativity not measurable?
people go to school to learn creative skills, art, design and others. all art is based on prior art and to be a successful artist or designer you have to know why things are the way they are.
i work close to a lot of art galleries in NYC. i work in a building with lots of creative businesses in it. people come in to work every day. in a lot of cases you can see inside and people are in meetings, working, etc.
art isn't made sitting in starbucks all day thinking you are creative. its coming in to work every day
I know it is anecdotal, but a large collection of anecdotal evidence is called data. :)
No, anecdotal evidence is heavily subjective to selective memory and the fallacies that come with it -- confirmation bias and motivated reasoning being the two primary ones.
Anecdotal evidence, no matter how much of it there is, cannot be used to imply correlation or causation, in any sense that an observational study or trial can.
As a visual thinker myself, the quantum world is very anti-visual, at least in terms of the everyday physics we know and love. While it may have served science well in the past, it may not in the future as the big mysteries are increasingly in the quantum realm.
Table-ized A.I.
They're right - it's not caught on any of the standardized tests in schools, especially now that all the stupid standardized testing has drilled down to basic math, English, and some limited science and history. I didn't find out until I went through a battery of psychological testing in 8th grade (20 years ago) because I was borderline for the EIP program and my teacher sponsor requested it.
I guess I'm lucky I just started a new job where I'll get to happily make flow charts and diagrams all day long.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Is good spatial ability because of / or an indicator of creativity?
Or, is creativity because of good spatial ability?
If spatial ability has some sort of causal effect on creativity then LEGOs (and no, I don't work for them! :) should be required part of every childhood. (How many science Nobel prize winners used LEGOs/tinker toys/wooden blocks when they were little?).
Also it would be an interesting to see what effect watching movies or even playing video games have had (looking at images on a 2D surface) have had. Maybe that explains the term "couch potatoes" (looking at 2D images exclusively might make the brain very UN-creative). Perhaps 3D video games like FPS would more than make up for this and games like minecraft even more so. Still this is another reason why fully immersive virtual reality can't come soon enough (that is if we don't all get sick from vertigo)!
I wonder if the stock price if LEGO has changed due to the findings from this study?
Isn't this "spatial reasoning" the same as the knack, as described in the classic Dilbert cartoon?
Doctor: "Your son has 'the knack'"
Mrs. Dilbert: "can he live a normal life?"
Doctor: "No. He'll be an engineer."
I think in the Design of Design Fred Brooks says something to the effect that good designers even in software almost always have high spatial reasoning ability.
Isn't this "spatial reasoning" the same as the knack, as described in the classic Dilbert cartoon? Doctor: "Your son has 'the knack'" Mrs. Dilbert: "can he live a normal life?" Doctor: "No. He'll be an engineer."
More, I don't even see what the point is, with regard to "but these are not tested for in standard testing" part. Why would it be? What is the point of testing kids in school to find out they are exceptional in any way when you aren't going to aid their education to make the most of that exceptional potential?
Ok, well clearly you are a genius. And let's explore that --- because it's important ...
... well ... it isn't easy to define gifted so lettuce not go there and ok thanks!
Schools are targeted for the middle of the bell curve -- they have to be! -- and even the gifted classes are targeted for the bell curve of the gifted students --- which
A. Creativity cannot be taught.
B. Talent is in the context of the time. It isn't fair, but it is true.
C. The educational system never knows how to detect --- let alone help --- talented young people. Welcome to the shark tank --- the game of top dog with no rules.
Short version: If you have talent ---> you have to develop further largely yourself, other people and the system don't even know HOW to help you.
Plus it ISN'T their fault --- talent is UNUSUAL and by definition this means nobody really knows how to feed your talent.
PROTIP: Take control yourself while listening, if you are special --- you are special in that others don't know best how to help because you are so awesome.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I found multi-threading easy as I just "visualize" the CPU loading registers and writing to memory, which makes it easy to "see" race conditions. Same thing with trying to design the data-flow of systems and identifying potential choke-points.
Oddly, I *did* dismantle the family refrigerator when I was 12.
The parents were away, and the thing stopped working. This was an older units with a separate compressor and motor - a big belted wheel that turned a pulley on the side of the compressor.
I took off the front panel. pulled out the frame containing the motor and compressor, and discovered the relay wasn't working. I unplugged it, cleaned/sandpapered the contacts, and put it all back before the parents got home (and told them what happened).
I also did the clock thing. I modified a mantel clock to a) not ring the hour, and b) start ringing at 2:00 AM and not stop. I hid it under my sister's bed on her wedding night.
I strongly believe special traits can be developed, including spacial ability. If you believe Geoff Calvin, there's no such thing as talent or innate ability. Everyone who is identified as an expert in their field (Mozart, Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice &c) had put in enormous amounts of practice before becoming expert. For instance, Mozart was composing at age 4, but didn't write anything particularly good until his twenties (IIRC - may have gotten the ages wrong).
Feynman, for example, believed that geniuses are common, but due to lack of education, lack of encouragement, poor education, or lack of leisure time they have no chance to blossom. (Meaning: genius-level people are too busy with a job and family to really sit down and create things.)
The literature and current studies indicate that, barring physical deformity, anyone can become an expert in just about anything. They only have to practice long enough and hard enough.
Creativity is another thing. There are many types of creativity, and the good news that increasingly school do see the need to encourage creative learning. Of course, given that school are increasingly only concerned with test, it is difficult to find time to engage in unstructured play, which is where we learn creativity. Creativity might be a the ability to put a bunch of stuff together into an interesting or useful form, or it might be the ability to create an image on a blank sheet of paper. To be honest, now that I think about it, the issue is not that we don't try to teach creativity, but we are too product oriented. We are focused on the idea that there is a right and wrong answer, a right and wrong, way, and not that we need to develop a creative process.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
how is creativity not measurable?
For example, do you measure quantity? (Reality television) or Quality? (Blade Runner) Finding a widely a accepted benchmark might prove to be a challenge...
But all the others were simple. I guess that must mean I'm creative or something.
I wouldn't know, I can't get past community college.
Now for the story. As a bad kid I was locked up. During that year I went though many psychological tests and IQ tests but it wasn't my first encounter with them. Having been labeled a smart kid (reading college level in grade school), I was somewhat of an outcast because A grades were so simple for me. I think it was simple really, I had read beyond the classes so the material was sometimes below me. I wasn't afraid to ask questions but I have had one lingering demon - math.
Something about the rote memorization bothered me, the lack of proof of how things worked. I dropped out of caring about it once they introduced imaginary numbers. Without understanding the formulas or using them, I have to come up with my own ways to make math work for myself. I could fake it well enough in trigonometry by memorizing the formulas and applying them but I swear to you I just can't put those into real world problems for the life of me but I can get an A on your final. Each time I've tried to read into algorithms I always get lost by the math symbols that aren't explained so I expect that in some ways this works for and against me. For me because I have to solve a problem with my own brain, against me because others won't see me doing it the way they were taught or how it's "supposed" to be done. I imagine that it takes me longer too since I'm reinventing the wheel. Where I get back time though is on visualizing a complex system before it exists and keep all the parts in my head. I'm good at figuring out where bottlenecks or potential problems will be. I think this helps me with making accurate time proposals and debugging the work of others. I've become the local 'goto' person in this company even for things I don't do daily. Eighty percent of the messages I get for work now are looking at something broken somewhere else. I could offer them that high spatial makes for a good debugger perhaps.
Back to the kiddie topic.
I was constantly watched and tested even in advanced classes. These classes gave me a social stigma I couldn't handle once I became a teen so I refused to go to school and rebelled intensely, after all, everyone around me was constantly saying I was smart. It was time to put down smart and work on my impossible social life because smart was under control. This led to a commitment to girl's school indefinitely for refusing completely to attend high school. In one door and out the other each and every day. Inside lockup their tests also quantified where my skills were and I can't forget how high my spatial ability came out. I kept the paperwork for it but the odd part was that the careers they suggested to me where nowhere near what I derive enjoyment from. They suggested judge, lawyer, and something medical. Only the lawyer sounded appealing because you could argue nonstop. None of them sounded to me like what I wanted, to turn the pictures in my head into reality. I can do that with programming. What I get out of programming is a desire to improve. When I want to feel creative lately I turn on 'Daft Punk - Technologic' to spin my juices. The song is fast and tech oriented, it goes through all the phases of usage and reminds me why speed matters to users and how products are lines away from being trash or replaced.
Those careers suggested seem very bound to rules to me. Had I listened to their assessments of my strengths I wouldn't be posting here or continued my reading in this direction. Especially if I had listened to the people who told me you NEED math skills to be involved with programming. Since I've had so many tests and been through intense counseling I don't think they know at all what makes people tick or at least they don't take enough factors into their decisions. What it all has really done though is make me aware of what I'm good at and what I'm not, that let me choose a path that suited myself.
I looked at these tests and tried to figure it out for a bit but unless I actually cut those things out and folded them up there is just no way I could figure those things out. For some reason I just can't visualize at all. I don't think in pictures or dream in pictures. I am definitely creative though based on what I have done and others evaluations of what I have done. I often come up with unique ways to solve problems that others just can't figure out how they work even after they see them work.
Overall there are many ways to solve problems and confining creative problem solving to an ability to visualize problems would do us all a great disservice. What matters is developing the talents you have and figuring out how to really use them effectively.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Art has nothing to do with creativity. Design has nothing to do with it either.
Writers are creative. Musicians are creative. Engineers are creative. Even politicians are creative. Creativity is the act and process of making something new. It is composed of existing parts and pieces whether those are paint, words, ideas or bits but the arrangement is new and unique (until it is copied - which is not a creative act, unless the process of copying is itself new).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
why can't "the ability to 'generate [take in], retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual _______.' " apply to music, numbers, language, logic, or physical abilities?
Like every other competent programmer ever?
When I was in school we got tested for mechanical and spatial reasoning skills as well as math, reading, blah blah. I scored over 90th percentile in mechanical and spatial reasoning and also pegged reading comprehension. Math? I was below middle of the pack, like 45% percentile. Math just never made sense to me but given the chance to work on something mechanical I'm all over it and can often figure out how something works or how ro assemble it just by looking at the pieces. Computers, likewise, are something I can envision. I can be given a set of requirements for a program and be able to tell where there will be issues that need to be worked out before the program is built. I tend to think outside the box is all. i could see myself inventing something but I sure as heck don't see myself doing anything math related, it just doesn't click :(
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
That fits.
I've generally been pretty negative about post-secondary education, and job requirements for the same. Degree inflation is a pretty well-known phenomenon. I work in tech, and I work closely with development teams. Almost everybody (95%+) has had at least an undergraduate degree, and a few people have had master's degrees. I've worked with hundreds of people with degrees (mostly comp-sci, business, and engineering), at all levels of experience ranging from 3rd-year co-ops to 20-year veterans.
My own position basically boils to these two points and a response to a common argument:
1. In my experience, people who have degrees (or those who only hire those with degrees) tend to assume that being awarded a degree denotes some basic level of competence. In my experience, there is simply no correlation between even basic competence and having a degree. By basic competence I mean: "able to think their way out of paper box (more colloquially, able to empty urine out of a boot if the instructions are written on the heel), or "able to follow simple directions." I want to stress that I'm referring to both intellectual (logic and reason) and practical (basically repeating processes that have been learned by rote) skills. Most university graduates I've worked with (some who performed exceptionally well in nationally-hero-worshipped university programs) are both intellectually and practically useless. Many of them will never be otherwise, at least not over the span of a decade or two.
2. Degrees are required for jobs that formerly would have been filled by people who took a 3-year college program (and where a good chunk of that three years was good work-experience mentoring, to boot). It isn't that the jobs really require a university degree, and it's not that people with university degrees tend to outperform those without (though that's probably true in most fields, I would argue that for the moment that's not true in tech where people can gain truly mind-blowing amounts and ranges of experience without ever setting foot in an institution). It's usually either a combination of social norm/inertia, and people with degrees refusing to believe or accept that somebody can be competent without one. (Those people are rare, but they exist, and they're usually the least competent of the lot.)
3. To those who say "but university teaches you how to (learn or think)!" Well, I have news for you: this can and should be taught in elementary school. It was taught to me in elementary school (and repeatedly thereafter of course). If somebody can make it through to university without knowing how to learn or think (if they're *accepted* into a university program without knowing how to learn or think), then you have almost certainly not made it as far as you have on merit. You've probably made it that far because your teachers and all the school administrators you've been exposed to have known that denying you a diploma or a degree is a one-way ticket to wage slavery. And if you've made it to 18 or 20 without knowing how to learn or think, a 4-year undergraduate program isn't going to help you much. At best your going to be a decade or more behind those who were properly-educated as children.
I'm getting to a point I promise :)
So you can probably tell I don't have a degree, but I also don't have a chip on my shoulder: I'm successful and incredibly well-respected by my colleagues. I've been asked maybe once in the past five years if I had a degree. Those few times when somebody decided to have an attitude about it, I quite enjoyed putting them in their place. (Opportunities I would not have had if I had a degree :) Now that most of my friends have finished their undergraduate studies, they now openly covet my (much) higher salary, and the four years I spent making money while most of them were spending it. Some of them have unpleasant amounts of debt. So really, the above position is a result of personal experience and informal research - it's a reasoned position based on the data
That link to the simple-to-test spatial cube pattern thingy... I imagine the sampling bias is off the hook with the people choosing to do it because that looks 'fun' when it was posted on a board for people who self-identify as nerds.
I wonder if they will update the mean result in time or if that survey is long since completed.
Yep, all five of them.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Conclusive proof that Soulskill doesn't RTFA. Or, a subtle IQ test. Solution left to the reader.
If spacial ability in children is a predictor of their scientific creativity later in life, then if we could improve children's spacial abilities, this might produce more creative adults. The next step is to look for ways to do that, and then see if it worked.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Competent programmers are a rarity. Most people are mediocre.
Hold on there cowboy...I got this far into your response...
Yeah see, the Bell Curve is not accepted in modern science, especially by people like Chomsky.
Even those who would disagree with Chomsky...drop whatever school or scientist you want, the idea is defunct.
It's important to also understand *why* because it's a good introduction to high level statistical analysis and how it can be weilded incorrectly.
A good analogy is to the work of Freud. Practically everyone knows Freud in some way as a famous Psychologist...anyone who has *studied* Psychology at virtually any level can tell you his basic theories, and they'll tell you, as I'm sure you know, that most of his theories have been debunked and now sit in the history's museum of archaic science.
Archaic but foundational to be sure.
The 'Bell Curve' is a concept not a scientific law or observed phenomenon. It was constructed using the language of statistics, but an idea or concept nonetheless. It became 'popular' because of its presentation and the general emergence of data analysis in daily life due to changes in technology.
Put your three claims to a similar level of rigor...you'll see easily that they are all logical fallacies:
Data and yes even test scores can tell a trained educator a lot. However...and if anything, take away this **one** truth from this post.....even the **best** data (and 'Bell Curve' is based on severely flawed methodology) is only as good as the person who is interpreting and reporting it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
>What can you do with two sticks and a string?
The only answer is Nunchucks.
God spoke to me
I looked at these tests and tried to figure it out for a bit but unless I actually cut those things out and folded them up there is just no way I could figure those things out.
Visualizing unfolded parts is a skill that improves with practice. Anybody who does sheet metal work sees such problems routinely. There are programs for this, such as eMachineShop or Autodesk Inventor. Rectangular sheet metal design is not that hard. Origami, though...
There's a higher level of visualization than this. I used to develop high-end animation software, so I met pro 3D animators. I've seen one draw a head by drawing a series of 2D cross sections freehand, then skinning it. I can use the 3D animation program, but I can't do that.
Sculptors have that skill, too. There's a classic line: "The story is told that the Pope visited Michelangelo in his studio one day, and on seeing him sculpting his statue of David, the Pope asked, "How do you know what to cut away?" The great artist's response was, "I simply chip away anything that doesn't look like David."'
That is not a joke. There are people whose 3D visualization is that good.
This may be inherited. I know a good artist whose drawings have hung in the Smithsonian. She has that kind of visualization ability. So do her son and daughter, although neither works as an artist.
Psychology is the perfect definition of junk science. However, because so many powerful bad people want to manipulate Humans, this field continues to get attention it most certainly does not deserve.
Yes, we have 'minds' and yes are minds must obviously work in certain ways, but 'free will' CANNOT be explained by the principles of a clockwork universe. The scientific method involves exploring concepts that could be simulated on a Turing Complete computer. Free will and true randomness CANNOT be simulated on a Turing Complete computer, and so by definition, fall outside the scope of the scientific method.
Psychology falls back to the old trick of misapplying certain statistical techniques, and passing off the results as scientific conclusions. One sees exactly the same rubbish in almost every published sociology paper- sociology and psychology being effectively the same thing. Correlation is constantly passed off as causation, and the logical fallacy that the 'property' of the group is also the 'property' of members of the group is also assumed to be correct.
This last fallacy is the one almost every person mistakenly believes to be true. Take certain classes of murder. Maybe 80%+ of the time they are carried out by a certain relative of the victim. Most people (almost certainly including you, the reader) think this statistic actually coerces reality, so when a new murder of this type occurs, the 'innocence' of the usual suspect is effected by the statistic. However, you CANNOT speak about a sample of ONE.
Science flourishes when science is allowed to flourish- quelle surprise. When ANYTHING gets respect in society, that thing flourishes, be it the 'church', gang behaviour, science, pop songs - it really doesn't matter what the thing is. As for the Humans with the talent for religion, thuggishness, critical thinking, music or whatever- well all that matters is no matter what society current respects, a number of us will prove to have higher levels of ability in that field.
I promise you one thing. The 'greats' in any given area of Human endeavour will have very little in common with each other. Alphas are peculiar in this way. The better betas are, perhaps, somewhat more similar to one another, but who cares about that. We are addressing the fallacy that 'genius' can be identified BEFORE genius self-identifies.
This fallacy, by the way, arises from the psychological desire by certain betas to think they can 'control' alphas by 'understanding' them at some fundamental level. This would then somehow 'elevate' said beta above the alpha. All total nonsense driven by the usual inferiority complexes found in the 'chip on the shoulder' types desperate to invent tests to categorise us Humans.
I should also point out that ALL the world's worst atrocities have been planned by betas with exactly the same forms of inferiority complexes. Designing 'IQ' tests, and sticking certain groups of Humans in death camps come from exactly the same way of thinking.
Why are geeks often below average when it comes to ball-related sports if they supposedly have higher spatial intelligence. Besides lacking hand eye coordination they also seem to be poor or average at spatial intelligence when it comes to dynamic situations i.e. anticipation over where the ball is going to be or how it is going to behave in terms of trajectory, bounce etc. (This is gross generalization based on anecdotal observations. I'm a geek who is reasonably good at racket sports)
To see the New York Times article, remove the 3 at the end of the URL
A. Creativity cannot be taught.
While true, this implies that creativity cannot be learned, which is entirely false. We are all, to some extent, creative. The more we practice that creativity, the more we'll be better at it. Some people are naturally more creative than others, but everyone falls somewhere in the continuum.
Schools can and should be giving students outlets for their creativity so that they can practice being creative. The more they do, the more creative those students will turn out to be.
P.S. It's not that hard to define gifted. Where the difficulty lies is in defining gifted in a universal context, which is as stupid an exercise as it is impossible. Instead, try to recognize gifted people in a single context and the problem gets much easier...a gifted musician, athlete or scientist is much easier to identify.
The problem is that I don't visualize at all. When I close my eyes I don't see any pictures. No dreams in pictures, thinking in pictures etc. Doing this kind of stuff is just not something I can do.
I can think of very complex problems in ways that others think of as very strange though but lead to very elegant solutions. I tend to be extremely good at taking something apart in my mind and turning it into a computer simulation or solve it in a very unorthodox and simple way.
I tried to learn to visualize things, so far I have not made any progress on that.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Except not all engineers create something "new". Many, if not most, play a support role. And many engineering disciplines involve following some very precise sets of rules and standards, even in the "design" of new products, so opportunity for "coming up" with something unique, or patentable, is actually quite uncommon. Many new and practical concepts in product design often comes from industrial designers with more of a background in art than in science and technology.
Most musicians are not creative either, though many like to claim they are. Most musicians are technicians who reproduce sounds on instruments according to very detailed instructions (ie sheet music). Even when improvisation is a element in a performance, the technic employed is often copied and not their own original idea. Only composers have a real chance to be creative. But even most artist, composers, and writers, while "creating" "new" content, are just following trends set by the creative leaders of their respective fields. Take my response to your post for instance - though original and my "creation", it is not uncommon in our modern era to instantly question presumptive, generalized statements that are not supported by clear and convincing evidence. So the product of my effort here is really not "creative", nor does it need to be. I have not in this post created any new style of prose, any new method of logical reasoning, any new literary elements. If there is anything truly unique about my post it is simply that I have questioned some well entrenched views on the nature of creativity, but I'm sure there are errors in grammar and style that are even more profound, after all I specialized in engineering, not rhetoric.
Too bad high creativity is does not predict the stamina to finish a Doctorate thesis. The strain on the sitting muscles during PhD plus post-doc plus five publications is a killer for a less patient person, no matter how creative. There should be a new way to harness the said creativity for science and related fields which would not require years of commitment and would better enable off-field contributions from unlikely sources, without the loony-factor included.
A. Creativity cannot be taught.
While true, ...
Says who? Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time. I work with kids in after school programs. We do science and robotics stuff. I have taught the kids to better visualize moving 3D parts by practice and exercises. I have also taught them how to come up with creative ideas. There plenty of ways to do this. If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example. I teach the kids that, instead of starting with a conventional solution and working forward to something innovative, do it the other way around: think of the craziest thing you can, and then work backwards toward something that is actually workable.
Ok, well clearly you are a genius. And let's explore that --- because it's important ...
Schools are targeted for the middle of the bell curve -- ....snip.....
Gack I hate bell shaped curves. They almost never ring true.
My personal expectation is that the curve is more of a bactrian camel than a dromedary. Statistics are further complicated by maturation, nutrition and more.
The interesting bit about thinking about two types of camels is that it gets easy to see that decisions based on simple statistics like averages will underspend on the population under one hump and overspend on the population under another hump.
This is the reason that state and national education mandates are so often far from the mark. And if you look deeper is why one room schools are so effective at teaching a wide range of students.... iff the instructor is clever enough and policy+syllabus permit.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
And, the younger the better.
What exactly does one mean by "scientific creativity?" Is it a simple knack for problem solving, or is it something more nuanced and complex, like the sort of ability to postulate entire new theories based on scientific evidence (e.g., Newton and Einstein?) And what exactly does one mean by "spatial ability?" Is such a thing measurable, and if so, what is the scope of such a notion?
Suppose we are speaking of some notion of creativity in the sense of the latter above, and furthermore, that by spatial ability we are referring to a specific ability to comprehend the structure of geometric abstractions without them needing to actually exist. Then of course it stands to reason that such ability would be a benefit in scientific (and mathematical) thinking. Would it be a *predictor* of scientific creativity? I think one could only say such a thing to the extent that, say, being good at math is a predictor of scientific aptitude; that is, ability is beneficial and perhaps influential, but not deterministic. There's a certain kind of convergence of imagination and logical deduction involved in many tests for "spatial ability"--for example, the task involves not just imagining what an object looks like, but also the relationships between features *if* that object were to exist.
So, on a very basic level, I'd be quite surprised if there were no correlation between the two. But do I think that the association is proportional? Hardly. Being especially good at mentally folding patterned nets of cubes isn't going to mean you are expected to be commensurately talented in particle physics (or vice versa). And I don't think that such a strong assertion is what these studies are attempting to demonstrate.
My said she was in her Geometry class taking a test. She said she visualized a shape and just reached out with her hands and manipulated it so that she could see the answer to the question. When asked about what she was doing, she described her process. They really did not understand, but they let her be. This made me quite proud of her, that her spatial intelligence was that good.
This from a girl who taught herself AutoCad. I figure she's either going to be an Engineer or a Mad Scientist.
emphasis on the 'Bell Curve'...apples and oranges...
it's a popular science book from the 70s, about an anthropology/sociology concept...my original post has the link, fyi. it was popular mostly because sociology/anthropology/comm studies/semiotics/etc were having wave of influential work in the 70s and data analysis was new to them in this context.
'normal distribution' is a major tenet of probability theory...it's more than a concept...it has proofs. It's a higher level idea that is like 'Bell Curve' the same way that Freud is like Mazlow.
so comparing 'Bell Curve' and 'normal distribution' in probability theory is like...comparing apples and oranges.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Does this include you? Most people overestimate their abilities.
*Sigh* - who cares? For all we know, you're rubbish at programming, and screw up constantly. I sense a self-diagnosis on its way...
I'm nothing special. Do you overestimate your abilities?
Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time.
You can stand up and "teach" it, but is it learned?
I work with kids in after school programs ..... If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example.
You are part of the problem - trying to normalise everyone. In the UK there has been a theory of socialist origin that everyone has exactly the same ability, but opportunities differ. So they abolished Grammar schools (which were selective) and put all kids in the same "comprehensive" schools with, like your theory, the idea that the [apparently] bright kids would pull the [apparently] slow kids up to the same high level. What has happened is that everyone has ended up mediocre. Goes a lot to explain why the UK has fallen from being world technical leader to just saying "wow" when they see a new gadget from Taiwan.
My son was exceptionally bright, so in a class of mixed abilities he got postioned into tutoring his slower fellow pupils (like in your classes), so for two years he learned nothing (except from me at home) and began to get dissillusioned with learning. That is not even to mention the distraction of the disruptive pupils, who tend to be the duller ones because it is the duller ones who are not interested in learning (cause/effect or effect/cause ?) so out of boredom they create havoc instead.
In the west we tend to reason with words internally. It is difficult to get most people to a real skill level with words and reasonable thoughts. If we tried to deviate and put school hours into spatial reasoning we might cause a loss of verbal cognition and internal dialogues. One would think that games like basketball and baseball would give young people pretty good spatial reasoning as knowing where to be when the fly ball lands involves spatial skills.
I once took a very high priced battery of tests and can tell you that they have tests with blocks printed with different patterns that are really mind stretching. Very few people will ever have that kind of testing. It tied up a specialist for three full days and in today's money would probably exceed 20K in costs.
>>What can you do with two sticks and a string?
>The only answer is Nunchucks.
Bow and arrow. (Nobody said they all needed to be attached)
Whip (Nobody said you needed to use both sticks.)
A rocket launcher (If you are in the A-Team or MacGyver)
If you think nunchucks are the only way to kill somebody, you lack creativity. There is an article right here about it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Competent programmers are a dime a dozen.
Programming is the easiest damn thing in the world. It's so easy that children can and do easily teach themselves!
Sure, some problems are hard. Luckily, you can sometimes avoid them altogether. Go read some of Chuck Moore's work.
Anyhow, how do you judge the quality of a programmer? There's only one way that I know: by the quality of their output. But that can't be right, can it? Some of the most incompetent code I've ever seen has been written by programmers generally considered to be brilliant.
Take a chunk of code known to work correctly. It won't take you long to find one developer to say that it's brilliant, and another to say that it's total garbage. Why? The first developer either doesn't understand it or sees some clever or interesting tricks. The second developer sees it as unnecessarily complicated, the same problem being solvable with a much smaller, faster, and simpler solution.
If you'd rather: Perhaps the code is fine and solves the problem well, but the second developer would have approached the problem differently. Maybe they disliked the use of a specific language feature or technique, choice of brace style, or selected language.
Programmers usually aren't well versed in the humanities and tend to think in absurd black-and-white terms. They constantly mistake completely subjective judgments for objective conclusions. They're also prone to believe absurd myths (mistaking common wisdom for objective fact) and tend to buy in to the latest industry fads. You'll frequently find them defending statements that they obviously don't understand. They've simply never questioned their favorite meme. How could it be anything other than pure fact? Programming is like math, right?
Code quality is highly subjective, obviously. I understand that there are objective metrics like size, speed, and memory use. However, we can only use those to compare two solutions to the same problem! Even then, subjective measures (like readability) will quickly come in to play, which some people will consider to trump this or that objective measure -- particularly when two solutions are close on objective terms.
That absurd black-and-white / right-wrong thinking makes each person think that their subjective opinion is objectively correct, and thus irrefutable. What else can they assume but that they're surrounded by incompetent morons?
Do you know who writes bad code? Everyone. The best developer you know wrote crap code last week. You wrote crap code last week. I wrote crap code last week. Not you, you say? You used the latest set of buzzwords? Remember this: Yesterdays best-practices are today's obvious mistakes. Sometimes they oscillate between bad and good. Pick damn near any topic and dig through both current and old articles and blogs to get a sense of how the common wisdom changed over time. (Nonsense "design patterns" are an easy mark. You'll find lots of back and forth on many of those.)
There are other reasons, of course. A big problem seems to be developers over-complicating problems. Sometimes going so far as to write an interesting problem that solves the problem they've been tasked with as a side-benefit. I replaced an 81k (1700 line) component with an 8k (300 line) component a couple weeks ago. Was the developer of the old component incompetent? Not at all. He just made the problem significantly harder than it was. I'd guess that it was to keep the otherwise dull project interesting -- or because he found the problem space interesting and wanted to explore it.
When I see stuff like this I can't tell if it's arrogance or just insecurity.
Required reading for internet skeptics
And I don't think blade runner is quality, so yeah, no benchmark.
Spatial ability is testable. I took such a test to get into high school.It is explicitly listed on tests such as the ASVAB.
I also took such a test (called the "Eleven-Plus", in the UK years ago to get placed in a selective Grammar School), and I am suprised that someone says it is "untestable".
The Eleven-Plus consisted of three papers, Maths, English and Intelligence. The intelligence test included a lot of diagramatic puzzles such as being able to pair patterns that were both mirror-imaged and inverted. I hated the English test but loved those spatial puzzles - could do them at a glance. I am now an engineer and need to use those spatial abilities all the time.
I know it is anecdotal, but a large collection of anecdotal evidence is called data. :)
No, anecdotal evidence is heavily subjective to selective memory and the fallacies that come with it -- confirmation bias and motivated reasoning being the two primary ones.
Anecdotal evidence, no matter how much of it there is, cannot be used to imply correlation or causation, in any sense that an observational study or trial can.
It sounds like your opinion is based on anecdotal evidence. ;)
I'm disinclined to buy this, although that's admittedly because of my own biases and experience. It's just that my spacial reasoning skills (as of that of my sister, who is one of the most creative and witty people I've ever met) are so insanely poor that it actually counted as a learning disability in school. (And thank god for that, because if I'd had to stick with the "visual math" curriculum my school'd been pushing, I'd still probably being trying to complete per-algebra...or at least their bizarre, mystifying version of it).
Spacial puzzles are a special kind of hell for me. But my inability to rotate objects in my head, draw with the level of accuracy most 8 year olds can accomplish, or learn any knots more complex than a square knot has never actually seemed to hold me back when it has come to problem solving or coming up with creative solutions...well, except when those problems are "fit as many dishes as possible into this dishwasher", but still.
And who brings on the brighter kid, handicapped by his dull team-member ?
South park?
1 - create children with improved spacial abilities
2 - ?
3 profit?
Gnomes anyone?
They stole the DNA discovery off Rosalind Franklin.
No word on how good her spatial skills were...
Thanks for that!!
Was feeling a little hungover today, but I'm pleased to say I got 8/9. I had a feeling I knew what I was doing. I don't think it's too hard, but maybe I take my spacial ability for granted.
Well I am not so sure that the test linked at in the summary is that effective. I personally am pretty good at spatial stuff, and on my first pass of the test it took me a good 15 minutes, scoring 8/9. I thought I did well. But then about 15mn later I showed it to my father in law and went through it again. It took me all of 3 minutes tops, not because I'd done it before but because I'd gotten much better at it. I didn't even need to visualize the cubes any more, I just looked at the flat patterns. I scored 9/9.
I think it would be very difficult to create such spatial tests unless you get into 3D geometry, where you try to visualize the cross section of a cylinder skewering a cone.
Many geeks I know are good at pingpong, which requires probably the most spatial vision (but not much muscle strength or endurance).
>David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. 'We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.'
ah yes. Choices choices. Do I want my kid to grow up to be a patent troll? or a slave driver?
Its so nice to read that David Lubinski, psychologist no less, knows a thing or two about engineering and innovation when he studies them.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
When I see stuff like this I can't tell if it's arrogance or just insecurity.
I was just going to say the same thing about your long winded post.
Summary: Everyone can code, no, really! And everyone can judge other's code as brilliant or crap, no, really! And everyone can and does write bad code, no, really!
I have seen hundreds of people who have good spatial skills & always suspected that is what led to the interest in STEM.
The reason I say this is that young kids with spatial skills develop those before they even hear the acronym STEM before eve kindergarten. They play with tools and disassemble and reassemble all sorts of things...just like I did as far back as I could remember to around 3-4 years of age.
Some of these people I knew went to college, technical schools and others became skilled builders, mechanics and machinists. Each could visualize, sketch and do the math their interest required, very well.
That's probably because there are too many players.
That is, the more players you have, the less predictable the behavior of the ball becomes. Team sports are all about communication. The spatial behavior of the ball is probably far less important to know, for a player, than the position of the other players and the communication between them. Bob needs to know if Bill is going to kick the ball to him or to Steve.
... if you get away from the games long enough to create something. Cool.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Objects more complex than cubes would be challenging. Cubes were too simple. I spotted the odd one out in seconds.
Perhaps, if I allowed them to study my brain as I take the tests, I could parlay my ability to score perfectly and in a short amount of time for a scholorship to their University
I would love to be able to study and deepen my knowledge more.
Memory and spatial ability, and how quickly things a learned in each area. I have a very high degree of spatial ability, and became very good at tech. My guidance councilor insisted that I go to college when all I wanted to do was fix TVs, went one semester and dropped out because I discovered computers and that I didn't need someone to teach it to me. I could fit the pieces of a computer program in my head and spill it out from my fingertips. 35 years later, I'm making over 6 figures without a college education. Today I manipulate entire systems in my head to find the best way to make them fit, or what has them broken. If only college was structured better to deal with people who learn quickly and could have kept me engaged, I probably could have learned a heck of a lot more.
... I can't remember any of them. Sometimes things stick, but I can't figure out the rhyme or reason. My ex-wife, on the other hand, had an almost eidetic memory. She became an RN and could rattle off drug interactions like it was written on a page in front of her. She could remember the name of someone she had met years ago, once. But she had little to no spatial ability. I don't know how many times I tried to teach her how to program a VCR, she just couldn't get it. Driving directions for her required landmarks that I didn't notice, not the compass directions that I used. Choosing either north or south I-95 was impossible, she wanted to know whether to turn left or right. (Yes .. I know .. it says it right on the sign. You try to convince her .. I gave up. That's one reason she became my 'ex-wife' ... just not a good fit)
.. diagnosing and fixing things.If she had the tools to really determine my skills, maybe things would have turned out even better.
However, my memory sucks the big one. Names, places, dates
We are two very smart people that have done well, but in two very different ways. Our daughter, however, seems to have gotten both. She is taking bio-science classes and can rattle of biological processes, how they work, and the names of parts I didn't even know existed. I tell her she is 'scary-smart', she can go on and on when talking about the detail off genetic manipulation. She does what I do with cells instead of with programming languages.
I could never be a doctor or nurse or a genetic researcher, my ex-wife could never be a computer programmer or a genetic researcher. My daughter could do any of them. Sure, I probably could have tried to be a doctor, but it would have been a struggle with all of the memorization. My ex-wife could have learned computer language syntax and been able to recite it back, but probably couldn't have applied it.
While I applaud my councilor for trying to send me to college, I still ended up doing the same thing a TV repair guy does
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Ford didn't invent anything except for a superior business model, which featured an assembly line, a living wage for workers and a choice of one color for the product (black). Bill Gates has been compared to him. I wonder why Lubinski thinks Ford had genius-level spatial reasoning ability?
Testing for intelligence shouldn't be just about what you know and how much you know.. too me, that's more like testing for memory retention. But how do you learn? What do you do with what you know? these can offer much more practical views into a person's intelligence and even dare I say, the level of productivity you could expect. How well do you use what you know?
Creativity can be taught. It's just exploring possibilities after all. To a certain extent, at intro and medium levels, 'artistic' expression is largely just the working out of possibilities in reality because the person lacks a sufficient visualization system.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Perhaps what you're missing from your story, is that perhaps your son was given an opportunity to learn an important human truth at an early age that is more important than book smarts, one which you still fail to grasp.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The GP mentionned toys as examples, nobody mentionned death and dismemberment.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
> What can you do with two sticks and a string?
Took a "JETS Engineering Aptitude" test filled with questions like these (you wrote a list of things) and imagine folding and rotating the paper type questions in Jr. High, scored top 5% vs. professional engineers. Felt terrible I didn't get my usual 99%itile like on math and verbal.
Now I sit here bitching about how stupid everyone is for not being able to see the combined DNA/meme duo data streams guiding human evolution, both complete with evolutionary changes and reproduction.
Some at least acknowledge memes; very few realize they are just a cog in the meme's reproduction mechanism.
They learn techniques, not creativity. How you rearrange the bits you're given, regardless of field, is creativity.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
No matter how constrained you are by a piece of music, you can still be creative in the style that you wring notes out of your instrument.
In fact, the more constrained you are the greater the gift of creativity needed to do anything useful with whatever leeway given!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Most programmers that I've ever met only know what they've been spoon-fed. They don't fully understand how something works, they only know that they've been told works. Many good programmers have a lot of knowledge, but anyone can acquire knowledge, what most programmers, and almost anyone in any other profession, don't have is the ability to apply their knowledge outside of the way they were told to apply it.
I am a firm believer that most people only seem smart because they have a lot of experience in their specific field. I've only met a few people that can take knowledge from one field or problem and apply it to another in a valid way.
I think that the "smartness" of a person is the product of their knowledge and their ability to apply their knowledge. Now, applying knowledge can be learned and is a form of knowledge also. A very knowledgeable person can be very smart from sheer knowledge alone, but add in creativity to the mix and you have someone that can create their own knowledge that may not be read or easily found by others.
A knowledgeable person who is creative in their way of applying knowledge, while being logical about application, will eventually out-perform someone who is only "book smart" or "experience smart".
Reading about something or experiencing something can allow one to acquire knowledge, but being creative allows one to create knowledge.
Brilliant post!
There have been a gazillion experiments done and statistical analyses done regarding these matters.
The high IQ children will make the top leaders, scientists, artists etc of the future has been shown to be false over and over again.
You know what is the best predictor for latter success in life? Family. Successful parents produce mostly successful kids. The opportunities are not dictated by the school but by the parents themselves.
One experiments examined boarding school students before and after holiday breaks. They found out the largest differences between good students and bad students were during the holidays where the parents had influence.
This whole genetic/Darwinian/bell curve explanation for intelligence is a very nice theoretical one. While it may have some influence, in modern society the genetic factors are not the major influencing factors. The genetic gifts pale to the environmental gifts that one gets, especially from your home environment.
Humans aren't born with an ability for science or math or whatever else. They all have to be learned by using the tools that we have. While some may have slightly lower this or that, in the end, there is no way to know exactly the next stroke of genius will come from.
These discussions always remind me of an Einstein anecdote. Take 4 years out of the life of Einstein and you will find a man who has failed miserably.
Do you realize that solving a problem and reducing a known solution to something simpler after the system is operational are two completely different problems. When the original problem was being formulated, there were probably many uncertainties and unknown relationships.Once the system is running, some relationships become clear and reductions are possible. I hate these smart/competent tags that people like to put on other people. The nature of the problem changes with time and obvious solutions are not obvious before.
As a vague example, would you call the design of a 30" CRT monitor bad because it weighs maybe 20 times more than the LCD one? Maybe during that LCD technology wasn't available. I know it's a weak example but the point I'm trying to make is that without looking at the conditions that the code was written in, it is impossible to make judgements that you are making.
I was a lettering NCAA 1st string athlete for a national champ in Lacrosse as a freshmen http://lemoynedolphins.com/sports/mlax/history/1985.HTM (Alex Kowalski - got injured though) & yet? I am a "total geek" too -> http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74
* :)
(Classifying people doesn't always "work out" man - there are always 'outliers'...)
APK
P.S.=> Real "oddballs" (like me, lol) who even were lettermen http://lemoynedolphins.com/sports/mlax/history/mlaxletterwinners (1985 Letter "K") in COLLEGIATE sports & yes, "starters/1st string" ... apk
I *think* what you describe occurs since 'geeks' concentrate on academic pursuits, not sports (in the long haul they're right - The mind? WILL outlast the body, no matter WHAT you do, or how you train - I know: I am near 1/2 century in age & am not 1/2 the guy I was between 18-28 physically & I accept I never CAN be, again)...
Imo & experience though - BOTH the mind & body, are what I call "plastic" (meaning can be 'reshaped' to ANY FORM YOU LIKE, if you're willing to put in the time & effort to achieve what it is you're set on doing is all).
* Thus, MOST 'geeks'? Are, what they are, since they decided to put '110% effort' in their academic or otherwise 'nerdy' pursuits is all... give them time on weights, running, & training? They can be as good as ANYONE else.
I mean that too... the human mind & body, are something to see - we ARE "built to work" & improve, and, when pushed? We do. A properly motivated human is an awesome thing to behold.
(I know - I scored on Division I NCAA National Champ (more wins than ANYONE in history on that note mind you) Syracuse U in my day in college (preventing a shutout, & my alma mater, a many time divisional & even national champ @ Division II, has NEVER been shutout - I stopped that twice in my career... lol, coach hated me though because I smoked then (guy was a goof) but loved when I did stuff like that... lol, go figure!)).
In highschool?
Did the same vs. West Genesee (most wins & titles of ANY school in the nation @ AAA level/best) & learned to play in that district in fact prior to parents divorce.
It's ALL where you want to put effort in... why sports for me? Reduction of costs for schooling really - partial academic/athletic scholarships & what-not are possible, especially if you come from the CNY area I do (best in the nation for the sport, hands-down, & the championships @ highschool + collegiate levels between SU & my old school in college show it)).
APK
P.S.=> Continuing my last post http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3997583&cid=44343467
... apk
I did the "clock" thing too. What are kids going to find today when they take things apart? Oh, a chip.
...and burned, hollowed, split, shaved, whittled, pressed, crushed...what kind of 'stick' is this? what kind of 'string'? where are we doing this? what is my final goal?
communication device, fire, fire transport, bow & arrow, snare trap, tobacco/marijuana/survival-herb drying rack (All neither tools, machines or instruments.)
hmm, I guess one can consider weapons and traps a simple machine....push button receive bacon....er squirrel...
Massive amounts of spacial reasoning greatly depends on the over-arcing goal, eg: survival / build power plant / garden vegetable arrangements...
This severely undercuts scientific blindness tests. I know this because I'm one of those people the education/evaluation system failed.
Most of these tests are like the Above Poster's where as many variables are reduced as possible, but those very variables are the exact ones intended to be recorded.
Thy foot hath been shot, good sir.
My parents sent me "homeschooled" a long ago and it works well for me.
Just for skepticism I went to community college to see what it's like ten years after I left Private School, holy shit what a mess this country is in.
Stay out of private school. Stay out of public school. If you want to be a good and successful person, everything is out there for you to do your job well.
But if you're going out into the wilderness like that, make sure to bring a really big knife. At least those are still acceptably legal.
HTH
It's preparation for life, not necessarily to gain knowledge. Other than what life will be like.
Life is nothing like school in any way. General school does absolutely nothing to prepare you for life outside of following orders and having a few facts memorized.
Everything is testable. The question is are you actually measuring what you think you are. That's why I used the word 'measurable'.
People have been arguing about whether their test for intelligence actually measures anything useful for decades. Spatial ability is a subset of this so pardon my skepticism.
And as far as creativity goes, well it's ineffable. The idea you can measure it with a test is absurd. About all you can do is give examples of the results of the application of creativity.
Sentrion didn't argue that writing music does not ever take creativity, but that many successful music writers can create popular music with almost zero creativity.
Depending on the length of the string, hammock for a doll. BDSM rack for a doll. Snap one of the sticks into four parts and you can make a doll. A knot puzzle.
I typo'ed the author's name and didn't realize. Good catch - thanks.
yes taking apart a clock is curiosity not spatial reasoning
Comprehension. Fail.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
In my own view of my-self, spatial ability and creativeness are one and the same. I do not come up with creative ways to solve a problem, I visually see the problem in my head and the answer just stares me in the face. Some people say that I am creative, while I just feel like I am just putting together a puzzle and I just see all of the pieces and know where to place them.
It can take me a lot of blankly staring at a wall to get the image in my head, but once it's there, I typically can "see" what needs to be done. This image is not static, but made of smaller parts that connect together and interact. It's quite strange and hard to explain.
Another interesting thing is that part of an image in my head can look "fuzzy". Every time this happens, it means I don't understand part of the problem. If I spend enough time looking at the fuzzy part, I can think of what I am missing and ask the right questions to get the answers I need to make the image clear.
It's really interesting to me, because it really is like looking at a picture. I really am not making an analogy, I have some sort of sense of "sight" when thinking about how to design system or generally solve problems. I do not consciously think of how to solve a problem, I just "stare" at this image in my head. I typically have my eyes opened in the real world, but I become unaware of my surroundings.
I don't know how other people solve problems in their head, but I don't really think about anything, I really just blank my mind out and look at the "image" in my head, and once the image becomes clear, I have the answer.
A few interesting times in my life, I had been working on a system design for some time and was not able to get the image "clear". Then one day, while doing something to clear my mind, all of a sudden the part of the image that was fuzzy became clear. The instant this happened, the rest of the image started becoming clear really fast and made me literally see sparkles in my vision and I felt like I was about to pass out while the image was becoming clear, but after those few seconds the entire image was clear and I knew exactly what to do. This has happened only a few times and was always related to something that really really interested me.
Yes that's right. He responded directly in 1995 here: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199505--.htm
Also, let's clear up the term 'Bell Curve' a bit.
Most of us encounter factor analysis in action in school, in the form of a weighted grading system based on distribution of scores...'grading on a curve'...
Also known as a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_curve_grading">'Bell Curve'...
Grading on a weighted scale is still done, but the way grades are weighted is much more complex and gives better representations than the 'bell curve' used in high schools in the US in the early-mid 20th century.
Another type of usage of 'bell curve' comes from probability theory. Here it is interchanged with the term Normal Distribution.
The book 'Bell Curve' is a pop science book from 1995 that repackaged an archaic statistical reductionist idea that human behavior could be quantified on a single curvolinear datagram. That's the core idea Chomsky criticized in 1972 and re-iterated in 1995.
So there are two common usages of the term 'Bell Curve'...both are essentially the same idea, which is rooted in a flawed understanding of an actual scientific concept in probability theory: the normal distribution.
2 bells 1 curve ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
without looking at the conditions that the code was written in, it is impossible to make judgements that you are making.
That's the point the bulk of my post is making. Though I would also claim that such judgments as still impossible even if you include the conditions under which the code was written.
Once the system is running, some relationships become clear and reductions are possible.
I couldn't agree more. Yet another reason that arrogant / insecure developers think everyone around them writes nothing but crap code. A friend of mine likes to say "There are no good writers, only good re-writers." That seems to apply to computer programming as well.
I hate these smart/competent tags that people like to put on other people.
Me too. I think it's perfectly ridiculous.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Well I am not so sure that the test linked at in the summary is that effective. I personally am pretty good at spatial stuff, and on my first pass of the test it took me a good 15 minutes, scoring 8/9. I thought I did well. But then about 15mn later I showed it to my father in law and went through it again. It took me all of 3 minutes tops, not because I'd done it before but because I'd gotten much better at it. I didn't even need to visualize the cubes any more, I just looked at the flat patterns. I scored 9/9. I think it would be very difficult to create such spatial tests unless you get into 3D geometry, where you try to visualize the cross section of a cylinder skewering a cone.
I'm not sure you're entirely correct. As with most things, doing them repeatedly makes you better. Wayne Gretzky couldn't do everything he did due to native talent alone - it took practice! This doesn't mean I could practice any amount and ever be as good as he was. Likewise, something that you (or I) could pick up in reasonably short order may be very difficult or impossible for others. Some, like the GPP, may be almost completely lacking in this area, and compensate with other techniques. Some of those techniques may lead to very elegant solutions that spatial reasoning simply wouldn't point to.
I won't say that my completing the test in 20 minutes with some effort means it would be a reasonable test for anyone else. Likewise, it would be interesting to see if more complex levels of testing could be achieved, and so be able to categorize those who are above average, if this even passes that mark.
On a related note, you may be interested in this: Arrowsmith School. The whole premise behind the school is using mental exercises to train up the weaker cognitive capacities of people with cognitive disabilities until they reach normal levels of function. 30 years of practice seems to indicate that it works. It makes me think there could be more possibility for improvement than we think.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
"Spatial" does not necessarily mean 3D -- 2D is a perfectly valid space too. This particular test was far easier to solve by using sets of face rotations and translations to find out the non-matching cube, instead of trying to imagine 3D cubes. The way the question is asked is perhaps misleading in that respect, in that it encourages you to use the less efficient way, because it mentions the word "cube". I used the 3D method for the first few questions until I figured the 2D one and then solving the rest (correctly) was a few seconds each.
Humans aren't born with an ability for science or math or whatever else. They all have to be learned by using the tools that we have. While some may have slightly lower this or that, in the end, there is no way to know exactly the next stroke of genius will come from.
Oh please. People are born with different ability, that blows, but deal with it. There's not just 2 kinds of people - standard retard and normal. There's a reason billy will never learn to tie his shoe's and it's not because his parents aren't successful. That spectrum stretches all the way from billy to Einstein.
Watch out for open ended tests though. They are typically as much a psyche test as an aptitude test.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Great, so why should the efforts of an involved parent who's clearly spent a lot of his time ensuring that his son is engaged in learning be undercut by other parents who don't take the same interest in the kid's education simply because they attend the same school?
Who cares why a child is advanced or more academically capable. They are, and that's all that matters. Whether their ability is genetic is an orthogonal concern that doesn't justify sabotaging the education of an advanced student to try to force a struggling student to the same level.
Massive amounts of spacial reasoning greatly depends on the over-arcing goal
Yes but this is a creativity and spacial ability test. Creativity is as much about defining the rules or breaking existing rules as it is working within them. I have found personally that I am more creative when I do define boundaries, arbitrary but still defined. Starting with two sticks and a string was the first boundary. There are many others but a creative person will define them as needed.
Being able to do this is one of the first skills you have to teach a child. Get some blocks or Legos or tinker toys. Have them come up with the rules "it has to be a robot" or "it has to be a building" and then start building. Without that rule they will often just sit and put pieces together with no plan no goal. You seed a vague goal and suddenly they will have a hundred ideas. The next step is to have them talk about what they are going to do before they do it. This forces them to visualize it. You can do this with other topics as well when the person is familiar enough with the components.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Yeah, I was very confused about his selection of "quality". The book that Blade Runner was based on, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is quite good, but the movie is not nearly as good, in my opinion.
I have also taught them how to come up with creative ideas. There plenty of ways to do this. If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example.
Well --- you've kind of proven you don't know what the froot pies creative is.
Every human being can imitate another, but that is so far from what being creative means that at this point I am interested in what your idea of creative is?
I mean, creative is not imitating someone else it is using your imagination --- and your definition of creative is the opposite of the traditional definition.
So if up = down, I don't see where crops growing from your seed.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
It would be nice if we could bronze this post and revisit it on a regular basis.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
School math isn't math, it's just calculating. Spelling bees aren't creativity contests either. One could argue they measure the opposite of creativity, because the spelling/grammar kids use to communicate in peer groups is much richer than the official rules and thus can accomodate more new information (at the price of being less generally intelligible). So about anything is a better predictor for creativity than school "math" skills and school "language" skills.
I think you are being dense...
Pairing a less creative person with a more creative person doesn't simply only result in imitation.
Creativity isn't simply creating something out of nothing. Creativity is building on a foundation. It is making connections between things that others overlook, and that is a skill that can be taught by opening someone's eyes to the fact that these non-obvious connections exist. Witnessing this process has the potential to create an epiphany that can open someone's eyes into making non-obvious connections themselves in completely different areas.
Teaching someone to see the world differently can essentially teach someone creativity, so I think creativity absolutely can be taught. It's not magic.
It's been well known for years that the best way to build a custom bike or rod is to have the plans and details fully mapped out in the mind, so that you can, say trace the wiring to find the best place to hide it, or placement of the mounts , engine etc, without leaving your seat. And I'd call these guys creative..it's modern art, after all.
Not really news to those of us in the creative STEM world.
I "see" engineering problems in 3D (or 4D - 3D + time). Always have I then have to "translate" them to paper or words for explaining them to non-engineers which takes far more time than to come up with a solution (which is easy to do - I just "see" the interconnections and mechanisms work). I suppose it's a bit like how some folks "see" numbers with colors or smells and so they can savant math. It's alway a challenge when I have to deal with people who can't imagine how this works - they want a A-to-B-to-C-to-D-to-etc. explanation of it but I just see the totality of it A-thrue-Z without those trivial steps needed at all.
weapons are a valid tool.
Also,
Firestarter (String could be used to hold the string in place, and will also catch fire. Hopefully some hard wood that burns good)
Backscratcher
Fork
Hammer
Hoe (for gardening, not a woman of negotiable affection)
Fork (this depends on type of stick and size. big can be used for farming. Small for eating)
Knife (if you can sharpen the stick with the other stick, hopefully without making a firestarter)
fishing rod and line (might be able to make a hook with a splinter)
fixed bow type trap for small animals.
you think Psycho, I think survival tools. Alot of kids learn how to do this in cub scouts and various other activities.
though it shows a person's thought processes that the first thing I thought of was ways to get and cook food, others think toys, and others think weapons.
dude never said anything about just toys
I can run software in my mind and find bugs in my sleep but I can't can go to the beach and visualize everybody with their clothes off. Well, that may not be a bad thing.
I have the very same problem. After a few years of struggling with it, I was diagnosed - as an adult - with a non-verbal learning disability. Depending on who you talk to, and who does the diagnosis, I may have Asberger's. I scored around 12 on the Osterreith Complex Figure test.
Rather than researching it, you should consider having yourself tested for it. You might find it changes your life. You may find, as I have, that it confirms what you've already noticed.
Science has severe limitations. The limits of the usefulness of science are tested in the soft sciences. You hard science people need to learn some philosophy of science (it's a college course, see philosophy) and learn some respect for the difficulty involved in those sciences. It's not rocket science kind of difficulty, it another kind of difficulty and nobody is going to be smart enough to solve the problems... The "solutions" are almost as fuzzy as the problems.
A great deal of science is inductive reasoning, it is not all deductive reasoning! This includes the more rigid sciences. Correlation and causation often is only a matter of statistics - you don't always have a clear connection, you take the best answers available and try not to become overly attached to them.
As far as doing poor science or poor soft science (some think those are the same,) that can happen plenty in any area. Genius is another matter. As far as the tribalism inherent to human nature, that's our natural politics at work - the methods of it's expression are quite broad.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news