Chaos Program

Can an article – written by a professional journalist for a national news magazine – credibly claim that there’s a creativity crisis in America? Isn’t the act of writing the article itself creative? Doesn’t that mean something?

Well, no.

By way of Slashdot (here) I found a Newsweek article (here) that made the highly controversial claim that American children (6th grade and under) are less creative than previous generations and advocated project-based learning in the classroom as the “scientific” solution.

I really wish that people who write about science would try learning a little first.Really I do.

Let’s start with the setup: A longitudinal study by E. Paul Torrance (Wikipedia bio; obit; Books by Torrance on amazon) in which young children were tested for creativity, then followed for decades and their creative achievements recorded. The conclusion was that it was a good test, that people who scored high in creativity while very young, often went on to be highly creative adults. Longitudinal studies (Wikipedia definition here), by the way, are hard to do well but can lead to very rich data sets that can be useful for far more than originally intended.

So far we’re in “duh!” territory. The big take-away is that psychologists were thrilled and amazed to find out they could measure creativity. They may also have been wrong but we’ll get to that. Psychologists were also interested to find out that creativity and intelligence did not necessarily go together. Again, “Duh.” Anyone who’s ever seen an interview with Ozzy Osbourne (or any of a hundred others I could name – sorry Ozzy. You’re still great!) could have told you that. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive either. Frank Zappa proved that!
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I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

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