Initially, generativity is largely a matter of curiosity and play, unencumbered by social coercion. Development of ideas beyond the initial stage requires a network of communicating individuals who can check and build on each other's ideas.
Quoting Isaac Newton:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Regarding Bell Labs (well-known for being highly generative):
“[John] Pierce, to put it simply, was asking himself: What about Bell Labs’ formula was timeless? In his 1997 list, he thought it boiled down to four things: A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.”
(from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
While technically competent management has a clear relation to technical generativity, the other factors are more about absence of negatives (economic and social coercion) than about presence of positives. This makes sense given that (a) at least some humans are automatically generative (in the sense of being curious, inventive, etc) and (b) economic and social coercion destroy generativity. (b) makes sense given that: economic coercion can't incentivize activities the economic system can't test on short timescales (e.g. marketing of consumer goods), and social coercion works on very short timescales and causes conformity pressures (where conformity is incompatible with generativity).
Thus, a question that is more often useful than "what causes generativity", is "what blocks generativity".
Quoting How to Read a Book (1940), page 284 (chapter 18, "How to Read Philosophy"):
"Children ask magnificent questions. "Why are people?" "What makes the cat tick?" "What's the world's first name?" "Did God have a reason for creating the earth?" Out of the mouths of babes comes, if not wisdom, at least the search for it. Philosophy, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder. It certainly begins in childhood, even if for most of us it stops there, too.
The child is a natural questioner. It is not the number of questions he asks but their character that distinguishes him from the adult. Adults do not lose the curiosity that seems to be a native human trait, but their curiosity deteriorates in quality. They want to know whether something is so, not why. But children's questions are not limited to the sort that can be answered by an encyclopedia.
What happens between the nursery and college to turn the How of questions off, or, rather, to turn it into the duller channels of adult curiosity about matters of fact? A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions-that is another story.
Why should we have to try to develop such minds, when children are born with them? Somewhere along the line, adults must fail somehow to sustain the infant's curiosity at its original depth. School itself, perhaps, dulls the mind-by the dead weight of rote learning, much of which may be necessary. The failure is probably even more the parents' fault. We so often tell a child there is no answer, even when one is available, or demand that he ask no more questions. We thinly conceal our irritation when baffled by the apparently unanswerable query. All this discourages the child. He may get the impression that it is impolite to be too inquisitive. Human inquisitiveness is never killed; but it is soon debased to the sort of questions asked by most college students, who, like the adults they are soon to become, ask only for information.
We have no solution for this problem; we are certainly not so brash as to think we can tell you how to answer the profound and wondrous questions that children put. But we do want you to recognize that one of the most remarkable things about the great philosophical books is that they ask the same sort of profound questions that children ask. The ability to retain the child's view of the world, with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare-and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
We are not required to think as children in order to understand existence. Children certainly do not, and cannot, understand it-if, indeed, anyone can. But we must be able to see as children see, to wonder as they wonder, to ask as they ask. The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions-simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions-and maturely wise in our replies.
Which is, again, consistent with the picture that humans start generative, and various social forces (especially coercive ones like school, and adults being annoyed at being asked questions, as in diplomat social norms) dim or extinguish the fire of curiosity.
See also: The order of the soul, Better babblers
As a follow-up, note that there is some tension between raw, unencumbered generativity, and the requirement to communicate ideas to others. Communication is essential, as this allows many more to work on the same problems, be inspired by each other's ideas, and so on.
The goal in shaping an intellectual community is to attain intellectual standards without intellectual homogeneity. Some aspects of the intellectual space, such as language, some truth conditions, some discourse norms, and so on, must be standardized to allow productive communication. However, when such standardization is attained through more wide-ranging intellectual conformity, the result is imitative non-generativity, as is seen in nearly all academic fields right now.
The goal is intersubjectivity, rather than pure subjectivity (isolated perspectives) or objectivity (a single standardized perspective): the ability for substantially different perspectives to communicate with each other, and reach common knowledge on some (but, necessarily, not all) facts that can be expressed in both perspectives.
Does anyone know why Bell Labs didn't take over the (research) world, either by absorbing more and more researchers or by other organizations or countries copying its model?
This already captures a lot, but I would just add to it something about where the babbling or natural generative stuff comes from that gets pruned by social forces.
My experience of thinking is very much one of random stuff coming up from the deep, and during meditation or other periods where I'm relaxed and letting rather than controlling, more of that stuff is free to come up. We could model this as a kind of suppression that's normally going on that gets removed by creating conditions where it turns off. Under those conditions, I can sometimes ...
I like this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
BTW, I'm not a fan of the word "generativity". I don't understand how it's different from "creativity" and I haven't heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
BTW, I’m not a fan of the word “generativity”. I don’t understand how it’s different from “creativity” and I haven’t heard it used the way this thread uses it outside of rationalist circles.
Seconding this. Needless propagation of jargon is bad.
But even if anyone here thinks this bit of jargon is necessary, nevertheless it is very bad to use jargon without having defined it first. If you insist on using jargon, write a definition! (It needn’t be precise, or intensional, but it has to communicate what you mean by the word, such that someone who’s not encountered the concept before, can understand you.)
Otherwise we get the absolute worst of both worlds: writing made inscrutable by jargon, but without the benefit of clarity and precision for those who know the jargon’s meaning—because there is no one who knows the meaning (possibly not even a term’s original user).
EDIT: Needless to say, the practice of hyperlinking to the definition whenever you use a new, less-used, or unusually tricky term of jargon, ought to be considered mandatory on a forum like this.
Yes, yes, this is all fine, but do you see the problem? Say I read the OP, I ask “what does ‘generativity’ mean”—and your response is to speculate on what you think when you hear the term, to “think out loud” about connotations and so forth.
So this is what you think of when you hear it, because… why? No particular reason, just, this is what associations the term happens to trigger in your mind. What does the OP mean by it? The same thing? Probably not. But what? How do we know? What does anyone else who reads the post think of when they read it? Something else entirely, different from what you think when you read it, and from what the OP meant? Quite possibly!
I hardly think I need to point out that this is an extremely sub-optimal way to communicate anything of any importance, or anything of the least complexity or rigor, or—god forbid!—anything that is both important and complex and/or rigorous.
Compare what happens if I write a post about, say, optimization processes. “What on earth is an ‘optimization process’,” asks a reader; and I respond:
Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 (etc., etc.)
(Or, of course, I could’ve included those links in my post in the first place.)
“Aha!” says the reader, “I se
I actually think people who have lots of intellectual output do tend to come up with lots of interesting, zany hypotheses--some of which end up looking obvious in retrospect. They don't necessarily present their work as zany when they're trying to get prestigious journals to publish it. But when I read great inventors describing their process, this comes up in different forms. Here's Claude Shannon:
Another approach for a given problem is to try to restate it in just as many different forms as you can. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle. After you’ve done that, you can try to look at it from several angles at the same time and perhaps you can get an insight into the real basic issues of the problem, so that you can correlate the important factors and come out with the solution. It’s difficult really to do this, but it is important that you do. If you don’t, it is very easy to get into ruts of mental thinking. You start with a problem here and you go around a circle here and if you could only get over to this point, perhaps you would see your way clear; but you can’t break loose from certain mental blocks which are holding you in certain
Any chance you could write up a summary of the video?
I'm not sure the definitions I can come up with "creativity" and "generativity" are that obviously distinct, but I feel like I have particular associations with creativity, and different associations with generativity.
A property I associate with generativity (curious if others think of it that way) is that it's sort of self reinforcing once it exists.
When I type "generativity" into google, it autofills "generativity vs stagnation." (apparently this is be...
I suspect an important input is finding/cultivating conditions for generative pairings among people working in an area.
Lately I've found myself wanting to make the argument that intellectual generativity is very important, and that you should be very careful with subtle forces that can corrode it.
"Generativity" is the sort of word that seems to come up a lot in casual conversations in my current circle but I just went looking for a good explanatory post and couldn't find one. I'm fairly confident that someone somewhere has talked about it (not necessarily on LW).
Curious if anyone knows of good existing writing?
And if anyone wanted to write up a fresh explanation that'd be cool as well. (A possible outcome is treating the answer section here as an opportunity to write a first draft that maybe turns into a post if there's consensus the answer is good)