Introduction

It is common knowledge that many artists have used drugs (alcohol, opiates, cannabis, LSD, ...) and that this account for part of their creativity. This common knowledge is usually opposed to people advocating rationality in sentences like "but with only your rationality, we wouldn't have much art", "you need chaos to make art" or even "the best artists were that great because they were irrational".

Eliezer partly addressed the issue in the lawful intelligence Sequence. While this Sequence is very interesting, I feel it didn't completely address the issue (unlike most of the Sequences). My hypothesis is that it's mostly focused on what's important to building a Friendly AI (which is a worthy goal, this should not be taken as a criticism), not so much as explaining creativity in actual humans. So I'm writing an article with my current thoughts on the topic, and I would welcome any additional argument, hypothesis, research paper, ... that anyone from the LW community can point me to. This article is not supposed to come to any definitive conclusion, but to show my current state of thinking on that issue. I hope to both give and receive in writing it.

Reasons for which it could be an illusion

Availability bias

The first question to ask about "it is a common knowledge that many artists were using drugs" is : is this common knowledge true, or not, and if not, why do so many people believe something which is false ?

Availability bias comes will full power on this issue : when we hear that a given artist (musician, writer, painter, ...) was taking drugs, we add a "drug addict" tag to him. Or more accurately we create a link between the "drug addict" node and his node in our belief network. When asked about artists who did take drugs, we can easily state many names : for example Hemingway, Van Gogh, the Beatles. When asked about artists who didn't take drugs... well, we usually don't have "did not take drug" node in our belief networks, and no easy way to say that Asimov or Bach didn't take drugs.

Even when doing specific research, we can know with almost absolute certainty that Hemingway was drinking a lot of alcohol, but not so confidently that Asimov didn't. It's easier to be sure of the existence of something, than to be sure of its non-existence.

Reverse causality

The second question, if even after considering the affect of availability bias, it still...

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