https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd

[[Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo - How can we do Combinational Creativity]]

Details

Date: [[2022-09-06]]<br /> Time: 9:00 - 10:00 AM<br /> Host: [[Nick Milo]]<br /> Location / Platform: #Zoom<br /> URL: https://lu.ma/w6c1b9cd<br /> Calendar: link <br /> Parent event: [[LYT Conference 2]]<br /> Subject(s): [[combinational creativity]]

To Do / Follow up

• [ ] Clean up notes
• [ ] Post video link when available (@2022-09-11)

Video

TK

Attendees

Notes

generational effect

Silent muses which resulted in drugs, alcohol as chemical muses.

All creativity is combinational in nature. - A-L L C

mash-ups are a tacit form of combinatorial creativity

Methods: - chaining<br /> - clustering (what do things have in common? eg: Cities and living organisms have in common?)<br /> - c...

Peter Wohlleben is the author of “hidden life of trees”

CMAPT tools https://cmap.ihmc.us/

mind mapping

Metaphor theory is apparently a "thing" follow up on this to see what the work/research looks like

I put the following into the chat/Q&A:

The phrase combinatorial creativity seems to stem from this 2014 article: https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/, the ideas go back much further obviously, often with different names across cultures. Matt Ridley describes it as "ideas have sex" https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex; Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts; Niklas Luhmann - linked zettels; Marshall Kirkpatrick - "triangle thinking" - Dan Pink - "symphonic thinking" are some others.

For those who really want to blow their minds on how not new some of these ideas are, try out Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly's book Songlines: The Power and Promise which describes songlines which were indigenous methods for memory (note taking for oral cultures) and created "combinatorial creativity" for peoples in modern day Australia going back 65,000 years.

Side benefit of this work:

"You'll be a lot more fun at dinner parties." -Anne-Laure

Improv's "yes and" concept is a means of forcing creativity.

Originality is undetected plagiarism - Gish? English writer 9:41 AM quote; source?

Me: "Play off of [that]" is a command to encourage combintorial creativity. In music one might say "riff off"...

Chat log

none available

Interesting to see people talking about these ideas in these spaces. It's too often a missed piece of the puzzle, and is really one of the most valuable parts.

What was the origin of the phrase "combinatorial creativity"? Was if Farnam Street in 2014 https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/

Some of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's discussion of this in the past: - Building a Creativity Inbox: Anne-Laure Le Cunff & David Perell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTSAuSUxuj0 (taped: June 23, 2020; released: Jun 25, 2020) where the phrase is uased as well as "idea sex" - Combinational creativity: the myth of originality https://nesslabs.com/combinational-creativity (see https://twitter.com/anthilemoon/status/1275820127058120705)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLDF6qZUX0

The classic Reece's Peanut Butter Cups commercial (circa 1981) in which a boy and a girl run into each other on the street with the following exchange:

Girl: Hey! You got your chocolate in my peanut butter. Boy: You got peanut butter on my chocolate.

is a good example of the productive collision of ideas behind the concepts of "ideas have sex" or "combinatorial creativity".

Humanity is a zettelkasten in biological form.

Our social ties (links) putting us into proximity with other humans over time creates a new links between us and our ideas, and slowly evolves new ideas over time. Those new ideas that win this evolutionary process are called innovation.

The general statistical thermodynamics of this idea innovation process can be "heated up" by improving communication channels with those far away from us (think letters, telegraph, radio, television, internet, social media).

This reaction can be further accelerated by actively permuting the ideas with respect to each other as suggested by Raymond Llull's combinatorial arts.

motivating reference: Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist

link to: - Mark Granovetter and weak ties - life of x

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWkwOefBPZY

Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).

Some of this is similar to:

The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110

Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/

Use of Wiki version histories

Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.

Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.

Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9

I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.

Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes

The most valuable work one can do in note taking is creating active links from one piece of knowledge to another, particularly if they're both surprising.

Anecdotally I do see a lot of people putting all of their work into collecting notes, and none of it rephrasing things into their own words to improve understanding or linking ideas together to create new ideas. The latter are both far superior to the former.

The actual incubation here is highly dependent on re-visiting our notes for active use and reloading their contexts back into our minds as well as re-arranging them mentally or otherwise. The incubation doesn't happen within the system though the system can help save them for us. We still need to be able to search and interlink them.

State-space exploration and idea combining (systematic pairings) are just modern reimaginings of ideas going back to Raymond Llull and possibly earlier.

(Gadamer 2004).

All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.

Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

Collecting thoughts is great, but there is more value in linking them, encouraging them to have sex, and making new and more exciting ideas.

Cross reference: Matt Ridley's When Ideas Have Sex https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex

Some of this critique relates to my classification about the sorts of notes that one takes. Some are more important or valuable than others.

Some are for recall and later memory, some may be collection of ideas, but the highest seems to be linking different ideas and contexts together to create completely new and innovative ideas. If one is simply collecting sententiae and spewing them back out in reasonable contexts, this isn't as powerful as nurturing one's ideas to have sex.

There's an interesting analogy between Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten numbering system and the early street address system in Vienna. Just as people (often) have a fixed address, they're able to leave it temporarily and mix with other people before going back home every night. The same is true with his index cards. Without the ability to remove cards and remix them in various orders, the system has far less complexity and simultaneously far less value.

Link to reference of street addressing systems of Vienna quoted by Markus Krajewski in (chapter 3 of) Paper Machines.

Both the stability and the occasional complexity of the system give it tremendous value.

How is this linked to the idea that some of the most interesting things within systems happen at the edges of the system which have the most complexity? Cards that sit idly have less value for their stability while cards at the edges that move around the most and interact with other cards and ideas provide the most value.

Graph this out on a multi-axis drawing. Is the relationship linear, non-linear, exponential? What is the relationship of this movement to the links between cards? Is it essentially the same (particularly in digital settings) as movement?

Are links (and the active creation thereof) between cards the equivalent of communication?

Any serious historical or other academic work should include a conversation with the body of other scholarship with which argues for or against.

Comparing and contrasting one idea with another is crucial for any sort of advancement.

Much the same way printing was automated with Johannes Gutenberg's moveable type invention, the writing of longer pieces may be automated with moveable ideas. Ideas written down on slips (index cards) can be moved around easily and re-used as necessary in composing longer articles.

When reading and taking notes, one should have a reason or purpose in mind and endeavor to stick to it. While you're absorbing what the writer has written, allow the unnecessary portions with respect to your goal flow through the sieve of your mind and only catch and annotate the portions which supplement your end goal. Keep and elaborate on these.

A few days after your reading and annotating, go back through your notes with a keen eye toward expanding on those important things to your goal or interests and set aside (or even discard) all the other less interesting pieces.

Naturally there are other pieces which may be important for remembering the shape of the things you read or facts which you've highlighted and want to remember or memorize. Save these things also in a separate space from the bigger ideas you're working on creating. They're useful, but of an entirely different nature than the ideas.

Two broad different types of notes:

• facts to remember
• ideas which can have sex with other ideas

A fascinating quote in the history of the commonplace book on it's way to becoming the Memex.

Definition: textual productivity

A measure of how much additional knowledge is generated by a system of ideas and thoughts interacting with each other.

Ideas have sex: the trouble in a dramatically increasing landscape of information that we've experienced over the last century alone is that the combinatoric interactions of all the ideas is also much slower, so the progress on this front may seem to slow while the body of knowledge and interactions is continually growing. This might make for an interesting graph.

It's rarely ever about the "lone genius".