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TED Talks 2009: Elizabeth Gilbert on a different way to think about creative genius (ted.com)
20 points by darragjm on Feb 10, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



How is this a different way of thinking? She's talking about genies being responsible for the creative process.

"Can we do this differently? Can we go back to some ancient understanding about the relationship of humans and the creative mystery? Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. There are probably people in the audience who would raise legitimate scientific arguments and suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy-juice on their projects... The question I kind of want to pose is, you know: Why not?"

Is this a giant analogy? I don't know. (Maybe my genie is on winter-break.) I don't need any non-scientific imaginary constructions to deal with the real world.


Exactly ... it's like creating God because we don't know how to explain all of the things in this world !

This is just a form of escapism, but if it works for her or for anyone else and not harming anyone, what's the problem ?!



I have noticed more regularly that good things are being missed... not sure what we can about it.


accept less crap ?

The 'new' page scrolls by so fast that it is pretty hard to keep track of all the links submitted.

That would go a long way towards getting rid of some of the frustration experienced by the 'old hands' here.

Maybe introduce categories, say 'real hacker news' and 'the rest' to begin with ?

Another easy to add feature would be something that checks the intersection between the vocabulary of the 'new' submission with the last 100 or so older submissions, above a certain threshold there could be a 'your submission is similar to 'x' message, are you sure you want to submit' confirmation.

Compliments to RiderOfGiraffes for spotting all those dupes btw!


<fx: blush>


well, in this instance you could upvote the dupe in the hopes that more people will see it on the front page. on a slightly related note, i've noticed these days that the posts with higher numbers of votes depend not only on the quality of the content, but also the reputation of the submitter.


A very unique talk for sure.




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