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For many years now, we've had a channel in SN's internal chat dedicated to negative capability, a 'yes, and' channel1, where we're all welcome to share wild ideas and entrusted with the difficulty of not judging them and living with their possibility.
I take negative capability very seriously because I think creativity is made of the stuff. That is, I think creativity is accepting some idea as a constraint, then attempting to establish a new idea coherent with the first, and so on. In image diffusion machine learning models they call this locality and translational equivariance.

Footnotes

  1. Negative capability was too confusing for anyone unfamiliar so I explain it using the improv philosophy instead.
creativity is made of the stuff. That is, I think creativity is accepting some idea as a constraint, then attempting to establish a new idea coherent with the first, and so on.
Agreed. What I struggle with is whether there is a point of diminishing return, so to speak. It would seem that under too many (internalized) constraints, creativity might be stifled.
It sounds like your channel curates an atmosphere where anything goes, no matter how zany or inane, which only really works if everyone involved suspends judgement, and accept the new logic from which the first idea sprung.
As a side note, some of my favourite movies/books are those where, right away, you are forced to suspend your disbelief, and accept the (un)logic of the new universe. The Naked Gun did this to a ridiculously comedic effect.
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 22h
What I struggle with is whether there is a point of diminishing return, so to speak. It would seem that under too many (internalized) constraints, creativity might be stifled.
Yes, you need an escape hatch when you go too far afield and are over-constrained. I only commit to negative capability when I'm in the ideation phase because I find there's always an escape hatch there. Before I begin spending expensive kinds of effort, I'll apply judgement. It's a lot harder to pull the plug when you've sunk a lot of cost.
which only really works if everyone involved suspends judgement
Yes, definitely. Even I struggle with it sometimes and I'll excuse myself from replying when I don't have the patience to diffuse my judgement. What's most important to me is that the folks involved accept the premise, and are capable of suspending judgement.1

Footnotes

  1. To think one's negativity is of special value, despite negativity being abundant in relative terms, is to be the kind of asshole that also lacks insight.
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