freelance paradigm

It was only recently that I begun to research what I somehow knew since childhood; there are two kinds of creativity: individualistic and vernacular.

Individualistic would be what we normally celebrate in architecture, music, films, photography, art, etc. It is what we reward the most; financially and trough other social mechanisms. It developed during classical antiquity in ancient Greece and got an other big push (which lasts until our very time) in Renaissance. It is the creativity of a single author or a group of people, but in any case we know who they are and we give them credit for whatever they had done. That is to say, we know them by name. We celebrate and sometimes even worship them. We recognize them as authors of their work. Works by the most celebrated authors tend to have very individualistic approach that separates them from all the others.

The vernacular creativity is different in that respect; usually we don’t have any idea about the author, but even if we do, his or hers work is not much different from all the others. There might be slight variations in style or execution, but not much really. What is more important; wether they are educated or not they don’t consider them selves as authors but in best case as craftsmen. All the folk singing, dancing, storytelling, housing, manual crafts, and a lot of folk art fits into this category. These are forms of art that often serve folk rituals and are passed on from generation to generation. Together they form a special kind of memetics (genetics of ideas) that make a nations mental DNA. I think that is all that there is to nationality anyways and it is the only real thing you can be patriotic about (being part of that process and heritage). Everything else that is about nationality is completely arbitrary and it is usually just a product of government’s propaganda.

And here is a striking idea; vernacular art is most often underestimated. “Real” artists look down upon it and don’t bother much studying it. Of course, many will say it is “interesting”, but only in a way the child’s drawing can be interesting to them too. They will not study vernacular paining the same way they would study Michelangelo’s or Rembrandt’s. In most cases, they wouldn’t study it at all.

Which is quite a pity, isn’t it? There is a lot of wisdom in vernacular arts and crafts. They didn’t just pop up, like most individualistic art. Vernacular art is a product of a long process of trial and error, very much like evolution is. Whatever remained trough the decades, centuries and generations, stayed there for a reason. There is not much bullshit about it. I was very lucky to be a satellite member of a team of students at Faculty of architecture in Ljubljana, which studied vernacular architecture from all over the world and you wouldn’t believe all the amazing things this research brought about.

So I decided to pay more attention to this second world of creativity and learn from it. If you think about it, the best artists always extracted great wisdom from vernacular vocabulary. Dvořák might be just one example. Plečnik, in architecture is an other. His approach to buildings is surely very individualistic and innovative, but at the same time he drinks from the centuries old fountain of Slovenian vernacular building and wood craft, which ties him to this geographic and national territory. His memes were passed on to his students, and their students and so on... Hopefully something remains. In a similar way Vlado Kreslin (a folk-rock musician) includes memetic DNA of folk music into his own original creations. His music influenced Siddharta and many other bands who build on his legacy. You could say that Siddharta’s music is very much Slovenian and Slovenian only (the quality might be absolute and international, but the style is not). It could not have been done in Germany or Venezuela exactly for the reasons I describe above. When Siddharta inspires new younger bands, this process will hopefully continue as long as we return to the roots every now and then.

I also believe this genetic process of passing on ideas (or sometimes mixing them), is very important even within the rigid system of individualistic creativity. The reason why Italy might be such a leading force in fashion and design is that they have an unbroken chain of designers who were students of a teacher, who was a student of a (repeat this 20 times or so) student of Michelangelo or Leonardo... In countries where these chains were broken, most often by political revolutions, nations suffer not just from identity crisis, but from lack of productivity. It is just too damn hard to start anew every couple of generations. A lot of time, energy, money and resources are lost on beginners mistakes.

That is how I came to believe that traditions and vernacular arts are extremely important and one should study and learn from it. It is not so much that people intuitively know what is right (that can be achieved by more rational methods), but trough the time some things just work better than the others. When these qualities collectively build on top of eachother trough the decades we might end up with quite refined results (much like with genetic algorhythms in math). So this is what I am after - that accumulation of the unschooled and primitive impulse. It is ignored for too many times.

There are many reasons. Many of them are covered in a 4 part series on the General Lack of Creativity. But let's get nasty today and blame someone else: like school and institutions alike. (by the term "school" I mean primary and secondary school, that is to say everything that is more or less compulsory and comes before University, which is another matter indeed)
I know, I know... I'm spreading negativity instead of love... It is not positive or constructive to throw blame around, but some things need to be said!

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

School is first and foremost an institution. It should not be confused with education. For education has been around since the beginning of times while schools are in place only since a short while - more exactly: since the industrial revolution. And they haven't change much since. We'll see that shortly. It is precisely its nature of institution that generates many of its flaws. Every institution has a goal of doing something; the goal of a hospital is healing people, the goal of police is secure safety of the citizens, the goal of schools is supposed to be educating children. But every institution, even the local brass band, has a goal that comes before anything else and that is its own perpetuation and longevity. It is an unwritten rule of every institution to stay active and prosper. That it is why it is not in the interest of the police to eliminate crime and it is not in the interest of school to find a good model of education. Many jobs rely on things being wrong. It would be really stupid of any "scientist" to publish conclusive results on the age of the famous Shroud of Turin. Not as long as the cash for "research" keeps flowing.

So, around the times of industrial revolution some factory owners realized that the production of goods could be far more efficient if their workers knew how to read and do some basic calculus. Their practical view was supported by the views of classical antiquity (especially ancient Greek), which values logical deduction and rhetoric abilities above anything else. Studying Greek art, sciences and philosophies was very fashionable at that time. Before long a curriculum was established and schools were made compulsory to satisfy the needs of so many factories.

Don't get me wrong, not everything is bad. Enlightenment brought about many fantastic things; development of true science being only one of them. We would not have medical science, hospitals, pharmacy, physics, chemistry or anything like that without the mental breakthroughs of the enlightenment. The idea of compulsory schooling expanded the pool of talents. There would be no Tesla, Edison, Einstein or Fleming if the poor children wouldn't be obliged to go to school. The problem is, that we still stick to the same concepts that were established at the time when schooling was conceived. The world has moved on since then. So should education.

The idea of academic abilities is only one of them. It simply states that math, language and some encyclopedic knowledge are worth more than all other pursuits of the mind. What about arts? Dances? Music? Could you look Beethoven in the eyes and explain him that his creativity is worth less simply because is in the field of music and not philosophy?

That is de jure, de facto is far worse.

Recent neurological research proves what has been intuitively known for ages; your brain and your body will develop to meet the needs and challenges of (early) childhood. There are many well documented cases, when a child has become blind on one or both eyes, simply because it's eyes were closed or covered during the critical period within which the neurons ("sensors") in the eyes were supposed to develop. Child's developing body assumed those neurons will not be needed so the child remained blind for the rest of its life, despite having otherwise perfectly normal visual apparatus.

On the other hand we can look at the early life of Usain Bolt. I have heard anecdotes which are yet to be confirmed (if you could find me good sources of either confirmation or denial, please send me links or emails), BUT they are illustrative enough even if they are not exactly true. So, I have heard at one neurological lecture, that Usain has been playing football (soccer, for US readers) on a meadow field close to his house and that meadow has been located on the top of a cliff. Underneath the cliff there was sea. The meadow had been leaning towards the edge of the cliff at a smaller angle which caused Usain's ball to run away quite frequently... If the ball reached the edge of the cliff before Usain, it was lost in the ocean. So young Usain had to develop some good sprinting abilities at a very young age. His developing body assumed this will be its task of survival so every muscle developed in a way to favor fast sprinting runs. That is obvious, you might say. What is usually forgotten is that also his brain, which actually controls those fabulous muscles and bones also had to develop specialized ways to do the job. Not only his muscles, his brain is made for 100m running just as well!

Whatever is trained and repeated in early childhood will stay there for ever. Every political system that used early childhood indoctrination knew that. It is absolutely necessary to start at early age to become a master at almost anything you can name; ballet, chess, math or music are just the most famous examples. The complexity of those activities can be mastered only if it is approached by a young and highly plastic brain. After the age of 7 most of the important brain connections are already fixed... Much can still be done, but surely it is not the same is if it were started a few years earlier. It is of an utmost importance to give child's brain as much practice as it can handle. If that child also shows emotional affection (passion) for that activity, that alone can lead to a magnificent career. The bottom line is that brain needs to practice that activity trough all of the critical periods; early childhood (3-7), young childhood (7-12) and teen age (12-18). After that it is more or less time to harvest the results of hard work. Learning gets harder and harder with each passing year. This is the hard reality as told by contemporary neuroscience.

Are we doing anything to take advantage of those facts? Not really. Most of our children are spared "hard" mental work until the age of 7. I put the word "hard" in quotation marks, because that "hard" work should be presented and experienced in the form of relaxed playful activities that is suited for child's age. I am not speaking of child's labor. Well, many good opportunities are missed... But many more are to be lost in years that follow.

Because if you think about it, is it really math, languages and memory that children practice at school the most? (I say memory, because most of other subjects, like history, geography and even chemistry require nothing more than good memorial skills to be passed) Is it really that they practice those skills? What skills (I can't emphasize that word, skills, hard enough) do they practice? Only one: passing exams! It could be either oral or written exams, by the time you reach 16, you are a master of solving math puzzles, filling blanks at language tests, naming 5 things of this or that, manipulating teacher's feelings when being put in front of the blackboard, etc... Or simply cheating at any of that. These are the skills that you practice over and over again. Beside obedience, indifference and passivity but that is another matter (read this book) indeed. The point I'm trying to make is, that your brain specializes in an entirely narrow and useless field. On the side of that you acquire tons of "knowledge", that is to say, useless data that can be used only in solving crossword puzzles or TV quizzes (and you forget most of it when you get out of the school anyway). Instead of learning skills of creativity and productive thinking you really learn some very limited skills by doing whatever is needed to achieve that one and only goal of passing exams. Unless you had been active on your own or with help of your parents, your brain remains underdeveloped in every other field or activity for ever. By the time you reach University (most of them are much better at educating than compulsory schools because they give more freedom to teachers), your brain has already lost most of its valuable plasticity. Just as muscles in your hand will deteriorate with time if you don't use them, so will parts of your mind. The more time passes the more hard it is to reanimate them. After a certain point it becomes impossible and there is no return. Our schools fail to exercise the vast majority our mind, so most of our mental capacities are stunted in development, never to be reborn. It does not mean we should do everything at once, it means doing one thing passionately enough so that it includes everything else. Playing violin really passionately already includes doing math, arts, dance, history, biology or anything else you can think of, but this time, in a service of beautiful music, which makes learning all those supportive fields so much more exciting. Each child should find its own passion and learn everything else to support it. Which introduces us to the next problem.

Schools have a growing need to be standardized. Everything has to be sorted within standards. Children are sorted in classrooms by their age - I know you take that for granted, simply because you are born into this world without ever being any different - but step back and think about it. Is it really their production date that is the most important factor of classification? Some children are more advanced in math, some in dance... Wouldn't then follow that advanced math children should practice math with older students with matching abilities? 7 year old Jose Raul Capablanca played chess against adults because no other child was as good a match for him. And even the sheer number of children in one such class is usually too big for quality learning (usually around 30, sometimes even more).
Secondly; why should textbooks be the same for everybody? In music schools where there is no such standardization a good teacher can choose from a huge number of books for his students to adjust the needs of each particular one. There is only one reason for this hard standardization and that is to meet the needs of a large industry which produces those books: professors (authors), publishers, printing facilities, bookstores and many other institutions rely deeply on "new and revised" editions that are compulsory sold every year by state law. Even if you borrow, somebody had to buy it first. Most parents go nearly broke every September but there is no need for that. At the end, it is about money on both sides. Does basic algebra really change so much with every passing year? And more importantly: does one size really fit all?

If you really think everything trough - what is at the heart of an education? What is that minimum that is needed for this activity? Is it a "new and revised" edition of a textbook? Not really, a good teacher could do even better without. Is it a classroom? No - we could do well without that either... I think that at the heart of it all is a teacher and a student or better to say - a relationship they develop. And that has been cluttered by tons of administration burden, standards, forms, tests, merits, levels, standardized textbooks, or whatever you can name that keeps this schooling industry running and jobs safely kept... It is not just money, sometimes these standards are put in place with very noble causes but also without a view of a bigger picture (see Barry Schwartz on this issue). As a result, teachers are preoccupied with administration so they rarely have time to focus on teaching, and children are preoccupied with tests and scores so they can't focus on learning. Whatever is truly individual and worthy in one person is smashed down and washed away by these standards which fit a rare few and exclude everyone else. That is the reality of today's schooling. That is why the majority of the people feel dumb and excluded in schools or after they finish it. That is why they feel untalented. That is why all those creative and smart children (whose parents can't stop talking about) grow up to be depressive and boring adults. It is important to understand that this is not a result of any vicious conspiracy; it just came to be this way by many small steps which all made the majority sink just a little deeper into their comfort zone. They made grounds to open more institutions (commissions, boards, research labs, panels...), make more jobs, make everybody a little happier and at the same time everything a little worse, so more jobs can be made to correct it. Concepts like "Tragedy of the Commons" can play a big role here. I don't believe they are doing it consciously. They are not that smart. Perhaps nobody is.

OK, let's review that process once again: at the age of 7 children in most developed countries are put into classrooms and told to sit down and be quiet. Otherwise teacher might get a headache and no one wants that, does it? But again, if you really think deeply - isn't that the most unnatural thing you could do? Look at baby kittens or puppies. Are they sitting still? No, they are jumping around and playing... very much like human offspring of the same relative age. Schooling uses different techniques to petrify children; threats, punishments, emotional blackmail... If anything of that fails, they assume the child has ADHD and they put it on Ritalin. Childhood education should fit the needs of children not the needs of teachers. Sitting still and listening is an activity of the old.

Obviously, at the age of 10-12, when hormones kick in, most children become sick of school. They have had enough of standards, they intuitively feel there could be more to life, and that this system does not fit their intellectual needs. They start to hate the idea of education and mental effort in general, simply because it was presented to them in the wrong form - in the form of schooling. They rebel! (in every other way, education and mental effort remain being fun - even factory workers like to solve crossword puzzles, don't they)

From here on (this is highly speculative, but bare with me), schooling has two different strategies to keep them in order. First predominantly works on girls and calmer boys, second works mostly on boys and wilder girls.

At the beginning of early adolescence (as we said, when hormones kick in), 5 million years of evolution starts to reveal itself. Most girls calm down and act more responsibly. That is the necessity of becoming a mother! (in the eyes of adults girls seem to mature faster than boys, but in reality they just mature in different way) However, most boys become even harder to control, they take greater risks, they damage things around them and often even themselves in games they play. That is the necessity of becoming a hunter! What they need is a rabbit to be killed and brought home with its head chopped off. Our bodies are not developed for writing homework and answering emails. Our bodies are made to survive in nature and it is impossible to understand psychology without internalizing this hard fact. It is only a small fraction of percent of the entire evolution that we have been living in what we think of is a civilized society. The vast 99,9999...% of the time which shaped us is during the time we were in wilderness.

So girls are usually bargained to suppress their individuality with good grades and compliments. After all, it is a system that values very highly sitting still and behaving well, especially combined with responsible attitude towards homeworks and school assignments. This are all the qualities of a young (soon to be) mother. They prosper trough schooling, many without getting any real education and many of them finish on positions that require high level of responsibility and obedience (they can become even a judge or a medical doctor..., but more often a secretary or a nurse).

Young hunters are a harder case for school. They will just not sit still, listen, obey or behave. They will not learn or sometimes they will hide their knowledge just to show rebellious attitude. School has a number of readily available mechanisms for such young brats; school detentions, punishments, principal's office hearings, bad grades, letters to parents, emotional blackmail, and so on... In most cases they succeed to crush rebellious spirit by the age of 18. Unknowingly they also destroy his/hers own individuality. What it is left (in both cases) is an average person (whatever that is).

But rebellious spirit is at the heart of creation. Some sorts of rebellion should be nurtured and cultivated into a positive form which will question dogmas or conventions and at the end produce something new and better (I have a feeling someone just doesn't want that... even in healthy families it takes parents with a very big heart to teach children to question authority, that is themselves [parents] in the first place). Oscar Wilde reminds us:

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

but also:

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

(my emphasis... taken from the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism)

There is another mechanism how degrade young geniuses: give them extra homework. "You are smart, you should do these extra hard exercises too!" But you know, these kids are not stupid - why work double if all you get at the end is the same "5" (or "A" in US) as you would otherwise? Isn't it better to hide among the average and pass smoothly without lifting but a finger? When nobody mocks you for sticking your neck out? Sure it is... Being average it is! But that kid has still lots of spare energy (remember; puppies like to jump around, not sit still), and if it is not transfered with his hobbies or sports into something productive, it could be very well turned against him/her-self in a form of a violence, drug abuse... it could even lead to suicide. (I didn't come up with this - a far more experienced elderly teacher told me to write this down)

In all cases the system that is based on standardization has managed to produce a product of its own kind: a standard human fit for a standard job. Or, as George Carlin puts it: an obedient worker. Unfortunately many of them finish as boring, anemic and frustrated teachers (or textbook writers, headmasters, social workers, etc) who fail to inspire children for arts or sciences (or whatever else). Even more so; they manage to present these fabulous pursuits as disgusting. The cycle is closed and the schooling business continues. If anyone remains creative or positively individualistic it is in spite of schooling, not because of it.

So what is the solution out of this mess? Firstly; we should demolish this system and think of a new one where the constructive relation between the teacher and a pupil will be at the heart of it. We only add things from which their relationship will benefit. It could very well be textbooks and standards too, but only when needed and as needed. But above all, it should be a system in which skills are transfered, not encyclopedic knowledge. If I aspire to be a photographer, a fireman, or even a judge, or a medical doctor - the first thing I need are skills of the profession. It could be skills with equipment (camera, computer...) or skills of any other kind (social skills, mental skills, you name it). And don't worry, I will gather encyclopedic knowledge, but this time, not so much by memorizing as by doing. Books are good way to learn, but only in supplement to practical training. And of course, a good and experienced mentor who is guiding that process is also critical. It looks like we have a triangle; at one corner is practical learning, on second theory (books) and finally mentor on third. I have a good sense that the Renaissance knew that. The greatest masters of that time; Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Vasari, Galileo and many others gained that knowledge with practical work under the careful and caring eyes of the master. If they entered the workshop at 10 or 12, they were masters themselves by the age of 18 or 20 (todays graduates are beginners at 22). And guess what; they were all rebellious in spirit too. But the Medici, who payed for everything, were smart enough to see beyond attitude - they saw and nurtured the talent! And that is how they calmed them down!

References and further reading/watching/listening:
Ivan Illich - Deschooling society
John Gatto: Dumbing us down
Jeff Hawkins: On Intelligence (find him also at TED Talks)
This talk by Ken Robinson
RSA animated talk by Ken Robinson (find him also at TED Talks)
Also all of the books by Ken Robinson... please read them all!
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (or anything else by him... it is all brilliant)
Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational - find him at TED too
Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism)
a lot of stuff at Wikipedia, Google, and so on... I heard a lot of that in person during lectures or interviews... to many to name them all.

This is a short slideshow I did for the opening of my Siddharta exhibition in Ljubljana. I will report on the event (or you can see it on my facebook profile), but for now, here is the video... I recommend full screen. ^.^

If somebody spoke 50 years ago about cross-ocean collaboration, touch screens, user generated content and other things we take for granted in 2011, they would consider him a mental patient. Today we live in this world. When one looks at the iPhone or innovations presented at tech conferences it is hard not to think about science fiction coming true, even though the most significant features of todays world (internet, laptops, mobile phones) were not actually foreshadowed by sci-fi writers. At least not to my knowing. It is kinda amazing, that most of sci-fi is concerned with big-time stuff, like space stations, flying cars or time traveling. There is some element of wishful thinking in that, I'm sure.

But that is not what I wanted to write about. What I am really happy about is being a part of is this global Internet community. Wherever people have access to personal computing device, they can log on and meet around the globe. In best cases they can collaborate, work together and share ideas. This offers a much better chance of meeting somebody of your own interests, tastes and creative wisdom. Clay Shirky writes about that in his book Here Comes Everybody.

In this regard I am proud to say that things are actually working very well in praxis, not just in theory. I bet many of Opera fans are familiar with Violetisha, a big Opera enthusiast who made a lot for this community and my.opera in general. This time she did something awesome for me too; she redesigned my blog. I always wanted something 'wider' (perhaps for high-res photos) or cleaner for reading. She made it true and just look how awesome it looks.

Yes, it is a great thing to live in the future.

The mobile 365 project is finally finished. I cannot tell you how much I learned (I will probably write a dedicated blog post about it)... Since I had no founds to print a book, I decided to make a movie-animation instead. Here it is.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

So far my talks and writings were mostly concerned with the lack of creativity and unsupportive environment in schools. I would now like to make a wider argument in a series of articles in which I want to describe how I understand creativity at this point, and what it is needed to achieve it. Today's blog post is about what I find the most important:

A Clear, Focused and Uncluttered Mind.

It's been said somewhere that we receive more information in a week than an average person in 18th century would consume in his entire life. Even if this is only half-true, it is still somewhat of a trouble, not because of the sheer amount of it (your brain can handle even more), because most of that information is pure rubbish. In physical terms; it is not a signal, it is simply noise!

"Journalism," as a market expert Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, "may be the greatest plague we face today" (Taleb, p. 39). The reason is that journalism is more on the side of the entertainment than real reporting. Over the decade they made huge alarms about mad cow's disease, anthrax, terrorists and similar things, while only few people actually suffered. The amount of attention dedicated to those problems is disproportional to the actual size of the problem. Meanwhile malnutrition in Africa is getting less and less attention. Hungry black kids simply don't sell adds anymore. Or try to remember when was the last time heart attacks, which kill more people than all of those threats (including terrorism) combined, made big headlines... It is not about reporting, it is about keeping you in a state unease.

“It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.” - Jerry Seinfeld


But what is really important for this argument is the amount of noise media outlets produce. News are FULL of events every day (not all of them are that big, but almost all of them are unimportant). Think about it: it is not like another Google is founded every day. The really big events (the ones that matter) happen very rarely, but the paper needs headlines every day. So they make headlines out of small bulshit events. A a result, they produce noise in a pure physical term. Just think how much time you waste watching, reading and contemplating trivial daily news that have absolutely no relevance to your life, thinking that they actually do. In what way is your life affected by a random murder in the next town, unless you are scientifically (law, forensics..) or personally involved? In what way is your life affected by the results of sports' competitions on another continent? And why the hell should you waste your time thinking about what is going on with Brangelina!? There is a lot of unnecessary psychological stress waiting for you in everyday news (of which you might not be even aware of, many people take it for granted, they even love it); you worry about things that have nothing to do with you or can't do anything about. It is a waste of time, energy and more importantly; your attention. There are people and things around you to which that attention should be addressed.

"Oh," you might say, "but news helps me to understand the world and predict (my) future." No it doesn't! It is exactly the opposite. News is just the noise which clutters your vision. You are so close to the mosaic, that you don't see the real picture, not even the individual 'pixels' - you see the dust that is collected on them.

"It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spent 'studying' the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world. // ...people often think that it will surely be the next batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of things." - Taleb, p. 61

But should the argument rest on wasting time only, then watching TV and reading newspapers would still be justified as entertainment. But the damage which exposure to the media noise does to your brain is so significant, that it is best to put wax in your ears and avoid any contact with news whatsoever. It is not just the time you spend consuming the news, it is also the time that noise stays in your head and dominates your thoughts.

"Finally, I reckon that I am not immune to such an emotional defect. But I deal with it by having no access to information, except in rare circumstances. Again, I prefer to read poetry. If an event is important enough, it will find its way to my ears." (Taleb, p.67)

So the void of information should then be replaced by reading poetry, novels, good books, watching paintings or photographs, pondering design or technical innovation or just by admiring the beauty of the nature. Just how much of that do we miss because we are too occupied by nonsense. The general awareness (in a buddhist sense) should rise as a very good side effect.
The second positive side effect is something that was taken for granted in renaissance, but it is now very rare; being interested in a lot of things. It was scientifically proven, that people who are knowledgeable in more than one in more than one field, produce more and better ideas... (Burt, 2003)

By not thinking about noise, your brain has now more time and space to think about things that actually matter. It is very well known, that most ideas don't come when you work in a lab or studio - people get ideas while driving a car or during a shower. An that is when most people think about noise instead of something that actually holds a value. Every creative man or woman you can name didn't achieve his or hers achievements by reading and worrying about what was on the TV or in the news. All of them were deeply involved with their projects instead.

When I talk about these things, many people think I want them to ponder difficult questions of nuclear physics or Shakespeare when they are having leisure time. That would be nice, of course, but it is not necessary. It is enough to think about how beautiful is the tree over the street or to think how deep could the sea is by the place of your last vacation... anything, but the noise.



Main references: Taleb, Nicholas Nassim: Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and Markets, Penguin Books, 2004
Burt, Ronald S: Social Origin of Good Ideas, University of Chicago, 2003 (PDF)

Try to close your eyes for a minute and remember the first time you were really in love. I mean, REALLY in love. Deeply. You feel like out of your mind, like a whole new universe came into existence within you. And you want to share it with someone so you rush to your best friend and explain how you feel. "It feels like my chest is going to explode... it hurts and yet it is so sweet..." And so on. Your friend is perplexed and doesn't have a clue of what you are saying. At the same time you (for the first time in your life) find out how poor is our language when it comes to describing intangible things, such as emotions, ideas and concepts. It is a narrow band indeed.

Suppose the next day you hear a love song on the radio. Or you stumble upon a beautiful poem and it finally snaps. "The person who wrote this feels exactly the same as I do." The very same words of the very same language suddenly give you a feeling of connection. Yet those are not just any words. They are carefully crafted together to make the very best of that narrow band of communication that is between you and the author.

So it is not about the words, it is about how those words are put together, and that is poetry. It does not have to be just poetry; even in painting there is a limited size of canvas and limited spectrum of colors. In music you are limited by the possibilities of sound and acoustics. And everywhere you are limited by the recipients attention. The band of communication is always very narrow and the need to master it is critical. Whatever theory you are studying, it could be musical, photographic, artistic (...), it is always about mastering that narrow band. How to put words together that they will convey the emotions I have now in an other person? How to make a photograph that will vividly depict the sensation of this horse running towards me even to the people who were not on this field with me? How to paint a picture that will spur the same amazement in the viewer as I feel now? How to shoot a story that I feel deeply about so that other people will find it important too.

It is not limited to emotions. It can be just a philosophical revelation, or even a scientific idea or a concept. It always starts with something very intangible which has to take a physical form in order for the other person to consume it. And the band remains narrow, so you have to master it. But deep below there is a motivation to connect with other people and we try to use whatever means we have. That is why we have so many different modes of expression, from painting to dance and from literature to music. We all want to connect and share our inner worlds.

Finally I have managed to read this book which is epic for several well known reasons:
- it advocates gene-centered view of evolution which I find fairly convincing (enough to make me rethink my knowledge on that topic),
- it does so by sharp logical reasoning that is a signature of all Dawkins' books. The text could almost be translated (back) to mathematical equations. No doubt, Dawkins ran many simulations on his computer while constructing this argument,
- it uses principles of game theory to explain what goes really on in evolution,
- it is the book that first widely introduced the analogy between genes and memes; even better - it is the book that introduced the very word of meme if not the whole concept itself.

But two things stroke me.

Reading about animals' behavior I am left with an impression that humans didn't really evolve that far onto the evolutionary scale as we might think. Theoretical, experimental and observational examples exhibit a very complex behavior patterns that resemble our own species indeed. We might have developed a huge cortex to solve equations and compose music, but our social behavior isn't that different from any other particular animal.

And secondly; in face of all conspiracy theorists, Dawkins' models of simulated game theory show, that you don't need conspiracy of (a rich) elite to act as it acts. Lions have never had a meeting on which they agreed not to eat each other. Each of them behaves in a fashion that maximizes the prosperity of his genes and that includes not eating fellow lions. Theoretical lions that did not have a gene for that strategy had a tendency to eat each other, presumably before they could make babies which would also eat each other. Their genes didn't generate behavior that would be evolutionary stable, so they died out in the process. Lions that are left today are the survivors. I am really glad to find a prominent book that (mathematically) proved what I have known for a while; in most cases there is no conspiracy going on because there is no need for it. Things work out for themselves if every member of the group takes care for his own selfish interest (under certain rules of the game they/we play everyday).

I strongly recommend reading.

During the time in whch I neglected this blog, I did quite a lot of reading and educational watching. I watched the entire series of Justice class from Harvard, and I really liked this episode where they discuss the price that can be put on a human life.

I also read this book that Chase Jarvis recommended.

But enough about my academic pursuits.

What I realized more vividly than ever is that even intangible things must sometimes be tagged with a price in Euros. Which often sucks.

As a photographer I must attach a price tag to my photographs or my work in general. More often than not, I make critical errors in judgment, but not in my favor. I usually charge far too less. I tend to forget what I invested in my self and I also forget what I bring to the table. And I think I am not alone in this. It is a general thing among artists, not just photographers, but also painters, illustrators, writers, movie makers, musicians... etc.

It would be too easy to blame it on society, even though it plays its part too. The value that creative work has is often intangible and hard to defend financially, so people tend to diminish it in negotiations with the artist. They often do it on the basis of time ("You did it in one day..." "I don't earn so much in 3 hours..." etc) or material costs ("You only used this much of color"). You hear it everyday...




Yesterday a society of photographers in Slovenia called Enoooki (one-eyed) distrubuted an edition of our biggest daily newspaper Delo - but without photographs. It becomes very clear what the value of a photograph is, once you miss one.

Think of your wedding/graduation/family/whateveryoulike photograph(s). How much would you pay to get them back if someone stole it from you? That's the price!

There are many ways of how to define creativity and its finest results. It probably depends on how you look at it, but I like the idea that each creative output is a product of motivation, skill and taste. Motivation keeps you going, it makes you (wanna) do stuff and it is pretty clear that without the motivation any creativity is nonexistent. Then you must have skills. You must know your devices as well as you possibly can. Despite the obvious talent, it would be impossible for Elton John to compose a song without mastering the piano. Or Michelangelo to sculpt something like David without being really good with stone. This is why every art form calls for constant and fanatic practice.

A lot of people are motivated. They desperately want to do art or science. Some of them learn the skills. But very few have the taste to know in which direction aim their creativity. Taste can be understood as a set of values that guide you trough the process of creation. Even in most trivial of situations you can spot the lack of taste immediately. There are many people who clearly have enough clothes, but they combine them in the wrong way. It is not the lack of clothes that makes them look like clowns, it is the lack of taste. It is the lack of taste to blame that many technically good painters never go beyond what it is sold on the beaches or postcards. It is the same for photography. They are motivated, they have the technical skill, but they don't know what is really good so they aim too low.

So how to acquire a good taste? In my experience this happens with constant criticism. You must put your work under the scrutiny of yourself and others. You might get hurt, but that is a good thing. Bad feelings fade away, the lesson remains. You must also see and judge as many other works as you possibly can (this doesn't necessarily involve informing your peer about the opinion). If you are an architect you should devote at least some part of your every day to review other architects' work. When I was a freshman, a very dear very professor said: "A day without looking at an architectural magazine is a lost day." Today I know how right he was. By looking at magazines you develop a clear taste of what is good and what is not. You later apply that taste to your own work. Without the taste your motivation and skills are simply misguided into wrong directions. And this goes not just for design or arts, it is true for every activity. Because of that many good works of art are very simple and resourceful. You don't need a huge budget to create something original. You don't need many resources. But you need a good taste for it.