PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

4. THE RISE AND FALL OF CREATIVITY
approach is valid, it should not be limited to geniuses. It is based on
natural and fundamental principles, and its applicability should be more
general. The difficulty with applying it to the ordinary person lies not
with first principles but rather with the inability to find the right variable
that justly describes one’s creativity or productivity. Ordinary people’s
output has not been measured, appraised, and quantified throughout
their lifetimes.
Finding the activity and defining the right variable are the most crucial
steps toward deriving one’s own natural-growth curve. Activities
that depend strongly on physical condition rarely cover the complete life
span. A woman’s life expectancy extends well beyond the completion
of the fertility curve that ends in the early forties. Likewise, the end of a
sports career rarely coincides with death. The exhaustion of an artist’s or
scientist’s creativity, however, often corroborates the approaching end.
The intellectual domain is therefore better suited for such an analysis
than the physical one. Chess matches, for example, are more appropriate
than boxing matches. Genuine creativity and productivity in one’s
area of interest, when systematically quantified and classified, may
serve as a good variable. A critical judgment of what constitutes creativity
or productivity is essential. It is on that issue that public recognition
or rewards are helpful. They provide objective criteria in defining the data
set.
It is also very important that the data are complete and bias–free.
There must be no gaps due to lost or forgotten events or contributions.
There must be no changes in definitions or procedures during data collection.
Using multiple sources, that is, two people collecting data on
different periods of one’s lifetime and combining the results later, may
introduce detrimental biases. It is safer to have both investigators cover
the whole lifetime and average their findings afterward.
Finally, the fitting procedure must be of the highest standards. Predicting
the final ceiling of an S-curve from a limited number of data
points may produce very different results among unsophisticated computer
programs (presumably no ordinary person will try to do this
without a computer). ∗ A rigorous Chi-square minimization technique,
∗ At the time if this edition a simple software program for use by non experts is available
from Growth Dynamics. For a demo visit the web site www.growth-dynamics.com
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