(2017-07-12) Pearson Boyd How Creativity Really Works

Taylor Pearson on The Truth about How Creativity Really Works. John Boyd was a fighter pilot..

The best starting point for understanding Boyd’s views on creativity and innovation is an essay called “Destruction and Creation.”

Boyd starts the essay by asserting that “the fundamental goal of humans is to improve their capacity for independent action.” (Agency)

Destruction is related to deduction, taking the big parts and breaking them down into constituent pieces. Creation is related to induction, synthesis, and integration. It’s taking the little bits and re-building them into a coherent whole. (Model)

In order to maintain a high capacity for independent action, you have to constantly destroy your existing conceptual system and resynthesize from the constituent parts.

an observer can never have a fully accurate conceptual system because the act of getting an accurate understanding necessarily shifts the reality being observed.

Boyd saw that the act of defining reality changes reality

You can rebuild these constituent parts into many different incoherent wholes, but a coherent and useful whole would be a snowmobile — treads from the tank, an outboard motor and skis from the boat, and handlebars from the bike. Snowmobiling, Boyd’s term, is how Creativity really happens. It is destructive deduction combined with creative synthesis.

Boyd believed that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem provided a solution