>As I understand it, the core of creativity seems to be randomness, >the ability to take something unrelated and combine it with the >problem at hand, unfolding its consequences and potential, and >then more or less rationally evaluate it.
I that this might be an erroneous view that has been propagated mainly in popular psychological self-help books.
>From what I have read, it appears that creativity is not a mere random generation of novel ideas, followed by a critical evaluation. True creativity is rather connected to the ability to recognise *promisingness*. The creative genius is often able to zero in directly on the a few really promising ideas, while the less creatively talented person wastes his time exploring threads which almost never leads anywhere.
This is not to say that a creative person does not need to and try out many possibilities before he finds something that works. But it would be a big mistake for anybody to think that in order to become truely creative all you have to do is turn up the noise level in your brain or your tolerance to freeky ideas. The best way is rather to aquire the right sort of experties in the area you intend to work in, to have a tutor who has made some significant creative contribution to the field, and to make it a habit to think things out by yourself, (and to have the right genes of course).
See e.g. Bereiter & Scardamalia: Surpassing Ourselves, 199?
Nicholas Bostrom n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk