There is no Mystery to Creativity

Sean McClure
2 min readApr 23, 2024

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The idea that creativity is “mysterious” and allotted only to a special few, who have a knack for spotting “gaps” and “opportunities”, is pure fallacy.

It’s a classic example of getting the directionality of problem solving wrong.

Creators are great at filling gaps and creating opportunities *because* of their ignorance. Rather than studying the paradigm they embark naively into the industry.

This builds immense skill in “filling gaps” because the creator’s targets lack detailed (paradigmatic) information.

Without the constraints of detailed information dictating what one is “supposed” to do, the capacity for massive creativity is inevitable.

Nature solves complex problems by leveraging massive variation, with the *only* invariants (things unmoved) being *high-level* targets.

Everything else *must* be allowed to swirl, to move, to die.

The fairy tale that creators “spot gaps” better than others comes from the narrative that a knowledge foundation must precede the creation of something new. This is patently false.

Creating something new does NOT require knowledge, it requires movement and ignorance. Movement is what enables statistical sampling from the possibility space, while ignorance guarantees one’s targets remain unconstrained by the paradigm (undetailed).

Every 👏 single 👏 computational 👏 approach 👏 to solving 👏 complex 👏 problems 👏 uses 👏 the above 👏 process.

There are NO exceptions, anywhere in nature or the lab.

Stop looking for a recipe, and stop listening to “gurus.”

Your inexperience is a massive asset, that can destroy competitors.

Stop building foundations, and start moving.

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Sean McClure

Independent Scholar; Author of Discovered, Not Designed; Ph.D. Computational Chem; Builder of things; I study and write about science, philosophy, complexity.