From: Osher Doctorow [log in to unmask], Thurs. March 21, 2002 11:32AM
I want to thank the *pest* who keeps sending me email with a rhyme about the
dangers of generalizing beyond statistics (and no other comment) for
inspiring me to write this.
As a member of over 350 internet forums and discussion groups, I find that
Ingenious as well as Non-Ingenious Imitators (imitators for short) tend to
almost always be interested in WHAT, while Creative Geniuses and Creative
Non-Geniuses (creative people for short) tend to be almost always interested
in WHY although with some at least minimum interest in WHAT. I hasten to
add that the vast majority of people in both quantitative and verbal fields
appear to be imitators, and this is not a totally disparaging remark because
imitation seems to be a necessary stage before creativity. However, the
vast majority of imitators never become creative or do so only once or twice
in their lives (more or less).
Why is it so difficult to become creative, for example in Statistics? In
my opinion, it is for a rather simple reason, it is difficult to go against
the vast majority of people in doing anything. One loses economic and
financial benefits, friends, social relationships, power, and on and on by
doing that. Neither peer review in Publish or Perish nor Nobel Prize levels
in science are exceptions. In fact, there is no Nobel Prize in
mathematics/statistics. The original Nobel who established the prize was
interested in chemistry and engineering (he invented dynamite), not
mathematics as a discipline. Peer reviewers tend to mostly be imitators
too. They imitate the current trend usually, go by what the majority of
people in their journal are interested in or believe, and certainly almost
never go around seeking non-mainstream views and exceptional views.
Imitators tend to be non-interdisciplinary, non-open-minded, not to search
for non-mainstream or exceptional ideas, not to change their own ideas.
Powerful people in or out of academia or government or corporations need to
understand the vast majority of people (imitators) much more than the
minority of creative people, and so tend to be imitators themselves.
Osher Doctorow
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