Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull Amy Wallace
Author:Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace [Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-04-07T22:00:00+00:00
One mathematical concept that everybody understands (though they may not know the name for it) is linearity—the idea that things proceed along the same course or repeat themselves in predictable ways. The rhythm of the day or the year is always the same—it’s a repetitive cycle. The sun comes up. The sun goes down. Monday is followed by Tuesday. February is cold, August is warm. None of that feels like change—or, at least, it feels like predictable, understandable change. It is linear, and that is comforting.
A slightly less obvious concept is that of the bell curve, although most of us have an intuitive sense of what it means. In school we are sometimes graded on the bell curve—with a few people getting poor grades, a few getting excellent grades, and the rest bunched in the middle. If you plotted these test results on a graph, putting the scores on one axis and the number of people who received them on the other, the result is shaped like a bell. Human height works the same way, with most adults between five feet and six feet tall, and fewer numbers on either extreme. Professionals such as doctors or plumbers also have a similar distribution in their abilities—some are extraordinary, and some you wouldn’t trust to tie your shoes. But most exist in the range between excellent and bumbling.
We are quite adept at working with repeatable events and at understanding bell-shaped variance. However, since we aren’t good at modeling random events, we tend to use the mental facilities that we are good at and apply them to our view of the world, even when such an application is demonstrably wrong. Randomness, for example, doesn’t occur in a linear fashion. For one thing, random processes do not evolve only in one way; by definition, they are indeterminate. So how do we develop ways of understanding randomness? By which I mean: How can we think clearly about unexpected events that are lurking out there that don’t fit any of our existing models?
There is a third concept, also from the world of mathematics, that can help: stochastic self-similarity. Stochastic simply means random or chance; self-similarity describes the phenomenon—found in everything from stock market fluctuations to seismic activity to rainfall—of patterns that look the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification. If you break off a branch of a tree and hold that branch upright, for example, it looks a lot like a little tree. A stretch of coastline has that craggy coastline shape whether it is glimpsed from a hang glider or from outer space. Look at a tiny section of a snowflake under a microscope, and it will resemble a miniature version of the whole. This phenomenon occurs all the time in nature—in cloud formations, in the human circulatory system, in mountain ranges, in the way fern fronds are shaped.
But how does stochastic self-similarity relate to human experience?
We face hundreds of challenges, every day, in our lives. The majority hardly qualify as challenges at
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