Channel Aesthetic Potential

A Personal (and Guided) Journey Through Kreb’s Cycle of Creativity (Part 1)-Science

As an aspiring Substack guy, I must answer foundational questions to develop as a creative to provide my readers with value, not just a standard A+ five-paragraph essay. How do I get to these foundational questions to develop the principles and disciplinary considerations to become this creative and ultimately create beauty? I need to get off my ass and write the comic books I should write.

Centaur Write Satyr, PhD.

is miles ahead on his own incredible work. Stay tuned for more for the Infinite Jest of our age.

To become a creative and create this beauty (and ensure it isn’t meandering), I love (and need) a model.

I first saw this image a few years ago at the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Singapore Art and Science Museum.

Ok, it was closer to this one.

It was actually 100% this one.

At the time I was in the dregs of a design mindset, curating problems without a desire to solve them. I admired this model solely as end in itself. This was an issue, because it would never evolved beyond lotus. My goal now is to turn this image into a creative compass, albeit an aesthetically pleasing one.

This isn’t crass utilitarianism. This is about purpose. Utility and purpose are distinct. Think Marie Kondo, not Jeremy Bentham. There’s a way to collaborate with The Giving Tree without skinning it alive ala the Utility Monster.

Five years ago I commissioned my tattoo artist to paint the key narcissistic leads in Adam Reed’s shows: Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo, and (well everyone knows) Archer.

Left to Right: Archer, Captain Murphy, and Xander Crews AKA “Awesome X”

Yes, this is brilliant and brings you joy as well, but let's not let that distract you.

When he handed it off to me, he said, “I’m hoping when you see this every day it brings you joy.” Maximum Marie Kondo, negative Jeremey Bentham. He didn’t reach and tell me that this painting will increase my productivity by 5% and my happiness by 15%. He stated it would bring me joy. “Well, how do you measure that?” asks the positivist? We will get to that.

Alright, back to Kreb’s Cycle of Creativity. “So why the navel gazing!?” you ask. Well here’s my appeal to my wizard-ing authority and mentor Alan Moore:

“To develop as a writer will almost certainly entail developing as a person. It

will be necessary to acquire a properly thought-through moral standpoint, and

perhaps an equally well reasoned political position from which to observe and

weigh the world that is being written about…the important thing is to have a moral

or political from which to look at the world and hopefully understand it.”

Kreb’s Creativity Cycle is a means for me (and ideally for you) to develop as a writer by answering foundational questions and continue to develop as a person.

Each week I will discuss one of the inter-cardinal and cardinal directions and arrive at conclusions that will inform my creativity.

We will start with Science in the NE quadrant of the figure:

Here is how Neri Oxman, the creator of Kreb’s Cycle, defines science. “Science is to explain and predict the world around us; it ‘converts’ information into knowledge.”

Well the Koof damaged the notion of “science” for me. Bad connotation now. Kinda stinky.

It showed me that one must nail conclusions in real time, not months or years after the fact. This is not just to be right for the sake of being right like some creep panicked about not being on the “right side of history”, but to ensure you won’t be tricked to put poison into your body. You must develop and and trust your own developed deductive reasoning and even the evolutionary inheritance of your instincts. They can be life savers.

Rampant manipulation of “objective” data during Koof time coupled with the with the screeching, illogical, and eventually ironic political formula of “trust the science” showed science is not necessarily a priori but at the mercy of those in power. For all these goddamn smart people and academics who have cited Foucault over a million times you think they would understand this. SMART criteria still matter, but they are limited.

Let's change this to “epistemology” or perhaps ”knowledge system" (even though I am IFL as much as the next guy) and more precisely, as cognitive success and cognitive failure.

Steve Patterson (one of the good libertarians and meta thought guy) is one of the stronger voices on the philosophy of science. In a podcast last year with Tom Woods (another of those good libertarians), Patterson discussed one of his central theses: “The 20th century was filled with really bad ideas that were articulated badly [and] that paradigms were established for political and social reasons… between 1880 and 1950.” This spanned traditionally STEM fields in addition to social science and humanities departments.

Why’d they stick? Well (1) inertia is a bitch and (2) these ideas supported and buttressed the power structure. Rothbard’s The Progressive Era is a must-read to understand the historical forces leading to the latter.

Patterson brought up a persuasive example via sports that I see as symptomatic of a wider issue in science: autistic positivism (i.e., ignoring all other variables and considerations to focus on a singularity).

Quick aside. I like sports. If you are one of those “Ooh Sportsball” guys, go home and make yourself a cocktail with everything underneath your sink as you explore your tedious reductionism.¹

Alright re-direct. Steve Patterson. Hot Hand theory.

Sports fans have a handle on sports. They understand the ebbs and flows and can sense the dread (e.g., Game 7 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals my fellow Kings Fans) or when an athlete is taking over a game. But experts will say this sense of the game it just them lying eyes of yours. The seminal 1985 study by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky analyzed shooting data and found that hit and miss sequences followed random distributions, with no evidence of streaks beyond chance. The “Hot Hand” illusion stems from fans, coaches, scouts, personnel departments, and players' cognitive biases like the gambler’s fallacy and pattern recognition errors. Again, your lying eyes. But wait; there’s more!

In 2018 a study from Miller and Sanjurjo (2018) demonstrated that the original study systematically underestimated streak-based performance and failed to account for selection bias. In addition, other academic studies argued that individual shooting tendencies and game dynamics were not fully considered (i.e., it was lazy single variant analysis AKA autistic positivism).

Also, NBA teams whose bottom line is success (not publish or perish) have embraced the full range of data collection and modern analytics to conduct multi-variate analysis and include variables such as layer tracking and shot difficulty to show you that “he’s on fire” exists.

Cool. We used Kung Fu to beat Kung Fu. But, did you need science to prove this? Do Christians need the Shroud of Turin to justify their faith? Or can you be trusted to draw a conclusion on your own absent of academic papers?

Now for my immediate scientific considerations to inform my writing and thinking:

-Unless it's mathematics, geometry, logic, or praxeology (i.e., a priori knowledge), I’m agnostic, not allergic, and open to other knowledge systems.

-Reason is not enough.

-The complexity problem is real. Variable isolation in real time is a tough nut to crack (see the beginning of The God that Failed for an accounting of this.

But these are my conclusions. What are yours? What are your basic epistemological considerations and how will this inform your writing, whether it is fiction or non-fiction?

Next week we will tackle Engineering.

1. OK, sometimes you have a point.