[zeptian]

These kind of studies are dubious. The PhD report could have been generated by an LLM in about a day, and no one would know any better.

It works like this:

Take any hypothesis. And have a lot of verbiage around it with dubious experiments to "statistically" validate it. and write a giant report which would eventually turn into a book.

Steve Pinker and his likes excel in this kind of stuff. Psychology/Sociology and sometimes economics are filled with these sorts of studies.

It is more persuation than science.

And one could could argue that science itself is a certain kind of persuation.

[jeffreyrogers]

Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, reveals your prejudice against social science, and could be copied and pasted anytime a non-rigorous subject comes up. I'm actually interested in criticisms of this work, but your comment doesn't even rise to that level.

[zeptian]

guilty as charged !

But Bohm's "On Creativity", to me presents a much deeper "philosophical" take on a) what is creativity and b) how to foster it. And I dont see it referenced in this text at all.

Again, since this is about persuation, it is what the reader wants to believe.

[creer]

There are (probably) several billion works on creativity. Just reading and listing your own sources of inspiration on creativity is quite the endheavor. And that is not going to be exhaustive even in a PhD thesis. I'll give leaway there - on the contrary, mine THEIR list for stuff I missed.

[zeptian]

fair take, but my view these days is the following.

there is way too much information-garbage floating around.

hence I try to stick to time-tested classics particularly when it comes to certain topics. now, your time-tested classic may be different from mine and certainly, i want to see if there are things I missed, and hence I mentioned Bohm's work, as something the author of this PhD missed.

[throwanem]

Comparative critique is far more persuasive than a series of baldly asserted and sweeping pejorations.

[ysofunny]

I found that the line "science is a certain kind of persuassion" quite informative. I was not aware of such a skeptical thread of thought near science

[zeptian]

End of the day, there are many belief systems that we human hold onto, but we need a method to settle opinion.

And science happens to be a certain kind of a method for settling opinion.

CS Peirce wrote about it so beautifully in his 1877 essay: "On the fixation of belief". go read it. here is a link saving you a google search. https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html

[jeffreyrogers]

The comment was edited after I commented, it was originally much less substantive, and is improved now.