True Or False: Creativity Is A More Powerful Force Than Intelligence

Settling a high school debate topic

When I did high school debate, centuries ago, the first topic I ever debated was about whether the U.S. should impose price controls on the pharmaceutical industry. I first discovered Scott Alexander through his excellent article on the subject, and found it refreshingly well-written compared to most of what was written on the subject (though for some reason I thought his name was Lloyd Alexander).

Then I proceeded to forget about his blog for like two years, until eventually I rediscovered it at the urging of a friend and became the ACX superfan I am today.

So, in the interest of keeping the tradition of bloggers writing about debate topics alive, I thought I’d weigh in on one of the current debate topics. Unfortunately, one of them was about the UN convention on the laws of the sea, which seemed very boring, and the other was about whether Somaliland should be allowed to join the African union, which also seemed incredibly boring. The only remaining topic was: “Resolved: Creativity is a more powerful force than intelligence.” Now, I think this is a pretty lame topic, but it will have to do.

In debate there’s one team that argues for the motion and another team that argues against the motion. So, there’s one team that argues that creativity is a more powerful force than intelligence and another that argues that it’s not the case that creativity is a more powerful force than intelligence.

I suspect that this motion is false—the negation is right. I have three basic arguments for this.

(In the off chance that any debater comes across this and decides to cite it, this is who I am).

First—and I know this sounds sort of nitpicky—I don’t know that creativity is a force. When one calls it a force, it seems they’re only speaking poetically, rather than literally. If one surveys all the dictionary definitions of a force, they get things like:

physical, especially violent, strength or power:

in scientific use, (a measure of) the influence that changes movement:

None of these are met by creativity. And in ordinary language, it would be weird to say “creativity is a force.” It can’t be that anything with any influence is a force—the sun has great influence, but the sun is not a force.

Now, if creativity is not a force, then the resolution is false. If, for instance, one were to say “creativity is a bigger elephant than intelligence,” well, that would just be false, because creativity is not an elephant. Similarly, if creativity isn’t a force, then statements about creativity being a more powerful force than something else are necessarily false.

You might object that we often make statements about the force of things. For instance, we might say “she’s a force to be reckoned with,” or “she’s a force of nature.” But here, I think, we’re speaking non-literally. When you say someone is a force to be reckoned with, they’re not actually a force. Rather, it’s just a loose way of talking.

It’s a bit like if you say “many people are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.” That’s strictly false. No people are buried in Arlington national cemetery. Corpses are buried there, but corpses aren’t people on every view of personal identity. Similarly, a person might loosely say “everyone knew Hillary Clinton was going to win.” Obviously you can’t know something false, but this is just a loose way of referring to strong belief.

Thus, I think the resolution can’t be true because intelligence isn’t a force. It’s like saying “Donald Trump is a better octopus than Hillary Clinton.” Seeing as he is not an octopus, he cannot be a better one than anyone!

But even if it turns out that intelligence is a force, I suspect the resolution is still likely false. Ask yourself which is a more powerful force between the following:

• Human nature and pride?

• Folly and bravery?

• Progress and evolution?

• Perfectionism and U.S. interventionism?

In each case, it seems odd to describe one as a more powerful force than the other. If forces have differing degrees of power, the degree of power that something has is largely vague. Just like (unless we’re epistemicists) there’s no fact of the matter about how tall one has to be to be tall or how many hairs one has to have to be hairy, it seems like there just isn’t a fact of the matter in most cases about how powerful two forces of very different kinds are.

But if the power of a force is vague, then it’s false that one force is more powerful than another, barring exceptional circumstances. If there aren’t facts about the extent of something’s force, then it will typically be false that it has more force than another thing. For instance, if there is no fact of the matter of about how creative one is, then it would seem false that, say, Tolkien is more creative than George R. R. Martin.

(I also suspect that, because the universe is infinite, both forces will be infinitely powerful, and thus neither is more powerful than the other, but this is a very weird argument, and while I think it’s technically right, it’s not really what people are wondering about when they ask which is more powerful).

Okay, but suppose you don’t buy either of these things. I still think that probably the negative is right. This is because creativity is a kind of intelligence but intelligence is not a kind of creativity. Thus, intelligence has strictly greater force than creativity, for the same reason that all the nuclear weapons in the world have more force than just the nuclear weapons in America. If A is a part of B, and parts of B other than A have some force, then B has more force than A.

But clearly, creativity is a kind of intelligence. Imagine a being possessing no intelligence at all. Would it be able to be creative? No, of course not! If a being has an IQ of zero, of course it couldn’t be creative. Only by being smart can one be creative. There’s a reason that oysters do not do art.

But not all intelligence is creativity. The ability to remember past situations involves intelligence, but it doesn’t require creativity. Many kinds of basic problem solving don’t require being creative, but just knowing stuff. AI is pretty intelligent, but it’s not creative: it’s just pattern matching.

I read over the brief that summarizes the main arguments on both sides, and found the arguments for creativity being more important pretty unimpressive. They involved saying things like “creativity drives innovation,” “employers want creative employees,” and “creativity allows us to synthesize information.” All true, of course, but the topic is about which is more important in the aggregate, rather than which one is better to have a little bit extra of. Try innovating or being an employee with an intelligence level of literally zero.

The other arguments were even worse. For example, one of the arguments was that “intelligence tests are perfect and prone to errors.” Now, obviously they’re imperfect—what isn’t imperfect?—but they are highly reliable indicators of lifetime success. More importantly, the topic asks about the importance of intelligence, not the importance of being able to join MENSA—intelligence could be very important even if we’re bad at measuring it. Analogously, being a terrorist is a pretty powerful “force” for bad, even though we’re generally not that great at telling who is a terrorist.

Another argument was that “creativity is the highest form of intelligence.” If this is right, then creativity is strictly less important than intelligence. Remember the earlier principle: if A is a proper subset of B then B is more important than A (that means A is a part of B—e.g. if I have a dozen eggs, three of the eggs make up a proper subset). If creativity is the best kind of intelligence, then creativity would be strictly less important than intelligence, just like the best swimmers only have a less great aggregate effect than all swimmers. Obviously swimming at an Olympic level is the highest form of swimming, but swimming total is a more powerful “force” than swimming only at the Olympic level.

So there you have it! I think, for the first two reasons I gave, the topic is probably false but for not very interesting reasons. The third reason is the most interesting, but still not very. Ultimately, I think this is a poorly written topic that will either involve strange global comparisons of the total quantity of change brought about by creativity and intelligence—something that likely depends on definitions—or will devolve mostly to semantics. Obviously creativity is very important, but probably it’s just a proper subset of intelligence, and therefore intelligence is necessarily strictly more important.