> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
I wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
It wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly
Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
Obits are among my idea-stirring hacks. Some thoughts on why they work, and some similar ones.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
Goddang, it’s not like they’re giving medical advice or anything, it’s simply about being exposed to novel concepts and ideas, which fosters creativity. You don’t really need “evidence” for this, but even if somehow it’s wrong and reading obituaries either somehow does not increase or decreases creativity, is not like there’s harm in saying “Hey, try reading some obituaries, you might learn some interesting stuff”
But that's not what they're saying. They're claiming it's a creativity hack, not that you might learn some interesting stuff. That's the entire thesis of the post... which isn't backed up at all.
Does there exist anything related to creativity that is backed up with clear data? This article is as convincing as anything else I’ve ever read about increasing creativity.
It depends on how you define creativity probably, but a few scientific examples:
1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.
2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.
> Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure were most effective (gs = 0.66), while the use of cognitive manipulation drugs was least and also non-effective, g = 0.10. The type of training material was also important. For instance, figural methods were more effective in enhancing creativity, and enhancing converging thinking was more effective than enhancing divergent thinking.
There's lots of legitimate research related to creativity which could be discussed: the existence of the 'incubation effect' and sleep effects, the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work*, the 'near adjacent', the 'equal-odds rule', the benefits of cognitive/ideological diversity (and lack of benefits of certain other kinds of diversity), the correlation with intelligence and personality traits like Openness...
As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).
Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.
I don't think anyone is asking for a double-blind study conducted by accredited scientists from multiple leading institutions on a sample of a quarter-million people across decades getting published on the front page of Science here.
We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.
As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.
Completely agreed. It's just irresponsibly bad writing to claim "this can boost your creativity!" without even a single example of how it has boosted yours or someone else's. I don't need a scientific study, but surely you can give at least a single anecdotal example? Because if you can't, you honestly shouldn't be writing this in the first place.
If it helps them, that seems sufficient reason to share what works for them. I'd say that a more kind critique would be that their advice could be expanded to: "Read anything" in order to get creativity going. But gatekeeping advice unless they can cite "major creativity" that came from it seems harsh.
When they claim up front that it's a "creativity hack", yes I expect would expect them to back it up. That's not gatekeeping or harsh, it's literally the one job of an article to back up its claim.
I think its hardly that much of an interesting idea. Reading wide ofcourse is useful and interesting. But I doubt reading obituaries are the best way to go about that.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
I like obits as much as the next person, maybe more. But the premise of the piece very much depends on a particular definition of creativity; and then tries, and fails, to extend it to reading obits. If it's defined as something novel, then a priori it can't be obvious and therefore is likely to be an association between distant concepts - a statement of the obvious. Mednick might be right; but an extrapolation to obits, as in the original piece, is unjustified, and definitely unproven. Velcro wasn't invented because someone read an obit; it's good, impressive, but just regular creativity. Gentner posits an obvious truism, but its relationship to obits is tenuous at best, again unjustified, and just probably wrong.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
I have a lifelong friend who is a very successful investor and who has been habitually reading obits since his high school days. I recall his explaining that obits served as an opportunity radar.
Whenever I see a "X has died" subject on the front page of HN, I invoke a personal rule that if I haven't heard of the person, I skip it. You dying shouldn't be what gets my attention.
Of course, there are long dead historic figures that we know about. But being dead is rarely the very first thing you learn about them.
My father unexpectedly passed away a few years ago so this stuff is especially close to my heart.
I’ve learned a lot from lives of others so think this is wonderful advice for finding gems and remembering the normal goodness that exists in this world.
> one popular piece of advice for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day. But here’s the catch: This only works if that new information is very different from what’s already in your head.
This is a good distinction.
I make it a point to hang with folks from vastly different backgrounds from me.
I can get some very good (and bad) ideas from them.
i like this advice. when trying to come up with new characters for fiction its very difficult to come up with something you don't already know but with this you have real people with their entire life story summarized for free.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
When in doing genealogy, I tend to save obituaries in archive.org and archive.ph and sometimes paste the content into the wikitree profile.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
The bigger danger is that all obituaries will be written by an AI.
Non famous obituaries are written by family members or friends. It's possible they'll use AI to clean up the wording
Obits should intentionally be committed to the Internet Archive for longevity and preservation, but I digress.
The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
I wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
Timestamping services that use digital signatures solve this, basically.
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
It wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly
Even the popular vote was the biggest landslide in ... the last 8 elections I think?
> Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics.
However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
You didn’t, the (grandparent)post you replied to did.
[flagged]
> Trump won by an extremely narrow margin
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
Which domain? I'll send it to archive.org using ArchiveBot.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
That's cool, but doesn't it have the same problem? When you die or decide to stop paying, the website dies too.
Archive.org
People are going to be surprised Pikachu when that goes down, either from poking the law bear or just because everything dies eventually.
Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
That is okay. People deserve the right to die.
But not the right to be forgotten.
Wdym
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
Obits are among my idea-stirring hacks. Some thoughts on why they work, and some similar ones.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/>
An old Russian joke:
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
This joke has its origins in the days when Soviet leadership was a series of men in their seventies who kept dying on the job.
It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.
There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.
All I ask for are leaders born in the 1950s
We just had a chance at one born in the 1960s. People decided that they wanted someone born in the 1940s.
It refers specifically to Stalin.
And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.
What's old is new again.
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
Goddang, it’s not like they’re giving medical advice or anything, it’s simply about being exposed to novel concepts and ideas, which fosters creativity. You don’t really need “evidence” for this, but even if somehow it’s wrong and reading obituaries either somehow does not increase or decreases creativity, is not like there’s harm in saying “Hey, try reading some obituaries, you might learn some interesting stuff”
But that's not what they're saying. They're claiming it's a creativity hack, not that you might learn some interesting stuff. That's the entire thesis of the post... which isn't backed up at all.
Does there exist anything related to creativity that is backed up with clear data? This article is as convincing as anything else I’ve ever read about increasing creativity.
It depends on how you define creativity probably, but a few scientific examples:
1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.
2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem
> Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure were most effective (gs = 0.66), while the use of cognitive manipulation drugs was least and also non-effective, g = 0.10. The type of training material was also important. For instance, figural methods were more effective in enhancing creativity, and enhancing converging thinking was more effective than enhancing divergent thinking.
from https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/items/a8357c0b-1e41-4eff-8ad1-fe3b...
reading the obits might fall under "cultural exposure".
There's lots of legitimate research related to creativity which could be discussed: the existence of the 'incubation effect' and sleep effects, the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work*, the 'near adjacent', the 'equal-odds rule', the benefits of cognitive/ideological diversity (and lack of benefits of certain other kinds of diversity), the correlation with intelligence and personality traits like Openness...
As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).
Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.
* One of Sawyer's research topics, as it happens.
What was the groundbreaking creative that came out of this?
I don't think anyone is asking for a double-blind study conducted by accredited scientists from multiple leading institutions on a sample of a quarter-million people across decades getting published on the front page of Science here.
We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.
As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.
Completely agreed. It's just irresponsibly bad writing to claim "this can boost your creativity!" without even a single example of how it has boosted yours or someone else's. I don't need a scientific study, but surely you can give at least a single anecdotal example? Because if you can't, you honestly shouldn't be writing this in the first place.
If it helps them, that seems sufficient reason to share what works for them. I'd say that a more kind critique would be that their advice could be expanded to: "Read anything" in order to get creativity going. But gatekeeping advice unless they can cite "major creativity" that came from it seems harsh.
When they claim up front that it's a "creativity hack", yes I expect would expect them to back it up. That's not gatekeeping or harsh, it's literally the one job of an article to back up its claim.
deeply ironic counsel coming from a guy that has produced reams and reams of unfiltered blather...
Huh?
Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln
I think its hardly that much of an interesting idea. Reading wide ofcourse is useful and interesting. But I doubt reading obituaries are the best way to go about that.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
What a great website fivebooks is! But as you say, you need to make an effort to find something different on there. A randomiser might be good there.
I like obits as much as the next person, maybe more. But the premise of the piece very much depends on a particular definition of creativity; and then tries, and fails, to extend it to reading obits. If it's defined as something novel, then a priori it can't be obvious and therefore is likely to be an association between distant concepts - a statement of the obvious. Mednick might be right; but an extrapolation to obits, as in the original piece, is unjustified, and definitely unproven. Velcro wasn't invented because someone read an obit; it's good, impressive, but just regular creativity. Gentner posits an obvious truism, but its relationship to obits is tenuous at best, again unjustified, and just probably wrong.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
I have a lifelong friend who is a very successful investor and who has been habitually reading obits since his high school days. I recall his explaining that obits served as an opportunity radar.
Can you elaborate on how? Besides the obvious of seeking out a bereaved family member and purchasing their home/belongings on the cheap, of course
You can also look for companies with leadership transition.
Whenever I see a "X has died" subject on the front page of HN, I invoke a personal rule that if I haven't heard of the person, I skip it. You dying shouldn't be what gets my attention.
Of course, there are long dead historic figures that we know about. But being dead is rarely the very first thing you learn about them.
Related, new era obits and celebrations (I am affiliated): https://www.chptr.com/
My father unexpectedly passed away a few years ago so this stuff is especially close to my heart.
I’ve learned a lot from lives of others so think this is wonderful advice for finding gems and remembering the normal goodness that exists in this world.
> one popular piece of advice for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day. But here’s the catch: This only works if that new information is very different from what’s already in your head.
This is a good distinction.
I make it a point to hang with folks from vastly different backgrounds from me.
I can get some very good (and bad) ideas from them.
The Economist obits are especially worth reading.
I think this is my favourite:
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2009/08/13/benson
https://archive.ph/9tM1P
damn, can't believe i outlived Benson
They are also available as part of their excellent (and free) The Intelligence podcast. Always worth a listen.
i like this advice. when trying to come up with new characters for fiction its very difficult to come up with something you don't already know but with this you have real people with their entire life story summarized for free.
There are biographies, of course.
One striking thing about reading biographies is that real people are seldom "chosen ones". That's a literature and movie trope.
Interestingly the second person listed has their own Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Garfinkle
such a simple, beautiful hack - using life stories from unexpected places to stretch your mind and spark creative leaps you’d never plan for.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
Max Planck
wouldn't biographies (or cliffs notes of biographies) be better?
The obituary they run in the back of The Economist is an excellent place to start.
Reading in the obits? Perfect for our TikTok attention span culture.
Back in the day, we would read a biography or at least the damn Wikipedia article.
There is an excellent documentary on behind-the-scenes workings of the obituary editorial team at NYT. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpMNerK9cU&pp=ygURT2JpdHMgZG9...
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