Understanding onset of hot streaks in artistic, cultural and scientific careers | Hacker News Reader

Understanding onset of hot streaks in artistic, cultural and scientific careers

nature.com

51 pointsbookofjoe9 comments

Some relevant quotes:

""" Building on recent advances in computer vision we use a transfer-learning approach to construct an embedding for artworks using deep neural networks. We generate a 200-dimensional embedding of each artwork and identify art styles through clusters on the 200-dimensional embedding space, allowing us to trace the evolution of art styles over the course of their careers """

""" We find that when exploitation occurs by itself, not preceded by exploration, the chance that such episodes coincide with a hot streak is significantly lower than expected, not higher, across all three domains. """

""" ... we find that when the episode of exploration is not followed by exploitation, the chance for such exploration to coincide with a hot streak again reduces significantly. """

"Hot hands are a myth," said a statician, who then spent 200 pages redefining what it meant, until it existed.

This is one of those things that keep getting quoted but it really shows the difference between someone in academia and people who use the term in practice. As you say, the "hot hand" is only a myth when you get to redefine the meaning.

It is amazing looking at a stat sheet from when you felt amazing versus when you felt like crap or even average. It is basically the sports equivalent of a programmer being in the zone.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/07/09/hey-guess-... is interesting.

As you zoom out, the universe becomes homogeneous; yet here we are, not average in any right.

Quite a clever approach to quantifying and collecting evidence for a fairly intuitive hypothesis.

> We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak.

"Intuitive" is putting it mildly...

Many artists including myself struggle with never ending exploration and producing large body of work ending "in the drawer". While exploitation step is obvious when to initiate and how long to sustain it is less so.

Agreed it's intuitive, but also this research provides (for me at least) more support that this type of "problem space exploration" is not necessarily procrastination, but it's instead a key and necessary component in creative productivity.

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