Easy to Recognize, Hard to Create

When asked what his definition of obscenity was, a Supreme Court Justice famously answered that he can't articulate one, but he knows it when he sees it.

This kind of asymmetric structure is quite common: where it is easier to recognize something (even if you don't understand why it is so) than to create it. Only the greatest musicians can create entirely new sounds, yet a layman could immediately recognize it as beautiful - even if they can't explain why. The greatest artists make a stroke, step back, and then recognize if it worked, without being able to explain why. Writing for a specific target audience is hard, but if you read it to someone you know who matches that target persona, then you intuitively know what needs to change. Writing an original joke is hard, finding one funny is not - even if you can't explain why. Christopher Alexander believed that the key to great architecture isn't grand planning, but to try patterns and see how they make you feel. It's hard to create the original pith of a viral Tweet, but if you read one you instantly know it qualifies. In Computer Science it is generally accepted that P ≠ NP, or that problems can be hard to solve and easy to verify.

Depending on the domain, the skill of recognizing good solutions is called intuition, taste, experience, good priors, tacit knowledge, or instinct. The skill of creating them is pure creativity.

These two, creation and recognition (also known as: variation and selection, conjecture and criticism, generate and discriminate, hypothesize and test etc), work in tandem, often as a feedback loop - so that the greatest creators are the ones who excel at both creativity and taste. In humans, both skills improve with practice, but taste is often a leading indicator for creativity. The size of this gap varies by domain.

Both skills improve as you run iterations of the feedback loop. Great artists often spend years copying others before they develop the nuanced taste to create something original of their own. You need to be disciplined in giving your intuition rational counter-examples, in order to improve it. If you trust your intuition when it's untrained or you aren't open to it updating with experience, then you are engaging in self-deception.

Fighting self-deception is the process of trying to be consciously aware of where your instincts come from, not to ignore them, but to be able to reject them when they are irrational so they can improve, and you can make better use of them in the future.