Ex-jazz musician: improv drives exploration and diversity of thought, classical drills don't
floguo · x · 2026-09-11
Writing as a former jazz musician ("high school band nerd"), the author argues that improvisation leads to places you didn't know were possible — seeking coherence encourages exploration, divergence, and diversity of thought. Classical training means endless scales, arpeggios, theory and breath control: useful for understanding underlying structure, but jazz is ultimately the pursuit of something new and unknown, "music far greater than the sum of its parts." A framing often borrowed in AI debates about creativity and exploration.
More from AGI Musings
- High p(doom) at Anthropic and OpenAI is baked into their founding culture, not a random sample — robleclerc · 2026-09-11
- "There's no destiny": Sunil Pai on agency and shaping AI's future — threepointone · 2026-09-11
- JHU lands $20M NSF grant to build a nationwide network of self-driving labs — DanielKhashabi · 2026-09-11
- Robert Penner, inventor of ease-in, says AI fuels his personal Renaissance of deep math projects — johnlindquist · 2026-09-11
- Hugging Face CEO: Asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change — inductionheads · 2026-09-11
- Ex-OpenAI researcher Kokotajlo: robot-built factories could double compute every 3 months — victor_explore · 2026-09-11