Chris Jones - The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics

This was Einsteins reply, in an interview published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1929, to the question: Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge? A similar, widely seen quote attributed to EinsteinLogic will get you from A to B. Imagination takes you everywhere.while snappier, is probably not his.

David E. Bock, Paul F. Velleman, and Richard D. De Veaux, Stats: Modeling the World (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004).

Theres No Accounting for Taste.

Not everything can be quantified, and its foolish to think so. How do you measure something as limitless as the human imagination? Unfortunately, that means there is no right way to do creative things, and no guarantee well achieve what we want to achieve. You will receive no false promises here. But we can almost always improve our handiwork, and so our odds of success. That earned difference, the margin between where we are and where we can be, separates us from each other, and us from machines.

It was 2009, and Ryan Kavanaugh had just announced his plans to burn Hollywood to the ground. We met in the garden at the Chateau Marmont, because even revolutionaries have to acknowledge the Establishments sometimes superior taste. Kavanaugh was in his mid-thirties but looked younger, or he dressed younger at least. He wore a skinny tie, dark jeans, and blue Converse sneakers. His ginger hair was spiked, and his eyes never stopped moving, on the lookout for the affection that had become inevitable for him. Less than a minute after we arrived, Baz Luhrmann, the colorful Australian director, emerged from the foliage and wrapped Kavanaugh in a long embrace.

That was Baz Luhrmann, Kavanaugh said when we sat down, nodding at me to make the note. Earlier that day, the waiting room at Kavanaughs West Hollywood office had been graced by another, less flamboyant, director. Ron Howard wore a baseball cap and hiking boots, and he sat like a schoolboy, with his hands folded in his lap. A receptionist offered him a bottle of water. Im A-okay, he said, exactly the way you might expect him to say it.

Howard was waiting for Kavanaugh to finish yet another meeting, this one with an author whose book he wanted to make into a film. The deal was taking time to come together. The author had been making the Hollywood rounds, and he was telling Kavanaugh how many famous directors he had met. He wasnt some starstruck, moony-eyed simpleton; he had a property that was in demand, and he wanted to be paid. Kavanaugh, an expert negotiator, smiled and shrugged. He had dated Kate Bosworth and was not shy that he had. I know a few famous directors, too, he told the author. One was waiting to see him atthis very moment.

Kavanaugh was the founder of Relativity Media, and famous directors were waiting for an audience with him, or jumping out of hedges to hug him, because he was sitting on a reported (and disputed) $2 billion in liquid assets. Much of it had been raised from Elliott Management, a venerable New Yorkbased hedge fund that had billions more cooling behind its initial investment; the studio had other big-money backers from as far afield as China. Even by Hollywood standards, Relativitys vault appeared bottomless, and Kavanaugh held the only key to its locks. He was suddenly very popular with people who needed money to make things, including more money.