Competition Can Kill Creativity; “Hyperselection” Makes the World Pleasant but Boring

Do anything you want with my music, but never make me boring!

Days before his death, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, reportedly said this to his manager. Twenty-five years later, Queen’s musical legacy lives on, his wish fulfilled. Still, it’s hard to imagine a six-minute song like “Bohemian Rhapsody” topping the charts today. The song ignored the conventional pop song structure, breaking the formula of what a hit single should be. Now, music has moved in the opposite direction. Intense competition has pushed artists and producers to figure out the traits that can make a song a commercial success.

Formulating Success

Queen ranks 22nd among the most-followed artists on Spotify. Streaming services like Netflix rank their shows. Millions of songs compete for attention on these platforms, making the competition too intense to take risks. This creates an intense pressure to stick to a formula rather than experiment with something different, filling the musical landscape with songs that sound alike.

Niccolò Di Marco, a computational social scientist at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy, and colleagues analyzed 21,480 musical pieces across six genres of Western music— pop, jazz, hip-hop, rock, classical, and electronic. In his mathematical analysis, a clear pattern emerged—the melodic and harmonic structures of jazz and classical music had become simpler. These genres have become closer to pop and rock, relying on repeating musical structures rather than variety.

The idea of hyperselection— as the authors of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology– is not unique to the world of entertainment. We have become so adept at optimizing and identifying the pattern of what succeeds that we prune alternative approaches. Despite hyperselection making different parts of our world more efficient and optimized, the bottleneck forces the approach into a predictable, and often boring, framework.

Being the Sheep to Succeed

The appeal of hyperselection is highly prevalent in sports, academia, and even in urban settings. For example, in professional football, coaches keep searching for tactics that can give their team the upper hand. Once a certain strategy proves fruitful, it doesn’t take long for other coaches to use similar tactics. While the game becomes competitive and sophisticated, it impedes individual flair.

Urban settings provide a very visual example of how commercially successful shops, restaurants, and brands are copied and reproduced. Cities thousands of miles apart host the same brands— from Starbucks to Apple stores.

The effect of hyperselection in academia is a lot more pronounced in academia, as it is brutal. In fact, morality is optional when metrics equal prestige. The “World’s Top 2% Scientists” List unintentionally became a tool to secure funding, often using shady measures.

The World’s Top 2% Scientist Controversy

Every year, researchers at Stanford University, in collaboration with Elsevier, publish the “World’s Top 2% Scientists” list to identify the researchers whose published work places them within the top 2% of citation metrics globally. The database is purely analytical— a measure to understand citation behavior and research influence rather than proof of excellence. Intense competition based on ranking pushes hyperselection, providing visibility to researchers with more papers than proper research.

Yet, universities boast the presence of their professors who make it to the list. Inclusion in the list is recognized as a global stamp of excellence, and British economist Charles Goodhart perfectly captures its essence:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

As a result, metrics such as the number of citations push quantity over quality. Researchers agree to cite each other’s work in “citation cartels”, gift co-authorship, or publish an ordinary piece of research in open-access journals that generate rapid citations. Such practices distort the list, and celebrating a metric compounds over time. As a result, researchers pursue studies that are easier to conduct and more likely to be published, instead of trying out a risky idea which might fail but could also produce breakthroughs.

The Value is in Variety

Most of human evolution took place in wild, unpredictable, and messy natural settings. We evolved to respond to such changes and settings, but modern societies are built on safer and quite predictable environments. Hyperselection thwarts adaptive variance that arises from allowing different products, behaviors, and strategies to co-exist.

For example, better sanitation and antibiotics have greatly reduced infectious diseases. On the other hand, humans are superorganisms that harbor microorganisms that form our microbiome, and even aid our immune systems. Excessive sanitation may remove some of that microbial diversity that our bodies need. Antimicrobial resistance is a textbook example.

Psychological well-being is also disrupted when a person moves from one environment to another. Experiencing difficulty, uncertainty, and failure can help develop coping skills and resilience. Minimizing risks and maximizing comfort can make people less capable of dealing with adverse situations, particularly during formative years of childhood.

Role of AI in Hyperselection

Artificial intelligence can form patterns from data using algorithms that analyze collected human behavior. This creates a feedback loop that intensifies hyperselection— AI identifies what works, recommends more of it, and the resulting information optimizes the outputs even further. The process hardly requires any human involvement, as AI can identify and implement the formula itself.

Our attention span has drastically shortened over the last decade, making short-form video content highly likeable. AI can push optimized content designed to hook our attention and customize the feed in a way that prompts us to keep scrolling. Even with access to a wide inventory of information and content, hyperselection gives us tunnel vision– only a select few frameworks manage to impress us.

How to Fix the Sterile Society

The crux of the hyperselection dilemma is not painting optimization as all bad. Safer, cleaner, and more efficient things have made human life fluid. However, optimizing everything taxes our creative output. The way to prevent over-optimization is to treat adaptive variance as a necessity for social structure.

For example, universities could encourage risky research rather than rewarding predictable outputs. Creating room for exploration and experimentation is key to discovery. Efforts will be met with failures, but playing it safe all the time makes life quite dull and uninteresting. More importantly, it deprives us of growth and flourishing, and exhausts the experience pool that ultimately teaches us how to navigate the world.