Just read the beginning but I feel like there are obvious counter examples. Basically lots of academic environments. I personally (and somewhat sadly) did my best work in grad school, thanks entirely to the environment. All of us in the lab I studied in benefitted from being around each other every day. From what I’ve seen, this is very common throughout history in academia.
Maybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or competition, or premature desire to commercialize, or just the kind of people that become founders; it’s definitely not co-working in and of itself.
Should add I agree that solitary reflection is important, just not that being surrounded by like minded people is detrimental.
Why is there always a self-imposed need to extract something from ourselves instead of just being? I really hate this in the modern world. Maybe one of the worst defining traits of industrial times.
Probably not enough data on this yet since it's a new unlock, but I think it's perfectly possible to do great work today without interfacing with other humans directly. Some weird off-spectrum people (the kind this article is talking about) might even prefer to or work better this way.
This is so true. I've had some inventive ideas during certain phases of being a hobbyist and very small business owner. Sometimes I'd share them prematurely. Just killed the momentum, and I'd look back and say, "what happened?"
Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks,
"pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it's finished"
My father knew this too, intuitively. He did some really nice, not-for-profit, practical projects on a very low budget. He'd like to comment during those fruitful years, "now, that's a pregnant idea" - the point being, perhaps, that you want to allow the idea to develop way past the fertilization stage, before releasing it into the world. The British have a term, "half-baked idea" that may run along the same lines.
What a nice essay. Thank you, author! It's hard to imagine these insights being hatched by interactions on social media, where everyone is a critic, and always so cock-sure that their biases are so correct.
Of course, our educational system is loaded the the dialectic-style interaction style, where there is a dogma that the truth can be arrived at by negation of opinions through a Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, but that often often goes nowhere. In my most productive R&D experiences, where I was often the only guy in the lab who had various consultants milking the billable hours, the best bosses would give plenty of space for diving into trying this or that, because they respected that intuition needs to run free. Then, the numbers and other results would validate the assumptions or instincts. But just point-blank instinctively shooting down every new idea... often goes nowhere - and happens so often. Too often.
I think solitude is great. The hard part is finding the right people to talk to. I'm not sure if this is a Silicon Valley thing, but I've met some people who use a lot of jargon in a way that feels partly about status. At first I thought they just had a lot of ideas. Then they started talking about things in my own field, and I realized they were getting some pretty basic concepts wrong.
My guess is that some of this comes from listening to too many podcasts. You can pick up a lot of jargon and big ideas pretty quickly, and some podcasts are better at giving you that "oh, now I get it" feeling than actually helping you understand the ideas.
FYI the so-called Bertrand Russell quotation is apparently in fact an expanded paraphrase of Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism (1987):
Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
Still earlier Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Chapter 8, 'The Future Evolution of the Brain'.
There are a few mathematicians that have analyzed and wrote about their process. A recent (IMO) good writing on the subject is David Bessis' "Mathematica" (I found this review https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/review-of-mathematica... which I haven't had a chance to fully read). It covers both a personal perspective as well as examples from Grothendieck, Descartes and others.
Having had the opportunity to have ideas and pursue them extensively as a corporate employee, startup founder, and independent researchers, all I can say is that there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia. It's like a living irony.
For a deeper treatment of the broader subject - one of the most cited books is the "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
> what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them.
Reminds me of that Rick Rubin quote:
The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
I feel like this is relevant to the takes of "ai psychosis". I spent about 600 hours working alone with AI before I was ready to collaborate, re-discovering things in my own process that others may have already known sprinkled throughout twitter and youtube, etc. and really being open to the wonder of it all.
The "new ideas are fragile" is certainly true. I'm struggling with something I'm building which I think is extremely cool but technically difficult, but which if based on the reaction of friends and family I'd abandoned long ago. Only after having worked on it for 2 years and really got it working technically did I see a small spark in my dad's eyes as he said "oh, you can make MONEY off of this?". I feel like I have a strong internal compass but I have to admit external validation is needed at some point, but I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed. Unsurprisingly these people have not achieved much themselves, never taking any risk.
I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.
I'd consider yourself blessed to be surrounded by cynics. I've always found myself with the opposite scenario where people are overly kind even when I specifically ask them not to be. If you're reasonably objective, I think you can tell if a criticism is garbage or warranted. But if whatever you're making is just the greatest thing since sliced bread then the feedback is completely useless.
I'm similar to you in that encouragement and external valuation goes a long way for me, but I've found that all successful business-minded entrepreneurial types really love playing the game where they bounce ideas off each other and try to shoot each other's ideas down.
When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.
I have a vague recollection of a point someone made before that most ideas are usually wrong or incorrect at the start. For example, Nvidia was built on the thesis that non-triangular polygons would dominate, which was 100% wrong (today all polygons are triangular). But they often develop into something true.
Sure, but to find what works you need to take action first. The problem is if you have no support network that encourages you to take action you are more likely not to start or to give up when you face headwinds. That's one reason startups tend to happen in a few hubs. Yes, it's also where VC is, but to get started you need likeminded people who don't reflexively shoot down anything new.
I’m going to sound rude here but I think the debate around solitudal achievements suffers a great deal from bias. For one, survivor bias favours the ideas emerging from deep thinking work. We overestimate however how much of that is the deep thinking vs quantity tradeoff. Einstein had many, many, many ideas and the majority of them were pretty bad if not outright outrageous. If you have the time and environment to produce a million ideas and pursue them, your likelihood of a good idea goes up.
A second issue is that ideas almost never come up in isolation. The countless women behind the men erased from history tell exactly this story. Nowadays we fight the same fights about attribution.
I should write a detailed account on why the arguments named in the article are not supported by evidence from cognitive research, but I for one am convinced a conductive environment is 1000% the ingredient necessary to come up with revolutionary work, rather than some magical great man thinking fantasy.
> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder
I think that teams can be very creative; with a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” effect, but it has to be the right team.
Personality fit, and synergy have as much to do with it, as raw talent.
I have worked with teams of highly-talented and educated people that actually had a “whole is less than the sum of the parts” effect.
I think efforts to commodify creativity are doomed to fail.
Writing down potential corporate strategy has made me consider how to incorporate such ideas in my own Startups with much greater success - https://s-1.vercel.app/
#1: Fantastic article. #2: I wonder if, (Overly reductionist take on a nuanced and carefully composed article...) a key element, in addition to the solitude central requirement. (Note: Must it be during youth? That was a trend observed in the article. Brain plasticity, habits etc. And does this mean truly being alone and free from distractions, or just away from negative nancies, bosses, and similar arechetypes?) It must be balanced with the ability to collaborate with the right people. (Or the sort mentioned in the article)
Both in balance. Freedom to work out the ideas in whatever direction you want, "It's been done before"; "this won't work", "This is bad for your career" aside, along with smart, open, supportive people who you can exchange ideas with and collaborate on.
You will note that almost all the mathematical, and renowned natural sciences people of history and contemporary took traditional education paths, i.e. phds at research universities. Hmm.
Perhaps this too explains the frustration one may feel at times working with LLMs to code - the steering/interpretation by the LLM may distract and second-guess our process within our cognitive space.
New ideas aren't fragile. The folks who come up with them need to have the conviction and strength and indifference to peer disapproval to nurture and cultivate them. If a creator finds that easier in isolation then great. But isolation is not a pre-requisite. Some outlandish ideas spring out of interaction with others (peers, skeptics, laypersons, etc.). Isolation has its place and its function but, in itself, it is neither a nursery nor a cemetery.
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[ 0.82 ms ] story [ 6.7 ms ] threadMaybe it’s pressure that kills ideas, or competition, or premature desire to commercialize, or just the kind of people that become founders; it’s definitely not co-working in and of itself.
Should add I agree that solitary reflection is important, just not that being surrounded by like minded people is detrimental.
Wind from the sea Butterflies in embankment weeds Never resting (1915) Taneda Santoka
Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks,
"pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it's finished"
My father knew this too, intuitively. He did some really nice, not-for-profit, practical projects on a very low budget. He'd like to comment during those fruitful years, "now, that's a pregnant idea" - the point being, perhaps, that you want to allow the idea to develop way past the fertilization stage, before releasing it into the world. The British have a term, "half-baked idea" that may run along the same lines.
What a nice essay. Thank you, author! It's hard to imagine these insights being hatched by interactions on social media, where everyone is a critic, and always so cock-sure that their biases are so correct.
Of course, our educational system is loaded the the dialectic-style interaction style, where there is a dogma that the truth can be arrived at by negation of opinions through a Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, but that often often goes nowhere. In my most productive R&D experiences, where I was often the only guy in the lab who had various consultants milking the billable hours, the best bosses would give plenty of space for diving into trying this or that, because they respected that intuition needs to run free. Then, the numbers and other results would validate the assumptions or instincts. But just point-blank instinctively shooting down every new idea... often goes nowhere - and happens so often. Too often.
Thanks again.
My guess is that some of this comes from listening to too many podcasts. You can pick up a lot of jargon and big ideas pretty quickly, and some podcasts are better at giving you that "oh, now I get it" feeling than actually helping you understand the ideas.
Britain has produced a range of remarkably gifted multidisciplinary scientists and scholars who are sometimes described as polymaths. The group included, in recent times, Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, and Jacob Bronowski. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
Still earlier Sagan The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977), Chapter 8, 'The Future Evolution of the Brain'.
This can be cultivated and if you end up with one or more ideas in excess of what you can possibly deploy, that would be a surplus.
Under ideal conditions that is.
So it stands to reason that ideally the same place that good ideas come from, is the exact same place where more of them die than anything else :\
Having had the opportunity to have ideas and pursue them extensively as a corporate employee, startup founder, and independent researchers, all I can say is that there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia. It's like a living irony.
For a deeper treatment of the broader subject - one of the most cited books is the "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
Reminds me of that Rick Rubin quote:
The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.
> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder
I think that teams can be very creative; with a “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” effect, but it has to be the right team.
Personality fit, and synergy have as much to do with it, as raw talent.
I have worked with teams of highly-talented and educated people that actually had a “whole is less than the sum of the parts” effect.
I think efforts to commodify creativity are doomed to fail.
> Ideas are like fish.
> If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.
> Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.
Even though he liberally sprinkled pseudoscientificism into his metacognition, the older I get, the more I think he really got it.
Both in balance. Freedom to work out the ideas in whatever direction you want, "It's been done before"; "this won't work", "This is bad for your career" aside, along with smart, open, supportive people who you can exchange ideas with and collaborate on.
You will note that almost all the mathematical, and renowned natural sciences people of history and contemporary took traditional education paths, i.e. phds at research universities. Hmm.
Eat. Sleep.
See what stuck the next morning, on the walk to coffee.