Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
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Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#2Where’s the evidence? Self reported happiness of intelligent people in those situations does not prove anything with regard to collaboration killing creativity. What if creativity tends to come with unhappiness?
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#3A problem is that systems today are too big and complicated for a single person to build and manage. What's the best way to collaborate without loosing the creativity needed to push forward making the system better?
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#4A problem is that systems today are too big and complicated for a single person to build and manage. What's the best way to collaborate without loosing the creativity needed to push forward making the system better?
> What's the best way to collaborate without loosing the creativity needed to push forward making the system better?
Hierarchy allows you to organize large composite efforts without relying on collaboration.
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#5I wonder what their definition of an intelligent person is? Is it a person who scored high on a test, a master of his her profession or a high school dropout who was so fascinated with Bitcoin that he got in early and now a millionaire?
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#6This is a junk article in my opinion. I ran the global collaboration open source environment for sony Playstation last decade and was heavily involved with 'enterprise 2.0' in the web 2.0 era.
The idea that 'collaboration' is cramming everyone into an open plan office is idiotic and has more to do with corporate cost saving than any coherent attempt at getting people to work better together.
Remote/home working collaboration is the norm now, yet the old command and control hierarchies, because they generally don't work that way, still have little visibility or understanding of how people actually work together.
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#7I wonder what their definition of an intelligent person is? Is it a person who scored high on a test, a master of his her profession or a high school dropout who was so fascinated with Bitcoin that he got in early and now a millionaire?
Most wealthy people are moderately intelligent.
Really intelligent people often are poor... Once you get rich, you get lazy because your money starts working for you and people around you constantly feed you with false confidence and optimism and this makes you even lazier.
The smartest people I know are all poor in terms of wealth but sometimes they have high incomes.
Intelligence is not a single thing because there are many different types and almost no one is good at all of them.
There is emotional intelligence, reasoning ability, critical thinking, communication ability, spatial reasoning skills, mathematical ability, subconscious reasoning, etc...
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#8Creativity seems unimpeded when the one being creative is at the very top of the hierarchy. It doesn't really work for anyone else unless they have a direct contribution and connection to the dictator though.
Any requirement that new stuff be reviewed by committee (e.g. a board of directors) will tend to destroy anything truly innovative.
Why? Because the creative people can see much further than the (much less involved) committee. They seem like crazy people talking about a world that doesn't (yet) exist.
Elon Musk is doing so well because he has such an iron grip over his companies. If he ever becomes subject to real oversight he'll fail as hard as Jobs did under Scully.
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#9A problem is that systems today are too big and complicated for a single person to build and manage. What's the best way to collaborate without loosing the creativity needed to push forward making the system better?
This is a great question. I think the answer is, you, as a creative person, need to come up with good abstractions that let you present your idea well-enough without having to do too much work.
I have been thinking about abstraction recently (for other reasons, related to learning). To me, abstraction is transformation of the space with the problem to a space where you can easier manipulate the objects the way the problem requires it. For example, we can have image represented as pixels, and we can abstract it into lines and geometric shapes. So the operation, such as moving this triangle from here to there, that would be complicated in pixel representation becomes trivial in the more abstracted, geometric shape representation.
Back to the original point. Here are some examples of people invoking abstraction in order to solve some problem:
E.F.Codd invented relational model (abstraction) for databases. It let him solve some issues that people struggled with before (how to organize data and build queries) more efficiently.
Jeff Dean invented the map-reduce paradigm of distributed computation. The original map-reduce implementation was only about 1000 lines of code.
You can also see that abstraction has a cost - it doesn't let you do all possible operations more efficiently, just some that you might be interested in. It's a trade off that you have to make in order to present your idea to the world, to make it work. However, the point is to solve enough with the new abstraction that other people take notice and will naturally help dealing with the complexity of the edge cases.
There are many other examples of abstraction from computer science (for example, high-level languages), and even more examples in mathematics. It's how many mathematicians conduct their business - trying to come up with new abstractions (new definitions) that let you handle complicated proofs in a more straightforward way.
Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity
#10I wonder what their definition of an intelligent person is? Is it a person who scored high on a test, a master of his her profession or a high school dropout who was so fascinated with Bitcoin that he got in early and now a millionaire?
Most wealthy people are moderately intelligent. Really intelligent people often are poor... Once you get rich, you get lazy because your money starts working for you and people around you constantly feed you with false confidence and optimism and this makes you even lazier. The smartest people I know are all poor in terms of wealth but sometimes they have high incomes. Intelligence is not a single thing because there…
Most(all?) types of intelligence are positively correlated. So if you have a natural ability at one of those things, then you're more likely to be high in the others too. Even something as simple as reaction time is correlated with IQ.