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Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

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Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#31

Post by js8 »

feikname wrote: post #28
js8 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. Funny, I think it's precisely the opposite. I don't think most creative people can thrive under a strict hierarchy (some famous creative people had even trouble to keep a normal job). It's true that groups of creative people sometimes cooperate, but almost always like equals. One of the famous cou…

> There were open source project that tried a more heavy handed way of architectural management, and they failed - such as GCC A lot of people have been moving to clang, but I'm quite sure GCC is still strong. What do you mean by failed? A link backing this claim would be nice too, as I couldn't find any (although I just probably didn't search it right).

Ahh, youngsters.. :-) I am not talking about Clang, I am talking about EGCS, to quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection :

"As GCC was licensed under the GPL, programmers wanting to work in other directions—particularly those writing interfaces for languages other than C—were free to develop their own fork of the compiler, provided they meet the GPL's terms, including its requirements to distribute source code. Multiple forks proved inefficient and unwieldy, however, and the difficulty in getting work accepted by the official GCC project was greatly frustrating for many.[17] The FSF kept such close control on what was added to the official version of GCC 2.x that GCC was used as one example of the "cathedral" development model in Eric S. Raymond's essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

In 1997, a group of developers formed Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System (EGCS) to merge several experimental forks into a single project.[17][18] The basis of the merger was a GCC development snapshot taken between the 2.7 and 2.81 releases. Projects merged included g77 (Fortran), PGCC (P5 Pentium-optimized GCC), many C++ improvements, and many new architectures and operating system variants.[19] EGCS development proved considerably more vigorous than GCC development, so much so that the FSF officially halted development on their GCC 2.x compiler, blessed EGCS as the official version of GCC and appointed the EGCS project as the GCC maintainers in April 1999. With the release of GCC 2.95 in July 1999 the two projects were once again united."

A similar thing happened couple years later in XFree86 community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#32

Post by empath75 »

js8 wrote: post #26
giggidygig wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there such a thing as a non-creative person? I.e a person who actually thinks/knows/conscientiously decides they are not creative?

I think there are plenty people like that. In open source software, we see lot of people writing "exact clone" of some software (usually a game). And often, they get the job done. They decidedly don't want to be creative, they just want the clone of the thing. Actually, it's often how you get the work done. Too much creativity is a problem. Linus started his work on Linux kernel because he wanted a Minix clone. It wa…

I think you’re overestimating how creative even creative people are. Quentin Tarentino’s entire career has been remaking other people’s work, for example. There is a lot of room for creativity in copying.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#33

Post by nabla9 »

js8 wrote: post #25
nabla9 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good point. Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. The innovation must fit inside one head that balances all aspects and makes the decisions. 'The lone contemplation' works in all levels if you have good hierarchy. You don't need to fit your ideas to everyone else's and compromise. Creative collaboration and innovation has always ex…

> Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. Funny, I think it's precisely the opposite. I don't think most creative people can thrive under a strict hierarchy (some famous creative people had even trouble to keep a normal job). It's true that groups of creative people sometimes cooperate, but almost always like equals. One of the famous cou…

De facto hierarchy matters. Informal, 'light handed', and voluntary are just examples of organizational hierarchies.

>He has no choice than to respect meritocratic wishes of other developers

On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux. It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#35

Post by b0rsuk »

mamon wrote: post #17
b0rsuk wrote: post #14

What about brainstorming, the phenomenon where people inspire each other by building upon each others' ideas ? For me it tends to result in solutions neither of us would come up with alone. Sometimes it even comes out of misunderstanding of another person's intention - like, you read a forum thread title, an issue or a newspaper headline and think it implies something else.

There's some evidence that brainstorming is less effective than telling people to prepare a list of few ideas before the meeting and then merging those lists [1]. During brainstorming sessions people's creativity seem to be limited by other people ideas, not inspired by them. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-why-e... (sorry, couldn't hunt down original paper mentioned in the article)

The study group consisted exclusively of males. Maybe it's a male thing ? I heard (but can't remember the sources) that women work better when collaborating, while men work better alone.

I wonder if I get downvoted for saying this. I think misandry is politically correct, because it's not that discrimination is frowned upon, it's just misogyny and racism.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#36

Post by afpx »

Quanttek wrote: post #24

Article seems pretty bad. It already starts of horrendously when they call the journal "ScienceDirect.com". That's just Elsevier's site. The journal is called "Personality and Individual Differences." Furthermore, this is how the study assessed creativity: > creativity was assessed with 10 items (e.g., “I have a vivid imagination”) from the International Personality Item Pool [...]. Participants rated the accuracy of…

It’s so bad that I decided to put “Inc.” in my garbage media blacklist. After scanning their previous articles posted to HN, I relialized that I should have done it sooner.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#37

Post by js8 »

nabla9 wrote: post #33
js8 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good creative collaboration is never democratic or equal (counterexamples?). Great projects must have a lead architect. Funny, I think it's precisely the opposite. I don't think most creative people can thrive under a strict hierarchy (some famous creative people had even trouble to keep a normal job). It's true that groups of creative people sometimes cooperate, but almost always like equals. One of the famous cou…

De facto hierarchy matters. Informal, 'light handed', and voluntary are just examples of organizational hierarchies. >He has no choice than to respect meritocratic wishes of other developers On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux. It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emer…

> On the contrary. Linus can enforce his vision against majority of other senior developers because here is inherent costs friction in forking Linux

I challenge you to find an example where he did that.

> It would require large number of misguided decisions for any serious fork to emerge.

In the case of GCC, this wasn't true at all. All it took was being too conservative, and not including contributions fast enough.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#38

Post by js8 »

empath75 wrote: post #32
js8 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are plenty people like that. In open source software, we see lot of people writing "exact clone" of some software (usually a game). And often, they get the job done. They decidedly don't want to be creative, they just want the clone of the thing. Actually, it's often how you get the work done. Too much creativity is a problem. Linus started his work on Linux kernel because he wanted a Minix clone. It wa…

I think you’re overestimating how creative even creative people are. Quentin Tarentino’s entire career has been remaking other people’s work, for example. There is a lot of room for creativity in copying.

No, I am talking about people who decide to make an exact replica. Sure lot of creativity is remixing, but these people don't want a remix.

Take somebody who wrote OpenTTD, open Transport Tycoon clone. It was an exact replica of the original game (later of course people got more creative with it).

The same time could have been spent creating, for instance, Stardew Valley. The author didn't decide to make just a Harvest Moon clone.

That is roughly a difference between a non-creative project and a creative project.

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#39

Post by megaman22 »

mamon wrote: post #17
b0rsuk wrote: post #14

What about brainstorming, the phenomenon where people inspire each other by building upon each others' ideas ? For me it tends to result in solutions neither of us would come up with alone. Sometimes it even comes out of misunderstanding of another person's intention - like, you read a forum thread title, an issue or a newspaper headline and think it implies something else.

There's some evidence that brainstorming is less effective than telling people to prepare a list of few ideas before the meeting and then merging those lists [1]. During brainstorming sessions people's creativity seem to be limited by other people ideas, not inspired by them. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-why-e... (sorry, couldn't hunt down original paper mentioned in the article)

In my experience, brainstorming tends to be dominated by whoever is loudest and least coherent - the fuzzier and less thought-out an idea is, the easier it is for everyone in the room to agree on the broadest strokes, and have completely different understandings of how to actually get there.

Try to pin them down on specifics, and you get labeled as obstructionist or otherwise "difficult".

Re: Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

#40

Post by capisce »

js8 wrote: post #26
giggidygig wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there such a thing as a non-creative person? I.e a person who actually thinks/knows/conscientiously decides they are not creative?

I think there are plenty people like that. In open source software, we see lot of people writing "exact clone" of some software (usually a game). And often, they get the job done. They decidedly don't want to be creative, they just want the clone of the thing. Actually, it's often how you get the work done. Too much creativity is a problem. Linus started his work on Linux kernel because he wanted a Minix clone. It wa…

> He wrote the program specifically for the hardware he was using and independent of an operating system because he wanted to use the functions of his new PC with an 80386 processor.

Even if judging by surface appearance something is a clone, there might still be a lot of creativity involved "under the hood" i.e. in the implementation. In the case of Linux it was originally optimized for 80386 and is a monolithic kernel while Minix is a microkernel design. Fine-tuning it to run fast on 80386 must surely have involved a lot of creativity?

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