6 ms·

Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity

155 points by sus_007 9y ago

bwasti 9y ago
Where’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?
- yujbbg666 9y ago
  If you think of “loneliness” as “unhappiness due to being alone”, and if “creativity tends to come with unhappiness”, wouldn’t that prove the argument? The conclusion doesn’t seem to be the people in groups are unhappy, just that the output isn’t as novel in contrast. Maybe being happy stifles our deeper creative powers? If creating is a reflexive behavior for adapting to circumstance, we need to be less creative on our own when we’re in a group.
- ztjio 9y ago
  What if said creativity is garbage?
- dEnigma 9y ago
  There is some research in that direction. Some of it with the result, that sadness/unhappiness actually feeds creativity. https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-creative/ https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-crea...
rlv-dan 9y ago
A 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?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > 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.
- js8 9y ago
  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.
- yujbbg666 9y ago
  But do we need those big systems? My laptop and phone are powerful enough to generate valuable info from my data sets alone This always on nonsense is not economical Have large data sets? BOINC The only reason the cloud is cool is because corporate says so. ISPs have blocked home services, pay corporate for hosting! Surely we don’t need databases running 24/7 crunching every persons data to find valuable applications in medicine for example? Why can’t our computing look more personalized: I collect my data offline via whatever special gadgets I need ( blood sugar monitor for example) or professional help (doctors, etc) and share as it needed. We don’t need Google Photos operating 24/7 when laptops and phones and a small dedicated backup device can do the same It doesn’t seem all that efficient to have huge data centers around the globe on all day when lower power, less complicated infra could do the work only as needed
mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
I 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?
- jondubois 9y ago
  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...
  - averagewall 9y ago
    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.
    - danieltillett 9y ago
      This is the most amazing thing about intelligence - that there is a g factor [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
    - jondubois 9y ago
      I completely disagree. Most engineers and mathematicians have low emotional intelligence compared to lawyers, real estate agents and business people. Most engineers I know have trouble reading facial cues when interacting with other people. Also they don't realize when they are being manipulated and they are incapable of manipulating others to get what they want. People who have high emotional intelligence can essentially read the other person's emotions while they're talking to them and they can use the feedback to adjust their speech to make it more convincing. I think that's definitely a form of intelligence and it requires a lot of practice as well as natural skill. I've met some very uneducated people with very high emotional intelligence.
olivermarks 9y ago
This 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.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  I think it's collaboration by choice vs. collaboration by dictate. I had an awful time having to work with people that weren't at my level. And the work (not calling it "my" work, btw) always suffered as a result. Then in my most recent project, I've done some of the best work of my life in conjunction with a collaborator. She was someone I chose, and we both brought our respective disciplines to bear. We were both quite open to and respectful of each other's input. But a lot of our work was done in solitude. Sometimes one or the other would bring a surprise to the next meeting, a distinctly different yet more elegant solution to the problem we set out to solve. It was easy for either of us to cast aside prior agreements and accept the more awesome result. In previous jobs, I would be chastised for "going rogue" if I took a side journey to make something awesome. Some managers are blind to benefits like reductions in customer support/general headaches, increase in usability, reduction of time and motion, or just the general wow factor, when they are looking at meeting minutes. IMO Collaboration is like any other tool. It can work fantastically when employed by skilled practitioners. And will produce shoddy results in the hands of the unskilled. Ego, pride and self-obsession also contribute to failure. It takes a somewhat enlightened person to be willing to let someone else in to their creative process. To accept criticism as a necessary part of the process of making great work, instead of taking it personally. To go to the mat as the lone dissenting voice when they know they're on to something great. And to know the difference when their own idea is something really great vs. gratuitous crap.
staunch 9y ago
Creativity 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.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Elon Musk does have oversight, in the form of his investors. His creative vision had to pass through the scrutiny of the boards of those companies and individuals which invested in Tesla and SpaceX. There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative. The work produced by employees of SRI (e.g. Douglas Engelbart's team) and of Bell Labs eclipses Tesla and SpaceX in terms of innovation.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    "There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative." Uh, I don't think that was being questioned here. Englebart did not have a committee to gauge his budget, only the low-bureaucratic ARPA system where he had to convince only one technical person, and not a commitee of generals to get his funding. I presume ARPA itself was under more traditional guidance. The question was not that there can always be only one protean creator in an organization. The point was that a crowd adds no value to the divergent thought process of innovation. Only a productizes output can be sanely evaluated by a large group. At this point the question is not 'could this work' but rather, does it. The former is subject to mere opinions, whereas the latter is more or less a matter of objective measurement (if done honestly).
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Musk has nominal oversight, but that has nothing to do with his creativity. The BOD didn’t come up with how to reuse boosters. People are creative. Groups are not. Elon and Englebart likely developed new ideas that were sparked by conversations with others, but that’s far different than committee meetings.
b0rsuk 9y ago
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.
- mamon 9y ago
  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-everything-you-know-is-wrong-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-why-e... (sorry, couldn't hunt down original paper mentioned in the article)
  - b0rsuk 9y ago
    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.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    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".
boomboomsubban 9y ago
The leaps from the sources provided to the conclusion this article draws are massive, and those sources aren't suggesting "collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity."
limaoscarjuliet 9y ago
Group think is pretty good if you select your group well.
Quanttek 9y ago
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 the items as they applied to themselves on a 5-point scale (1 = Very inaccurate, 5 = Very accurate). Meaning that they self-assessed how creative they currently feel. It was not measured how creative they actually are (though I wouldn't know how you could do that) And these are the findings: > shyness was related positively to both types of aggression, anxiety sensitivity, and social anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity. Avoidance was related positively to both types of aggression and social anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity. Of note, unsociability was related negatively to both types of aggression, and was related positively to creativity. This directly contradicts the article's claims of "the character traits of 'shyness, avoidance, [and] unsociability' [...] are positively associated with creativity." And, as others pointed out happiness != creative output as implied in the article: "Furthermore, intelligent people are happier when they have less social interaction, even with their friends" So it seems like it's not as clear cut as they make it out to be.
- afpx 9y ago
  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.
  - Quanttek 9y ago
    Is your "garbage meda blacklist" only a metaphor or do you actually have one. if that's the case, how do you maintain it and how do let it affect your browsing (e.g. do you block the site or simply have a document somewhere sitting on your computer containing the list)?
- mannykannot 9y ago
  There is a lack of critical thinking on the author's part here. He feels that these studies somehow support his position ("... something about creativity ... something resembling collaboration ... apparent negative correlation ..."), but when looked at in detail, they do not.
knolan 9y ago
Article incorrectly names the journal as Elselvier journal ScienceDirect.com. It’s actually Personality and Individual Differences
mannykannot 9y ago
If this were broadly true, large science projects like the the human genome mapping, LIGO, and especially the LHC, would have little chance of success. In one of his autobiographical books, Richard Feynman has a passage in which he says that one of the best things about being at Caltech was the constant interaction with other talented people. The practice of science is much more collaborative than popular 'great men' hagiography portrays it. I have no doubt at all that there are many examples where forced collaboration has been counter-productive, but the successes of modern science suggest that this article is completely wrong about the optimal conditions for creativity.
- pmarreck 9y ago
  science ≠ creativity
woliveirajr 9y ago
And that's why I hate that tendency that decisions and so on must be taken under -consensus- If something will be decided by what everybody agrees, you're assuring it'll be by the lowest possible dominator, the lowest level that makes everybody understand and agree to.
- perpetualcrayon 9y ago
  All we have to do is raise the comprehension level of (1/2 * n + 1) voters for democracy to work well. And it's not a perpetual cycle. The universe's complexity is finite.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    The universe's complexity is finite. For a given bounded region.
ihaveahadron 9y ago
Collaboration results in group think. Haha It's funny because collaboration and group think are basically synonyms.
progman 9y ago
Oustanding progress usually comes from individuals, not from outstanding groups. Consider Newton, Archimedes, da Vinci, Jesus Christ, Luther, Gutenberg, Mozart, Einstein, Zuse, Edison, and others. They changed the world. Unfortunately, there is also evil genius (in wickedness) of individuals [1]: Jack the Ripper, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, etc. [1] https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-worst-people-in-history https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-worst-p... Groups are usually always mediocre since there are not many geniuses. It explains why systems of extreme group thinking like Communism never work out. It is interesting that even outstanding things created by comittee - Ada for instance - are barely successful while inventions of individuals - Wirth's Pascal, Kernighan's C and von Rossum's Python for instance -- were/are widely successful.
- escherplex 9y ago
  Or as one evil genius observed: When groups of small men attempt great enterprises they always end by reducing them to the level of their own mediocrity (Napoleon) Or as one modern creative genius put it: What do you care what other people think? (Feynman)
partycoder 9y ago
Groupthink is the loss of critical thinking as a consequence of cohesion and conflict avoidance. Groupthink can be avoided if the culture rewards critical thinking. That includes: - team members should be free to dissent from the majority if there's a reason. - team members should keep a reasonable level of skepticism when it comes to other members' claims. if someone shows high confidence, that confidence should be also be subject to skepticism. - if someone wishes to communicate their opinion, it needs to be done explicitly. e.g: in my opinion, <opinion here>. Interleaving opinions and facts creates unnecessary noise and bias. Usage of superlatives should be kept to a minimum as well.
- valuearb 9y ago
  The problem is that these principles are counter to his normal social relationships work. For example, if your boss is on the majority side, it’s significantly harder for most people to dissent. Being skeptical can be perceived as being rude, so many won’t do it.
sgt101 9y ago
What evidence was that then? A survey?

155 points by sus_007 9y ago

Where’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?

yujbbg666 9y ago
If you think of “loneliness” as “unhappiness due to being alone”, and if “creativity tends to come with unhappiness”, wouldn’t that prove the argument? The conclusion doesn’t seem to be the people in groups are unhappy, just that the output isn’t as novel in contrast. Maybe being happy stifles our deeper creative powers? If creating is a reflexive behavior for adapting to circumstance, we need to be less creative on our own when we’re in a group.
ztjio 9y ago
What if said creativity is garbage?
dEnigma 9y ago
There is some research in that direction. Some of it with the result, that sadness/unhappiness actually feeds creativity. https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-creative/ https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-crea...

rlv-dan 9y ago

A 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?

microcolonel 9y ago
> 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.
js8 9y ago
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.
yujbbg666 9y ago
But do we need those big systems? My laptop and phone are powerful enough to generate valuable info from my data sets alone This always on nonsense is not economical Have large data sets? BOINC The only reason the cloud is cool is because corporate says so. ISPs have blocked home services, pay corporate for hosting! Surely we don’t need databases running 24/7 crunching every persons data to find valuable applications in medicine for example? Why can’t our computing look more personalized: I collect my data offline via whatever special gadgets I need ( blood sugar monitor for example) or professional help (doctors, etc) and share as it needed. We don’t need Google Photos operating 24/7 when laptops and phones and a small dedicated backup device can do the same It doesn’t seem all that efficient to have huge data centers around the globe on all day when lower power, less complicated infra could do the work only as needed

mrhappyunhappy 9y ago

I 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?

jondubois 9y ago
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...
- averagewall 9y ago
  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.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    This is the most amazing thing about intelligence - that there is a g factor [0]. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
  - jondubois 9y ago
    I completely disagree. Most engineers and mathematicians have low emotional intelligence compared to lawyers, real estate agents and business people. Most engineers I know have trouble reading facial cues when interacting with other people. Also they don't realize when they are being manipulated and they are incapable of manipulating others to get what they want. People who have high emotional intelligence can essentially read the other person's emotions while they're talking to them and they can use the feedback to adjust their speech to make it more convincing. I think that's definitely a form of intelligence and it requires a lot of practice as well as natural skill. I've met some very uneducated people with very high emotional intelligence.

olivermarks 9y ago

This 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.

CodeWriter23 9y ago
I think it's collaboration by choice vs. collaboration by dictate. I had an awful time having to work with people that weren't at my level. And the work (not calling it "my" work, btw) always suffered as a result. Then in my most recent project, I've done some of the best work of my life in conjunction with a collaborator. She was someone I chose, and we both brought our respective disciplines to bear. We were both quite open to and respectful of each other's input. But a lot of our work was done in solitude. Sometimes one or the other would bring a surprise to the next meeting, a distinctly different yet more elegant solution to the problem we set out to solve. It was easy for either of us to cast aside prior agreements and accept the more awesome result. In previous jobs, I would be chastised for "going rogue" if I took a side journey to make something awesome. Some managers are blind to benefits like reductions in customer support/general headaches, increase in usability, reduction of time and motion, or just the general wow factor, when they are looking at meeting minutes. IMO Collaboration is like any other tool. It can work fantastically when employed by skilled practitioners. And will produce shoddy results in the hands of the unskilled. Ego, pride and self-obsession also contribute to failure. It takes a somewhat enlightened person to be willing to let someone else in to their creative process. To accept criticism as a necessary part of the process of making great work, instead of taking it personally. To go to the mat as the lone dissenting voice when they know they're on to something great. And to know the difference when their own idea is something really great vs. gratuitous crap.

staunch 9y ago

Creativity 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.

icebraining 9y ago
Elon Musk does have oversight, in the form of his investors. His creative vision had to pass through the scrutiny of the boards of those companies and individuals which invested in Tesla and SpaceX. There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative. The work produced by employees of SRI (e.g. Douglas Engelbart's team) and of Bell Labs eclipses Tesla and SpaceX in terms of innovation.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative." Uh, I don't think that was being questioned here. Englebart did not have a committee to gauge his budget, only the low-bureaucratic ARPA system where he had to convince only one technical person, and not a commitee of generals to get his funding. I presume ARPA itself was under more traditional guidance. The question was not that there can always be only one protean creator in an organization. The point was that a crowd adds no value to the divergent thought process of innovation. Only a productizes output can be sanely evaluated by a large group. At this point the question is not 'could this work' but rather, does it. The former is subject to mere opinions, whereas the latter is more or less a matter of objective measurement (if done honestly).
- valuearb 9y ago
  Musk has nominal oversight, but that has nothing to do with his creativity. The BOD didn’t come up with how to reuse boosters. People are creative. Groups are not. Elon and Englebart likely developed new ideas that were sparked by conversations with others, but that’s far different than committee meetings.

b0rsuk 9y ago

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.

mamon 9y ago
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-everything-you-know-is-wrong-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-why-e... (sorry, couldn't hunt down original paper mentioned in the article)
- b0rsuk 9y ago
  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.
- megaman22 9y ago
  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".

boomboomsubban 9y ago

The leaps from the sources provided to the conclusion this article draws are massive, and those sources aren't suggesting "collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity."

limaoscarjuliet 9y ago

Group think is pretty good if you select your group well.

Quanttek 9y ago

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 the items as they applied to themselves on a 5-point scale (1 = Very inaccurate, 5 = Very accurate). Meaning that they self-assessed how creative they currently feel. It was not measured how creative they actually are (though I wouldn't know how you could do that) And these are the findings: > shyness was related positively to both types of aggression, anxiety sensitivity, and social anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity. Avoidance was related positively to both types of aggression and social anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity. Of note, unsociability was related negatively to both types of aggression, and was related positively to creativity. This directly contradicts the article's claims of "the character traits of 'shyness, avoidance, [and] unsociability' [...] are positively associated with creativity." And, as others pointed out happiness != creative output as implied in the article: "Furthermore, intelligent people are happier when they have less social interaction, even with their friends" So it seems like it's not as clear cut as they make it out to be.

afpx 9y ago
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.
- Quanttek 9y ago
  Is your "garbage meda blacklist" only a metaphor or do you actually have one. if that's the case, how do you maintain it and how do let it affect your browsing (e.g. do you block the site or simply have a document somewhere sitting on your computer containing the list)?
mannykannot 9y ago
There is a lack of critical thinking on the author's part here. He feels that these studies somehow support his position ("... something about creativity ... something resembling collaboration ... apparent negative correlation ..."), but when looked at in detail, they do not.

knolan 9y ago

Article incorrectly names the journal as Elselvier journal ScienceDirect.com. It’s actually Personality and Individual Differences

mannykannot 9y ago

If this were broadly true, large science projects like the the human genome mapping, LIGO, and especially the LHC, would have little chance of success. In one of his autobiographical books, Richard Feynman has a passage in which he says that one of the best things about being at Caltech was the constant interaction with other talented people. The practice of science is much more collaborative than popular 'great men' hagiography portrays it. I have no doubt at all that there are many examples where forced collaboration has been counter-productive, but the successes of modern science suggest that this article is completely wrong about the optimal conditions for creativity.

pmarreck 9y ago
science ≠ creativity

woliveirajr 9y ago

And that's why I hate that tendency that decisions and so on must be taken under -consensus- If something will be decided by what everybody agrees, you're assuring it'll be by the lowest possible dominator, the lowest level that makes everybody understand and agree to.

perpetualcrayon 9y ago
All we have to do is raise the comprehension level of (1/2 * n + 1) voters for democracy to work well. And it's not a perpetual cycle. The universe's complexity is finite.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The universe's complexity is finite. For a given bounded region.

ihaveahadron 9y ago

Collaboration results in group think. Haha It's funny because collaboration and group think are basically synonyms.

progman 9y ago

Oustanding progress usually comes from individuals, not from outstanding groups. Consider Newton, Archimedes, da Vinci, Jesus Christ, Luther, Gutenberg, Mozart, Einstein, Zuse, Edison, and others. They changed the world. Unfortunately, there is also evil genius (in wickedness) of individuals [1]: Jack the Ripper, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, etc. [1] https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-worst-people-in-history https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-worst-p... Groups are usually always mediocre since there are not many geniuses. It explains why systems of extreme group thinking like Communism never work out. It is interesting that even outstanding things created by comittee - Ada for instance - are barely successful while inventions of individuals - Wirth's Pascal, Kernighan's C and von Rossum's Python for instance -- were/are widely successful.

escherplex 9y ago
Or as one evil genius observed: When groups of small men attempt great enterprises they always end by reducing them to the level of their own mediocrity (Napoleon) Or as one modern creative genius put it: What do you care what other people think? (Feynman)

partycoder 9y ago

Groupthink is the loss of critical thinking as a consequence of cohesion and conflict avoidance. Groupthink can be avoided if the culture rewards critical thinking. That includes: - team members should be free to dissent from the majority if there's a reason. - team members should keep a reasonable level of skepticism when it comes to other members' claims. if someone shows high confidence, that confidence should be also be subject to skepticism. - if someone wishes to communicate their opinion, it needs to be done explicitly. e.g: in my opinion, <opinion here>. Interleaving opinions and facts creates unnecessary noise and bias. Usage of superlatives should be kept to a minimum as well.

valuearb 9y ago
The problem is that these principles are counter to his normal social relationships work. For example, if your boss is on the majority side, it’s significantly harder for most people to dissent. Being skeptical can be perceived as being rude, so many won’t do it.

sgt101 9y ago

What evidence was that then? A survey?