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I am sure this is true for some people in some situations, but the sweeping arrogance of this makes me kinda mad: > any creation happens in isolation without a

I am sure this is true for some people in some situations, but the sweeping arrogance of this makes me kinda mad: > any creation happens in isolation without any signals or external validation until it’s complete. [...] Any idea or creative work you can think of happens in silence. [...] This isolation happens in all fields: movies, music, literature, or product development. This is just factually false. A really obvious counterexample is improvisational theater. The creation happens as a team activity in front of an audience. It's absolutely rich with signals. There's nary a pause, let alone silence. The same is obviously true with musical improvisation. And the creation of recorded music can also be deeply collaborative. [1] If you talk with stand-up comedians about their process, they get ideas from all over, but workshopping material with live audiences is a vital part of the process of creation. Movies have storyboards and read-throughs and dailies and reshoots and intense cross-disciplinary collaboration and iteration. [2] Literature has writing groups and readings and editors and friends who read drafts. In product development, we have prototypes and user tests and continuous release and instrumentation and cross-functional teams and short-cycle processes, all of which can drive creativity if we choose. Do some people need silence to create? Sure. Bless them. For those that experience periods of silence, can that be a struggle? Definitely. But the notion of a noble solo genius high on his mountain creating great things is more myth than reality, and it can be a harmful one because it makes a lot of people think they can't be creative, when instead they just need a richer environment. [1] E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M607TcuKf78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M607TcuKf78 [2] E.g.: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/making-of-everything-everywhere-all-at-once-1235253083/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/maki...

alt227 4y ago
> Do some people need silence to create? Sure. Bless them. I would disagree and say your example is pretty much the only one which works this way, because the process and result requires multiple people to be expressive together. Maybe dance and musical performance might fit the same rough description, but in those the skill required is personal based, and so most of the contributers will be in silence concentrating very hard on their own part and how it fits into the restas opposed to being completely collaborative.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > your example is pretty much the only one Which example? I gave 7.
  - alt227 4y ago
    > Which example? I gave 7. IMO Improvistional Theatre is the only valid example here, the other 6 IMO are silent and I will explain why: 1. Music - Done mainly in ones own head, drawing on personal experience and skill to find something which fits with what you are hearing. The process may not be silent, but the creation is. 2. Stand up comedy - The writing/creation is done by the comedian alone, then when workshopping in front of a live audience they assessing the material against the reactions, and adjusting it in their brain silently. An audience reacting is not creating anything, it is informing the creative process going on in the brain. 3. Literature has editors and friends who read drafts - again all the creation is done in silence. Feedback may be given verbally, but that informs the creation, it is not part of it. 4. Product development - This is not artistic creation. It is commerical development. The initial idea and creation is most likely done by an inventor/designer on their own in silence. It is commercial requirements which push this into the further areas of development as you suggest. I fully accept this is a subjective opinion so I am not stating you are wrong, only how other people can have different opinions based on perspective of what creation, the creative process, and indeed silence actually is. You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2?
    - wpietri 4y ago
      How many of these have you actually observed happening? Because your assertions that they are "silent" (in the sense of the original piece) seems wildly out of line with what I've seen. You might try watching the documentary I linked to see how you're wrong about recorded music, for example. And if if your only experience of product development is that sort of top-down drudgery, I'm truly sorry, but it absolutely can be richly creative and collaborative. > You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2? That you're blaming your failures on me is not a good sign, so this is probably my last reply. I also mentioned improvisational music and movies. I could also add staged theater, in which much of the creative work happens in group contexts (starting with table readings, going through all of the rehearsals, and often after).
jarjoura 4y ago
Great creation is never done in isolation. However, I think there's a mismatch of definitions. Getting to a destination, and seeing the big picture usually takes a lot of minds to envision. Once you know the destination, then in most industries, it falls back on the individual to figure out how to get to that destination. That's the quiet part. In the software industry, it's both collaborative and solo at the same time. How many projects have you worked on where someone comes in and clobbers code you've just committed and then there's merge conflicts and wasted effort trying to understand what they were doing? If that hasn't happened to you yet, you're lucky. So on the one hand, agree, you're both trying to build something together, but most likely you're both off in your corner figuring out how to contribute your part. I do think some of the loneliest parts of creation are when you see something no one else does and you can't really explain it without building it first. The amount of effort and energy required to do that is higher than normal and the fear that it could backfire weighs on you.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Software can be like that, but it doesn't have to be. I've been part of teams where we built entire products with pairing, frequent pair rotation, and cross-functional teams. Loneliness is a choice we have made, but I don't think it's a very good one.
  - flockonus 4y ago
    Well, to be fair, both you and the author fall for the same mistake: conflating what works your you/them, in your/their context, with what's generally good / bad.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Oh? Where exactly did I do that?
      - flockonus 4y ago
        re: > Loneliness is a choice we have made, but I don't think it's a very good one. It can be a good choice for particular situations (like the author seems to think of), perhaps some situations call for a balance of alone vs. social. Your original post makes a good case for specific solutions to specific situations (upvoted), but then as usual, the typical root of disagreements are poorly scoped comments.
Aeolun 4y ago
> But the notion of a noble solo genius high on his mountain creating great things is more myth than reality I’m not sure that’s actually true. The more I work the more I find that a single unit doing all the work is absolutely the most efficient. Even if you can ultimately get more work done with many people working on the same thing (and some things cannot be done alone at all), the efficiency is lower. I think that leads a lot of people towards the feeling that lone genius is most likely. I think it’s certainly more likely than any given person being part of a team that’s genius.

alt227 4y ago

> Do some people need silence to create? Sure. Bless them. I would disagree and say your example is pretty much the only one which works this way, because the process and result requires multiple people to be expressive together. Maybe dance and musical performance might fit the same rough description, but in those the skill required is personal based, and so most of the contributers will be in silence concentrating very hard on their own part and how it fits into the restas opposed to being completely collaborative.

wpietri 4y ago
> your example is pretty much the only one Which example? I gave 7.
- alt227 4y ago
  > Which example? I gave 7. IMO Improvistional Theatre is the only valid example here, the other 6 IMO are silent and I will explain why: 1. Music - Done mainly in ones own head, drawing on personal experience and skill to find something which fits with what you are hearing. The process may not be silent, but the creation is. 2. Stand up comedy - The writing/creation is done by the comedian alone, then when workshopping in front of a live audience they assessing the material against the reactions, and adjusting it in their brain silently. An audience reacting is not creating anything, it is informing the creative process going on in the brain. 3. Literature has editors and friends who read drafts - again all the creation is done in silence. Feedback may be given verbally, but that informs the creation, it is not part of it. 4. Product development - This is not artistic creation. It is commerical development. The initial idea and creation is most likely done by an inventor/designer on their own in silence. It is commercial requirements which push this into the further areas of development as you suggest. I fully accept this is a subjective opinion so I am not stating you are wrong, only how other people can have different opinions based on perspective of what creation, the creative process, and indeed silence actually is. You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    How many of these have you actually observed happening? Because your assertions that they are "silent" (in the sense of the original piece) seems wildly out of line with what I've seen. You might try watching the documentary I linked to see how you're wrong about recorded music, for example. And if if your only experience of product development is that sort of top-down drudgery, I'm truly sorry, but it absolutely can be richly creative and collaborative. > You must have miscounted because I cant find another 2? That you're blaming your failures on me is not a good sign, so this is probably my last reply. I also mentioned improvisational music and movies. I could also add staged theater, in which much of the creative work happens in group contexts (starting with table readings, going through all of the rehearsals, and often after).

jarjoura 4y ago

Great creation is never done in isolation. However, I think there's a mismatch of definitions. Getting to a destination, and seeing the big picture usually takes a lot of minds to envision. Once you know the destination, then in most industries, it falls back on the individual to figure out how to get to that destination. That's the quiet part. In the software industry, it's both collaborative and solo at the same time. How many projects have you worked on where someone comes in and clobbers code you've just committed and then there's merge conflicts and wasted effort trying to understand what they were doing? If that hasn't happened to you yet, you're lucky. So on the one hand, agree, you're both trying to build something together, but most likely you're both off in your corner figuring out how to contribute your part. I do think some of the loneliest parts of creation are when you see something no one else does and you can't really explain it without building it first. The amount of effort and energy required to do that is higher than normal and the fear that it could backfire weighs on you.

wpietri 4y ago
Software can be like that, but it doesn't have to be. I've been part of teams where we built entire products with pairing, frequent pair rotation, and cross-functional teams. Loneliness is a choice we have made, but I don't think it's a very good one.
- flockonus 4y ago
  Well, to be fair, both you and the author fall for the same mistake: conflating what works your you/them, in your/their context, with what's generally good / bad.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Oh? Where exactly did I do that?
    - flockonus 4y ago
      re: > Loneliness is a choice we have made, but I don't think it's a very good one. It can be a good choice for particular situations (like the author seems to think of), perhaps some situations call for a balance of alone vs. social. Your original post makes a good case for specific solutions to specific situations (upvoted), but then as usual, the typical root of disagreements are poorly scoped comments.

Aeolun 4y ago

> But the notion of a noble solo genius high on his mountain creating great things is more myth than reality I’m not sure that’s actually true. The more I work the more I find that a single unit doing all the work is absolutely the most efficient. Even if you can ultimately get more work done with many people working on the same thing (and some things cannot be done alone at all), the efficiency is lower. I think that leads a lot of people towards the feeling that lone genius is most likely. I think it’s certainly more likely than any given person being part of a team that’s genius.