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  andy99
  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.
• Alephinitesimal
  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.
• contingencies
  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'.
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  avaer
  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.
• slammers123
  Owl in owl's way I in mine Can't get to sleepWind from the sea Butterflies in embankment weeds Never resting (1915) Taneda Santoka
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  Gecko4072
  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.
• 4ndrewl
  It's called a shower.
• DaveZale
  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.Thanks again.