alt Hacker NewsJust 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.
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History of creativity, I reckon. There's always been places and times that are just fertile. 470BCE Athens, the Renaissance, 1900 Vienna, 1990s Bristol...
I thought Grothendieck's "example" was a good one. It's not that the academic environment stymied him, it's that he built up a practice of solitary creativity that helped him take inputs from his surroundings and fold them into his own framework. Both the solitary practice and the communication with fellow leading mathematicians was essential for his growth and output.
I think the point the post was trying to make was that; spend too long in an "academic" or "professional" environment and you become too contoured by the mores of the establishment to truly innovate. Spend too little time and you toil away in a cave, at best reinventing things that were invented already without your knowledge. I think in a heavily networked world like today, where there's also a lot of competitive pressure in these establishments, the solitude is probably worth thinking about more.
It's something I think a lot about in terms of capital allocation in academia and in tech, both in terms of monetary capital and the capital of time (which is limited by its very nature.) Investors and funds are heavily affected by the trends surrounding them but a minimum amount of funding and social buy-in is needed to really develop ideas. There's a lot more I have to say on the topic but it's perhaps a little too tangent to this article itself.
To academics, how often do you end up chasing an idea because it was popular in a conference? How often do you chase grants? Math might be one of the "easier" fields to be adventurous since mathematical innovation can be independently verified relatively simply compared to many other fields.