[kuhewa]

Cons of private thinking — I've spent multiple days on mocking up and deciding on the best version of one element of a project. Only to spend 45 seconds describing the issue out loud, dialectically in a tea room conversation, to realise there is a very obvious and simple decision and I had been overlooking the proverbial forest for the trees. It wasn't pointed out to me by my collocutor, just the act of organising the description of the problem and arguments for either version cogently enough to share revealed the solution.

[contravariant]

The real question there is whether you could still have hit upon the solution without thinking about it privately first.