[21asdffdsa12]

This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears.

Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.

Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any scientific or creative institution.

[flats]

Interesting—this feels like a very “engineering manager” sort of observation that isn’t actually all that generalizable.

My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).

I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.

[jayd16]

Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes.

But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.

[c22]

If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's handle?

[jayd16]

In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's just a joke.

[im3w1l]

I think the joke claimed to make a real point, and it's totally fair to critize that point.

[peacebeard]

We're going to have to collect data on the ratio of bathroom graffiti between tags and limericks. Anecdotally, where I live a it's mostly silly goosery.

Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.

A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.

[tejtm]

Over half a century later it still rings clear as a bell ...

    He who writes on bathroom walls
    rolls their shit in little balls.

    He who reads these lines of whit
    eats these little balls of shit.

[digitalsushi]

it's like bragging you're Spartacus

[ludicrousdispla]

I agree with your main points, but as I have both a BFA and an MBA I want to point out that the MBA focused very much on creating high-trust work environnments.

I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

Just an observation from a non-MBA. I feel that the MBA management class likes to create two class society where there is management class and a worker class. The management class has high trust amongst each other but no trust for the workers. The workers need to be controlled tightly and can’t be trusted. They are extremely reluctant to take feedback from the people who do the work. Better to pay consultants a lot of money. I have seen that in almost every larger company where I was employee or contractor.

[RHSman2]

How do you know if someone has an MBA? They’ll tell you.

[themafia]

I've never understood the "high-strust/low-trust" social dichotomy. I've never processed "society" as a single entity, but a large system with many independent aspects, and my levels of trust vary wildly across them and over time.

I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access to one or the other.

[kjksf]

It's not that complicated: statistics matter.

5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.

You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.

You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.

Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.

> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"

To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".

Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".

[themafia]

> Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society.

We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well?

> To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".

To make my intention clear, the other difference is "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was reacting to.

> What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work.

I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in my point of view.

[gzread]

The point was that both crime and trust are aggregate statistics.

[inglor_cz]

That indicates that you live in a relatively high-trust society. Obviously there is a spectrum and aspects, but they tend to correlate.

I don't know of any real-world society that would be very high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked), but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this happens [0]).

[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/how-to-stop-tur...

[esafak]

Have you not been to any so called low trust country? The difference is quite apparent in how people regard each other. With your alias, parts of Italy would qualify.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...

[grigri907]

I think you gotta define where you're drawing the box. Depending on the context, "society" might be your nation, your office, or just a 1:1 relationship with your coworker.

[fix4fun]

Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science.

That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of the internet ;)

[gchamonlive]

> Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science. That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical.

No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in practice with time.

Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their research bearing fruit.

[gdorsi]

I see this post as something motivational around public writing or public speaking.

It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.

On general work level it's different.

There the trust needs to be balanced.

People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.

Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.

[miroljub]

Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the centuries came from the high trust style societies.

With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.

[vincnetas]

Reputation. Its a good concept. We might need to bring it back and not externalise it to linked-in blindly. Honour is also nice to have.

[mapontosevenths]

I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea.

Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.

No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.

[pibaker]

A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers rides without questioning too much about their motivations. If you have to do a criminal background check — which is just another form of consulting a public ledger of reputations — before letting him in your car, you are by definition not trusting him.

[thwarted]

Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.

But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.

[mapontosevenths]

When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.

My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.

It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.

A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.

[miroljub]

To bring the honor system back, we need to value honor again as a society. Doing honorable things should be compensated in some tangible way, as well as doing dishonorable things should be punished by society.

PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.

[inglor_cz]

I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.

[miroljub]

> I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.

[inglor_cz]

Pashtuns in Afghan mountains have a strong in-group honor system and they are one of the least technologically developed societies in the world. So were many Early Medieval societies, where honor was the only valuable quality a noble person could possess.

Meanwhile, Early Modern Italy (Renaissance) was notoriously treacherous and, at the same time, very mentally productive.

When I skim across societies and ages, that correlation does not seem to be there.

[matt3210]

Leadership requires hourly updates all the way down to me so I barely get anything done

[criddell]

I always wonder how they justify stuff like that. What's the cost of producing those updates (including the opportunity cost of not doing something else) vs the value of the report?

[derangedHorse]

> Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work

No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.

[timr]

> Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.

I don’t know about “high trust”, but I can say with confidence that the “make more mistakes” thesis misses a critical point: evolutionary winnowing isn’t so great if you’re one of the thousands of “adjacent” organisms that didn’t survive. Which, statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with resources and squander them without results will be less trusted in the future [1].

Point being, mistakes always have a cost, and while it can be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios (amateur painting), it can be a terrible idea in other contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm wisely.

What you’re characterizing as “low trust” is, in most cases, a system that isn’t trying to optimize for creativity, and that’s fine. You don’t want your bank to be “creative” with accounting, for example.

[1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes, to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of their current work. So you see people who have lost literally billions of dollars in comically incompetent entrepreneurial disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise hundreds of millions more for a random idea.

[zombot]

> after a initial proof of ability.

This has just as much chilling effect. At the very least it's gatekeeping.

[dominotw]

recently execs in companies think software dev isnt creative work because llm can churn out equivalents. So they are openly tracking all sorts of metrics on devs now.

[mapontosevenths]

If those metrics are good they will be able to use them to find out that the metrics themselves dont work.

[ferroman]

trust is very VERY expensive commodity

[AIorNot]

This comment is spot on

[mvrckhckr]

I find that restrictions not only don't kill creative work, they enable it. Measuring anything makes you consider constraints, which helps foster better creativity - at least for me, and I see the same in others as well.

[noisy_boy]

Restrictions have dimensions. I have enjoyed working in highly cooperative situations where we had restrictions of resources and rules but no restrictions in terms of allowing us to find solutions. Infact those solutions were celebrated by my manager who had to work within the confines of rules and resources defined for him. It was great fun.

[mvrckhckr]

That sounds like a very good environment. There are always restrictions, just maybe not major and/or ones that seem arbitrary.

[austin-cheney]

That isn’t really correct.

Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism. Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least concerned by impacts of increased observation.

Furthermore, high trust social environments only contribute to the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social environments creative people remain equally creative but either do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly for subversive purposes.

[atoav]

I teach at an art university for 8 years now. I would highly doubt that: The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism.

In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met highly creative people who are extremely (unhealthy so) concerned with what others think, yet go their own path anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do things in a way that appears as if it is outside of the frame of normal parameters. But this isn't so simple either, because maybe it is context dependent. A punk musician may live in disregard of the aesthetical conventions of society, but they also may have a traded canon of styles and works their own subculture. So maybe that punk doesn't care what society thinks about them, but they may care about what other punks think.

My experience with hundreds of art students is that there is no correlation between how independent someone works and how creative their output is. There are many ways of producing interesting ideas and the lone (usually: male) genius being the only true way is by this point a well-refuted idea.

[Lalabadie]

I think the idea that one must be naturally impervious to shame to be "the right sort" of creative is attractive, but it's used to disregard the courage necessary to show oneself and open up in the way that builds the creator.

Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are obviously highly neurotic.

[austin-cheney]

I did not base my comment on personal observations. It comes straight from psychology and the big 5.

I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least restricted by those who are most eager to exercise decisions and try new things without fear of consequence, whether real or perceived.

[vixen99]

Two folk who set the direction of the modern world - Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

https://historycollection.com/16-examples-of-the-madness-of-... https://www.science.org/content/article/origin-darwins-anxie...

Can't vouch for the accuracy of these descriptions but they don't suggest lack of neuroticism however brought on. Bodily dysfunction of whatever kind can be causative of course.

[vodkadin]

Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis. Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are independent things. You can be highly open-minded and highly neurotic. I’d seriously question your understanding of the Big 5.

[austin-cheney]

> These are independent things.

I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own strawman to attack.

[vodkadin]

The logic in your OP is absolutely muddled. And it's evident I'm not the only one that followed your reasoning to you implying neuroticism is negatively correlated to creativity.

To restate your argument: openness is correlated to creativity (not controversial) and being neurotic dampens that because you care a lot what people think (no evidence).

There is no correlation between neuroticism and creativity. Neuroticism doesn't effect openness so it makes no sense. Either your argument is that neuroticism influences openness and that influences creativity or your argument is I just think neuroticism makes you less creative because I just think so. You might as well not even mention the Big 5 because it doesn't effect your last point.

[OrderlyTiamat]

This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.

Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.

Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.

I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.

[austin-cheney]

> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness.

I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did.

What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent compared to everybody else, but that is numerically irrational.

Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about everything including third party observation. Less fear and less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.

[OrderlyTiamat]

> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism

You did claim this.

> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people

This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".

You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.

[austin-cheney]

You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it does not matter what the comments actually say.

And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.

I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.