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.
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.
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.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.
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...
This has just as much chilling effect. At the very least it's gatekeeping.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are obviously highly neurotic.
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.
I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own strawman to attack.
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.
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.