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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

> after a initial proof of ability.

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

trust is very VERY expensive commodity

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.

This comment is spot on

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.

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.

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.