Personally, I don’t find that skeptical comments like Max’s discourage me from ideating. And the suggestion to keep ideation and evaluation separate might discourage the latter, since it’s actually not obvious how to operationalize ‘keeping separate’.
I’ve previously read a study that suggested evaluation during brainstorming led to less ideas—I don’t remember where.
Personally, I feel less inclined to post when I know someone will tell me my idea is wrong.
Edit: A Harvard Business Review article about brainstorming and ‘evaluation anxiety’ led me to this article, which I have not been able to read yet.
A general comment about this thread rather than a reply to Khorton in particular: The original post didn’t suggest that this should be a brainstorming thread, and I didn’t interpret it like that. I interpreted it as a question looking for answers that the posters believe, rather than only hypothesis generation/brainstorming.
When I was studying maths it was made clear to us that some things were obvious, but not obviously obvious. Furthermore, many things I thought were obvious were in fact not obvious, and some were not even true at all!
Personally, I don’t find that skeptical comments like Max’s discourage me from ideating. And the suggestion to keep ideation and evaluation separate might discourage the latter, since it’s actually not obvious how to operationalize ‘keeping separate’.
I’ve previously read a study that suggested evaluation during brainstorming led to less ideas—I don’t remember where. Personally, I feel less inclined to post when I know someone will tell me my idea is wrong.
Edit: A Harvard Business Review article about brainstorming and ‘evaluation anxiety’ led me to this article, which I have not been able to read yet.
https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8616.00154
A general comment about this thread rather than a reply to Khorton in particular: The original post didn’t suggest that this should be a brainstorming thread, and I didn’t interpret it like that. I interpreted it as a question looking for answers that the posters believe, rather than only hypothesis generation/brainstorming.
When I was studying maths it was made clear to us that some things were obvious, but not obviously obvious. Furthermore, many things I thought were obvious were in fact not obvious, and some were not even true at all!