At the very least I think we can be more confident in the generators/evaluators (or /assessors) dichotomy, than in the further claim that the former tend to be disagreeable.
I’m coming at this from science, where lot of top generators have a strong “this is so cool!” sort of vibe to them – they have a thousand ideas and can’t wait to try them out. Don’t get me wrong, I think disagreeable generators play an important role in science too, but it’s not my go-to image of a generator in that space.
[Wild speculation] It’s plausible to me that this varies by field, based on the degree to which that field tends to strike out into new frontiers of knowledge vs generate new theories for things that are already well-studied. In the latter case, in order for new ideas to be useful, the previous work on the topic needs to be wrong in some way – and if the people who did the previous work are still around they’ll probably want to fight you. So if you want to propose really new ideas in those sorts of fields you’ll need to get into fights – and so generators in these fields will be disproportionately disagreeable. Whereas if everyone agrees that there are oodles of things in the field that are criminally understudied, you can potentially get quite a long way as a generator before you need to start knocking down other people’s work.
Obviously if this theory I just made up has any validity, it will be more of a spectrum than a binary. But this sort of dynamic might be at play here.
At the very least I think we can be more confident in the generators/evaluators (or /assessors) dichotomy, than in the further claim that the former tend to be disagreeable.
I’m coming at this from science, where lot of top generators have a strong “this is so cool!” sort of vibe to them – they have a thousand ideas and can’t wait to try them out. Don’t get me wrong, I think disagreeable generators play an important role in science too, but it’s not my go-to image of a generator in that space.
[Wild speculation] It’s plausible to me that this varies by field, based on the degree to which that field tends to strike out into new frontiers of knowledge vs generate new theories for things that are already well-studied. In the latter case, in order for new ideas to be useful, the previous work on the topic needs to be wrong in some way – and if the people who did the previous work are still around they’ll probably want to fight you. So if you want to propose really new ideas in those sorts of fields you’ll need to get into fights – and so generators in these fields will be disproportionately disagreeable. Whereas if everyone agrees that there are oodles of things in the field that are criminally understudied, you can potentially get quite a long way as a generator before you need to start knocking down other people’s work.
Obviously if this theory I just made up has any validity, it will be more of a spectrum than a binary. But this sort of dynamic might be at play here.