There is something about the way we geeks debate things (politely, but with supreme confidence and competitively without much actual collaboration) which is absolutely exhausting.
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Agreed. I've been trying recently to help build spaces that actively reject this form of discourse… it can be hard to maintain, and I fall back into bad habits myself, but it feels good to try to have collaborative spaces where the possibility space of tradeoffs can be explored.
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At one place we have considering tradeoffs and avoiding framing opinions as fact as part of the rules. We could sometimes be better about enforcing it, but at this point it but its good when this becomes generally self-sustaining.
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A big thing is not banning opinions and preferences, but more encouraging people to be more honest about them, to explain *why* they feel the way they do, to appreciate other perspectives, and to frame discussions in a less zero-sum way.
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I imagine this could be *much* harder in the context of a shared project though, where ultimately decisions must be made, and you will not be able to please everyone. Not really sure how to deal with this though.
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I’d be interested in how other kinds of groups deal with this kind of thing - thinking of creative collectives, like in art, design, theater, etc. I'm sure we're not alone in our struggles here.
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At least in those fields it's a lot harder to pretend your opinions and tastes are wholly based in facts and logic, but perhaps I'm mistaken?
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Reminded of discussions I have had with in the past about challenges in resolving creative disagreements in theater productions. 🤔
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I remember a fellow design schoolmate who was happy to move to programming because it meant they didn't have to convince as many people about subjective things, haha. This was more about clients though, less helpful internally.
Ohhh also reminded of this excerpt (starting at 3:41) about using “If I could wave a magic wand” in creative collaboration: youtu.be/5CRSXcoasQQ?t= – a different scenario, from a different perspective, but shows that this stuff doesn't just pop up in tech stuff.
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Anyway, apologies for my massive ramble of a subthread! But yeah, I do feel your original post quite a bit :(
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