There’s a vast gap of meaningful, rewarding, and lightweight creative collaboration models between (say) bantering games on twitter and co-authoring a book or co-building a product. The transaction costs in setting up even modest little collaboration are too high. Wonder why.
Conversation
Paul Erdos is a good example of doing this well. What with his system of modest bounties on math problems and showing up at friends homes with a suitcase ready to collaborate saying “my brain is open”. His case illuminates some sufficient conditions...
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1. He was a genius whose contribution elevated the value of “small”
2. Math is peculiarly well-suited to breaking down work into small chunks
3. Capital input for math is coffee
4. He was single and mobile
5. He inhabited discipline where most peers had institutional homes
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These conditions are incredibly hard to replicate even in the next-cheapest kind of collaboration space, like say between writers and illustrators.
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Moving from academia to industry, frequency of “let’s collaborate!” overtures dropped to 1/3. Moving from industry to free agency, another 1/3, so now at 1/9.
Oddly enough the *yield* rate of successful collaborations has gone *up* slightly.
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In academia (postdoc level) I had 1 tiny collaboration outside of students and advisors — a friend wrote a bit of code to solve a sub-problem. Not publication-worthy though.
At Xerox, I had 2 side collaborations outside of budgeted work in my own teams. Both led to patents.
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In 7 years of free agency, outside of work I’ve paid for or been paid for, and not counting contributions to ribbonfarm where I only played editor, it feels like I’ve done a lot of collaborations with output, but both the creative relationship and output have been illegible.
Replying to
1-2 small ones like bitcoin visualization with
1-2 medium sized ones like getting a mastodon up with Zach Faddis, building longform course with
Biggest one has probably been with getting refactor camp spun up as an event with legs
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As a free agent, true overtures (a collaboration idea) are expensive but easier to act on once you actually mutually agree.
In institutions, overtures are cheap — every watercooler convo provokes one — but turning into action is harder. Everybody is an overcommitted martyr.
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Graded by the severity with which they constrict out-of-planned-activity, universities are probably (and surprisingly, given mission) much worse than corporations, after adjusting for unusual friendliness of funding structure. Youd expect more than there is.
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I’d be interested in seeing stats on joint publications that can’t be attributed to formal advisor-student relationships, or to peers funded by the same agency/grant.
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I think I've mostly lost my stamina for the heroic, solitary creative effort. I enjoy steady-drip, small-chunk-long-term activities with no heavy lifts, preferably with a collaborative component. Very hard to engineer such activities though.
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In western culture, we associate valuable output with dramatic, viral, launch drama, "appearing in public" in Arendt sense, and a sense of historicity and action. We associate quiet-drip work with either craft that's durable but not historic, or outright ahistorical laboring.
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This is not entirely unfair. Historicity *does* tend to correlate to dramatic conclusions of individual creative heroism and dramatic beginnings of collective historic chapters. Making *is* mostly "mere" craft, tossed after it wears out. Most quiet drip work is transient labor.
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Take Jiro Dreams of Sushi for instance. You could argue that being in a documentary makes Jiro a "historic" figure who shaped history, just via a quieter Japanese ethos. Otoh, really... is there more there than transient labor that will be forgotten, and some wabi-sabi equipment?
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But I think something is slipping through the cracks of the correlation between the three modes of vita activa (historic action, making, laboring) and performance appearances (appearance drama, background economic context, invisible labor context)
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Make that a 3x3 matrix and ask whether each of the appearance modes can have the consequential structure of each of the vita activa modes? Can you shape history invisibly laboring at home outside of public view for years, with never a dramatic "appearance" moment? I think so.
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Conversely, can something that has all the drama of public appearance have none of the historic consequentiality of Arendtian action we correlate it to? Of course. Most politics is in fact like that.
Fine, I guess I should make this 3x3 matrix and blog it.
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