Why We Must Form Communities of Creative Outliers
Let's Speed Up Societal Progress
The argument in one sentence: if there is more creative output and we make it more efficient for people who create creative output to collaborate and to gain feedback on such, then it is more likely that we will have more societal progress. Therefore, it would be a good idea to create communities of creative outliers to foster this.
The following is a more detailed summary:
Creative outliers push society forward towards progress by innovating
It would be massively beneficial if creative outliers could get to know each other more easily and support one another through community
Having communities of creative outliers increases the chances that both their values (exploration, experimentation, etc.) and their ideas will propagate.
It becomes more efficient to get feedback from people who are more likely to be qualified to give feedback. People who value novelty are more likely to be capable of understanding novel creative output than people who only reason from analogy or reason based on what currently already exists.
There is plenty of room for experimentation regarding the kinds of communities that can be made with this fundamental idea.
Societies that stagnate because there is a lack of experimentation regarding “direction” or trying new ideas and only do more of what they are currently doing are the ones which will benefit the most from this.
Therefore, societies, especially ones that stagnate or that are in most need of progress for one reason or another should prioritize recognizing creative outliers, supporting them, and giving them a community to support one another.
Consider the greats of science Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and a lot more. Consider cultural innovators, people like Siddharta Gautama, Socrates, Confucius, Nietzsche, etc. Consider modern technological innovators like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jensen Huang, Peter Thiel, etc.
What is common among such people is that they explore and experiment. They try new things that have not been tried before. At best, they redefine what most people assume to be possible. They expand the boundaries of knowledge and this is important because alongside the countless things that knowledge enables us to do, knowledge is what enables us to alleviate suffering.
Now, the problem is that throughout history, people who challenge the status quo are not always accepted, to say the least. Consider the central story in Christianity regarding what was done to Christ and how various prophets were treated. Socrates was killed for his ideas. Consider the alienation of people like Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikola Tesla, and Vincent Van Gogh. Consider how Galileo Galilei was put in house arrest due to heliocentrism, his perceived “heresy.” Look at the significant pushback that Charles Darwin had to face given how radical his ideas were at the time. One can keep on going when it comes to citing examples of how people who provided immense value to society by innovating were faced with a high amount of skepticism, and at worst, death.
One may say that these are exceptions to the rule and that for every creative person and idea are a hundred more that are useless and do no good, probably even harm. And you might be right, maybe there are good reasons for why people are skeptical. However, this is no excuse to fail to nurture creative people in a society nor is it an excuse to disregard creative ideas period. It can be argued that they should be prioritized a lot more because of the potential immense value that even one creative outlier can bring to society. And as a society, we must maximize the probability that those who are capable of bringing immense value to society manage to do it successfully, otherwise stagnation will happen. The positive value can outweigh the negative. Considering the incredibly high failure rate for startup companies and yet, the ones that do succeed end up bringing in trillions of dollars.
My suggestion to do this is for individuals and societies to create communities that fosters creative outliers. An example would be for universities to try this and I talk about universities because of the amount of access they have to people who are competent and how easy it would be for them to experiment, filter, and give incentives. There is plenty of room for experimentation regarding the kinds of communities that can be made with this fundamental idea. Should it be offline or online? A mix of both? What kinds of creative people should be included? Should there be incentives given for doing certain things? If so, what kind? How many people should be included? Etc. An actual example of this in history is the Homebrew Hacker Club facilitating the exchange of information and resources among players who played a crucial role in the development of the personal computer as we know it today. We need more of such groups in different societies and we need to try forming different kinds of such groups. For example, perhaps cross-disciplinary dialogue could be a good thing.
Potentially, this will enable creative outliers to get feedback from people who are more likely to understand them and the importance of novel work since they engage in it themselves. They will do so in a manner more efficient because community building can make it easier to filter out people who only reason from analogy or are only capable of understanding something if it is similar to something that already exists. Creative outliers will be able to exchange resources and assist one another. Their ideas will be easier to propagate and spread to other people and even to the broader culture which is another factor that makes feedback more efficient. And for the pragmatic, successful projects can indeed lead to high revenue generation as most apparently demonstrated by silicon valley or successful content creators.
There is an irony in saying this but societies that stagnate, do not value individuality as much, and are problematic, are the ones in most need of such communities. The more stagnation and problems there are in a society, the more they need to prioritize the fostering of creative outliers in order to make progress. High IQ or pattern recognition speed or efficiency boosting is not enough, there needs to be more willingness to experiment with different directions which creativity is all about.
And the irony is that the more a society needs this due to their stagnation, the less likely that they are going to engage in this idea or try to foster creative outliers as it is a factor for why they ended up stagnating in the first place.
In conclusion, fostering communities of creative outliers, which is actually less about technical know how and more so about a different from norm way of looking at the world, that is, the willingness to explore the unknown and experimentation with new ideas, will increase the likelihood of societal progress because of the reasons discussed.