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I came here to write something similar: the article does not pay enough attention to changing environments. The dotcom bubble ideas that are now successful do not share the same background environment of internet availability, bandwidth, networks of datacenters, storage, powerful portable computers, and all around higher digital literacy and people used to interacting with computers. If these things hadn't changed then trying and trying again would have continued to fail with high probability.

As written, the statement by Ford is wrong, it is important to keep a kind of Tabu list detailing what didn't work in the absence of gradient information. What experts get wrong is they fail to be sensitive to dependent parameters that are not static (I know the article says something like this too but it sort of glosses over it). The problem is many of these are hard to say outside of hindsight.

Perhaps listing the requirements before launching and listing the state of those requirements after failure, in addition to the idea might form a basis for what to retry. An expert might say something like "A website for dog food and toys will never work, we already did that 20 years ago and it failed spectacularly", when they should be saying "A Website for dog food did not work 20 years ago, here were our requirements and environment, has anything changed?". But even that isn't perfect so the process can't be deterministic.

> Similarly, seeing a list of past failures may inspire variations that seek to overcome the shortcoming without having to waste time first reproducing the same failure. One can try to learn _why_ it failed and use that to guide future attempts.

To me, this is a big thing that survivorship bias overlooks, to the detriment of us all. Taking Edison's "1000 failures to invent a lightbulb" can often be more instructive than the end result, even if you're not interested in inventing lightbulbs.

> The advice to be wary of experts reminds me of the advice to avoid criticism while brainstorming, the idea in common being that criticism and negativity supposedly stifles creativity.

I think the admonition to avoid criticism during brainstorming is so that any idea, no matter how infeasible, may be put forth. As I've understood it, this period of "unfettered criticism" should be markedly short, and while ideas will be recorded for future reference (and perhaps modification), they can safely be winnowed under the harsh criticism of reality after the brainstorming session.

That said, it has been common sense for quite some time that having a "box to think in" can help foster creative solutions to escaping the box.

I don't mind criticism, as long as it's constructive and not for the sake of bringing down someone.

"I did not see you considering X factor, do you think its impact will be insignificant" is a helpful, constructive criticism.

"This will not work. You're stupid to pursue this, pursue something else likely to succeed" is not.

Berating someone for having an idea is never the point of a brainstorm anyway.

> I don't mind criticism, as long as it's constructive

I think the point of "criticism-free" brainstorming is that it is time constrained, and a free for all. It's precisely geared towards getting people to not hold back, to throw anything out there.

The criticism will always come, sooner or later.

we avoid negativity during brainstorming to create psychological safety. that in turn expands the boundaries of creativity. the process doesn't end there however, which is what your criticism sems to assume, since we need to winnow down the ideas generated to a feasible subset, and then further to a pursued option. this latter part is where criticism (but not negativity) is employed to iterate toward the chosen option. literally no one argues the strawman that there can be no criticism during decision-making.

optimizing both divergence and convergence processes leads to good decision-making, not just one or the other.

To your point about psychological safety, that is actually reason to have an initial phase of idea generation occur individually before meeting in a group. Even a fully "positive-only" group likely inhibits divergent thinking to some degree.

Regarding groups, research challenges your claim that avoiding criticism during brainstorming "expands the boundaries of creativity", and that criticism is only useful for "winnowing down [already proposed] options." There are multiple studies showing that criticism during discussion _produces_ (not just selects) better ideas.

This is a good academic review of literature covering these topics https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2020.14...

no one's arguing that we can't (or shouldn't) have any criticism during brainstorming, only that negativity (which can also be read as aggression) reduces psychological safety, which in turn reduces creativity. people do pull back (consciously and subconsciously) when the sting of (negative) criticism looms.

idea-focused criticism (rather than people-focused) can hone decision-making, but we still need that psychological safety to get the best outcomes. these things can both be true at the same time, and we can both succeed and fail at fostering either or both and not get the best outcome.

just as we might criticize an overly safety-oriented decision-making process, criticism-oriented decision-making processes tend to degenerate into contests of aggression, which tend to produce inferior outcomes. dogmatism in any direction doesn't help.

To put it in a nutshell: Criticism should be put forth in a "let's get this to work, together. Failure should not be feared; it's another data point" mindset.

From my experience, many of the problems can be solved by spending time on extended introspection. The problem with authorities is that they often don't have a firsthand experience of the problems itself.