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Comment by babyshake | Hacker News Reader

conversely, do lonely children have good ideas?

Playing along with your question, I suggest no more so than popular children, however the popular children are exposed to pressure to discard the good ideas and have no incentive for acting on them.

Those few lonely children with good ideas, OTOH, have very little pressuring them to abandon their ideas. Who asking them to stop coding and go out to play?

interesting. I've noticed some famously creative people had a period of convalescence during their childhood. e.g. Descartes apparently formulated the idea of x-y (ie Cartesian) coordinates while bed-ridden.

I don't know how strong the correlation is (maybe lots of bedridden kids don't become creative? maybe lots of non-bedridden kids do become creative?), and there are other reasons for being lonely.

Well, if you're lonlely, bedridden or have any kind of impediments to living the "conventional" life, then I'd presume that solitary (and somewhat sedentary) fields like science and arts would be your outlet for creativity.

On the other hand, I have a friend who you wouldn't call creative in the conventional sense, but comes up with increasingly imaginative ways to pull women. Ultimately, it's what you devote your time to, whether it's by free will or some limitation.

I used to be asked by my family, etc to go out and play... only that I didn't care much or found it quite boring. I'm sure mine's not the only case.

I used to as well. Instead I'd stay in and play Starcraft. I wonder if that's what helped lead to my ideas (good and bad).

Being popular generally requires being a good practitioner of convention. Good ideas almost by definition are never part of convention but rather define future convention. Therefore if one is popular and thus is consumed by convention, in most cases he/she won't be a source of good ideas.

* This tho probably only applies to good ideas as in paradigm shifting game changers. If you include minor evolutions of existing ideas (that can be quite successful financially of course), being popular might even help to come up with those.

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