One of my favourite innovation workshop exercises is when I ask everyone to sit in total silence with their own thoughts, a pad and a pencil. For 10 minutes, 15 minutes even. It feels like an age for the extroverts...a really uncomfortable period of time. The extroverts squirm, they itch to start little side conversations, they want to ask clarifying questions. They look around to see what others are up to. And the introverts look relieved, exuding a sense of being seen for who they are and how they best think. Their focus is inwards, deep in thought and contemplation. Maybe it's because I'm an introvert. And I feel I'm bringing a bit of silent justice back to a world that is built for extroverts. But in reality it's because the best ideas have multiple startpoints, and if you don't make the space for all of the different startpoints, you risk missing half of the potential brilliance in people's minds.
(I do love you extroverts...both/and, not either/or)
Side thought - is Claude an introvert or an extrovert? I think maybe an introvert, depending on the System Instructions of course. And is the problem of all this AI-content-slop that we're enduring, that it's mainly human extroverts using AI-introversion in a way that human introverts never would...? i.e. putting content out there because it exists and that it might be valuable, rather than because it's considered and actually is valuable...? Both extroversion and introversion are of course valuable, but the content overload, the illusion of expertise, the more, more, more that AI is enabling is, without doubt, causing us some issues...or maybe it's just us introverts that are feeling overwhelmed?