The book Disciplined Minds discusses how the more educated and professional workers are more often than not the more conservative thinkers, somewhat by virtue of having been institutionalized and thus tunnel visioned in what's a "right" answer. So the generalization is not off base and not without precedent.

Adding to that there is indeed what called “Divergent thinking” [1], it is a way to explore thoughts in a diverse way and the ability to come up with creative solutions.

This is different from the more linear directed thoughts promoted in institutions. I often find people in the HN crowd to be more in the latter crowd than the former, but nonetheless intelligent.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking

Thanks for the link!

When I speak to artists or people in more creative fields, I find that, typically, the conversations are more improvisational in nature. The conversation just ebbs and flows naturally, with energy and a lot of spontaneous thought building. The strange book Impro is a good read for this.

Whereas, when I speak with engineers or scientists, it feels like the conversation has a much higher chance of lurching, especially when you start to veer off the beaten path.

I consider myself to be a bit more divergent than most, but being in a technical field is a bit of an impedance mismatch. I think a component of divergent thinking is sometimes extreme thinking, wondering about what if and ignoring, for the time being, how to get there.

I hear that. I usually have the same, I studied art and all of the people I met in that sphere are different from a general crowd, and quite a contrast to the offices I later worked in as a front end dev or designer. I usually ended up with meeting like minded people from other departments rather than my own (which often was interpreted as not being loyal to any team in the department —-ack office politics, what a minefield!—-

The book impro, who is it’s writer? I see a couple of results coming up.

The book I was referring to is Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone: https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Joh...

It's called overfitting to me.

The generalization is absurd and it's not intellectually honest to defend it.