There's a video of Dijkstra talking about Mozart and Beethoven as opposite poles -- the former wrote everything neat and right, the latter kept revising by gluing bits of paper in his scores. In order to further mark his position at some point Dijkstra stopped typesetting his papers at all and began to write them right the first time.
I'm a more ambiguous, big-picture-even-in-small-problems thinker; and I thrive with more detail-oriented coworkers that walk me through the trees as I walk them through the forest. This has a lot to do with me being able to think in very ambiguous terms and narrow down as needed to interact or provide for the needs of others. Left to my own devices I come up with extremely abstract philosophical theories that are not useful at all! Conversely left to their own devices precision people become paperclip optimizers.
I want to speculate further into "edgy" territory: maybe the whole gender divide that seems to come up in psychometrics and the labor market and so on is really an ambiguity/precision divide. The evolution of technology has actually increased the value of ambiguity, as computers do much of the precision work for us -- maybe making tech "woman-friendly" is rather about identifying those big-picture/detail-oriented complementarities.
So there's this whole ambiguity aversion spectrum. Maybe it correlates to the autism spectrum, maybe it doesn't. It's arguably much more important. Even in mathematics you have Poincaré, a demigod among men that kept publishing papers with significant mistakes, while in the social sciences you have people like Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour who approach their subjects with utmost precision and dedication to detail.
I'm a more ambiguous, big-picture-even-in-small-problems thinker; and I thrive with more detail-oriented coworkers that walk me through the trees as I walk them through the forest. This has a lot to do with me being able to think in very ambiguous terms and narrow down as needed to interact or provide for the needs of others. Left to my own devices I come up with extremely abstract philosophical theories that are not useful at all! Conversely left to their own devices precision people become paperclip optimizers.
I want to speculate further into "edgy" territory: maybe the whole gender divide that seems to come up in psychometrics and the labor market and so on is really an ambiguity/precision divide. The evolution of technology has actually increased the value of ambiguity, as computers do much of the precision work for us -- maybe making tech "woman-friendly" is rather about identifying those big-picture/detail-oriented complementarities.