"So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, red is the color."
Abstract and attention-to-details are opposites, and it's difficult to do both simultaneously. Both are valuable.
I wonder if this is applicable to programming languages. Because lisp enables abstractions, do users tend to focus on abstractions more than on details? Whereas C encourages more attention-to-detail at the expense of abstractions. It's not just what these languages are good at, but what type of thinking they encourage.
Of course, abstraction and attention-to-details are not mutually exclusive and there are ways of attending to both; but I'm intrigued by the article's suggestion of a trade-off.
i remember seeing a recent HN post about the correlation between hackerthink and spacial orientation. this is a great follow up to that story. it would be nice if there was a feature that would connect the two (something like a suggested thread merge).
Clearly his proofreaders were in a blue room.