I’m going to sound rude here but I think the debate around solitudal achievements suffers a great deal from bias. For one, survivor bias favours the ideas emerging from deep thinking work. We overestimate however how much of that is the deep thinking vs quantity tradeoff. Einstein had many, many, many ideas and the majority of them were pretty bad if not outright outrageous. If you have the time and environment to produce a million ideas and pursue them, your likelihood of a good idea goes up. A second issue is that ideas almost never come up in isolation. The countless women behind the men erased from history tell exactly this story. Nowadays we fight the same fights about attribution. I should write a detailed account on why the arguments named in the article are not supported by evidence from cognitive research, but I for one am convinced a conductive environment is 1000% the ingredient necessary to come up with revolutionary work, rather than some magical great man thinking fantasy.