Perhaps you misunderstood. For instance, suppose you paint bridges and you want to hang out with people who think you should paint kittens. You don't have to paint the kittens, and can still be "you" when you are not around them. The article seemed to indicate that Van Gogh feared that the people would change him, and I'm saying this is not a reason to avoid people.

The software analogy here would be like "I'm not going to talk to people about my new startup idea because hearing their opinions and thoughts would taint my work" -- which doesn't make any sense to me, or possibly even more so "I don't want to be around other software people talking about anything because that will change the way I think".

The argument is drawing the argument of you-need-to-be-alone from Van Gogh ends up with it not being valid. Van Gogh is amazing (see his stuff in person if you can sometime, it doesn't photograph well), but these are seperate orthogonal things.

It depends on how obvious you are about it I think. You can ignore the noise of the group (not really process it, or spend time on it) while still pretending to care about it.