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>For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it ... he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given I'm sure Jobs was br

>For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it ... he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given I'm sure Jobs was brilliant, but this kind of praise still reminds of this Enrico Fermi's story [1]: During the "Manhattan project" (the making of nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a "great" general. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that if the chance of winning one battle is 1/2 then the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/2^5 = 1/32 = 3%. "So you are right, General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius." [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0607109.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0607109.pdf

burntoutfire 7y ago
I can't believe that a brilliant man like Fermi would actually say that. The outcomes of battles are not random events. It's equivalent to saying that Floyd Mayweather, who so far has won 50 out of 50 of his fights, is not a great boxer, because, out of millions of people boxing, there mathematically ought to be one person who just won 50 times in a row. The thing is winning battles (or boxing fights) is not flipping a coin - it involves little more skill than that.
- namirez 7y ago
  What Fermi is saying is that if 3 out of every 100 generals are great, these 3 should be able to win more than 5 consecutive battles in order to beat the statistical noise. In your example, Mayweather's chance of winning 50 fights by sheer luck is 10^-15. We don't have 10^15 fighters around, so his achievement cannot be attributed to chance.
tompccs 7y ago
Unlike a general, Jobs didn't enter into a series of battles with binary outcomes. He built a company - Apple - from scratch which changed the shape of the world. I'm not saying that Jobs was the only person with that vision and that he was rewarded accordingly, but that his vision and insight were obvious to anyone who cared to listen, and that he followed through on that vision with incredible success. Imagine instead of a general a tank designer whose tanks went on to change the face of warefare. That's Steve Jobs.

burntoutfire 7y ago

I can't believe that a brilliant man like Fermi would actually say that. The outcomes of battles are not random events. It's equivalent to saying that Floyd Mayweather, who so far has won 50 out of 50 of his fights, is not a great boxer, because, out of millions of people boxing, there mathematically ought to be one person who just won 50 times in a row. The thing is winning battles (or boxing fights) is not flipping a coin - it involves little more skill than that.

namirez 7y ago
What Fermi is saying is that if 3 out of every 100 generals are great, these 3 should be able to win more than 5 consecutive battles in order to beat the statistical noise. In your example, Mayweather's chance of winning 50 fights by sheer luck is 10^-15. We don't have 10^15 fighters around, so his achievement cannot be attributed to chance.

tompccs 7y ago

Unlike a general, Jobs didn't enter into a series of battles with binary outcomes. He built a company - Apple - from scratch which changed the shape of the world. I'm not saying that Jobs was the only person with that vision and that he was rewarded accordingly, but that his vision and insight were obvious to anyone who cared to listen, and that he followed through on that vision with incredible success. Imagine instead of a general a tank designer whose tanks went on to change the face of warefare. That's Steve Jobs.