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I've always thought that the "Myth of the Lone Genius" is a bit of a "motte-bailey" format argument, where an aggressive, undefendable stance is advertised, and

I've always thought that the "Myth of the Lone Genius" is a bit of a "motte-bailey" format argument, where an aggressive, undefendable stance is advertised, and then when challenged the person who is making the argument retreats back into a more believable stance. The bailey, in this case, is "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true. I believe people that make the bailey form of the above argument want to believe that they're important, and want their contributions to be measured on the same scale that great people's accomplishments are measured on. If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".

ska 5y ago
> "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true. I think you are missing here the real core of the "Myth of the Lone Genius" argument which is not to claim that lone geniuses don't exist (e.g. Ramanujan, far more than some of these other examples) but rather to reject the argument that progress is mostly made by them, or can be best understood by focusing on them. The argument boils down to: everyone's contributions are clearly not equivalent, but the vast majority of real progress is a collective effort; and that by focusing on individuals we are less efficient at learning what is effective.
- saimiam 5y ago
  The GP comment itself is a motte-Bailey. I’m willing to bet they will settle for some less energetic form of their original argument that the myth of the lone genius is a case of sour grapes.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Ramanujan is certainly a better example than Newton or Aristotle. There were a lot of geniuses I would highlight over them if I was looking for individual talent.
  - username90 5y ago
    No, Newton is exceptional. It can be argued that he did more to progress physics and maths than everyone before him combined. He did so many things, but people just say "Oh Leibniz replicated one of the things after having seen the derived works of Newton" and dismiss him after that. Newton started the Calculus of Variations, one of the most powerful methods we have for calculating things. It wasn't until Euler 100 years later that the rest of the world began to properly understand what he did then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Newton was around (preceded by and followed by) great scientific discovery. Calculus of variations was also worked on by Bernoulli, for instance, who discovered it independently. And Leibniz seems to have as good a claim to being first as Newton does. Newton built heavily on Kepler for both math and the sciences. I'm not saying Newton didn't do great work. He just seems a poor example of a single lone genius. He was brilliant and alive at a time when a lot of exciting changes were coming around. Those combined to make him great. Just not a sole genius.
- sunstone 5y ago
  See also Walter Pitts.
E-Reverance 5y ago
>>If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important". I think it is about not comparing the top 100 people in a field. This would already exclude the lazy/dissertation folk.
colechristensen 5y ago
When it comes down to it, I think the lone genius is overestimated in common understanding and the rebuttal overcorrects. It usually takes quite a lot of expertise to recognize what someone truly accomplished or even to appreciate or be explained. The lone genius tends to do something which has its time come, usually a bit ahead of schedule. In science the pattern tends to be long periods of incremental buildup of large volumes of straightforward work interspersed with sort of phase transitions often (but not always) triggered by the lone genius. (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions) The pieces will all come into place for a significant change waiting for a trigger. The lone genius is the one who does this early. Not in a vacuum but also not in a crowd.
- asymptosis 5y ago
  This seems a bit contradictory. You say that the lone genius is often overestimated, then you attribute Kuhnian paradigm shifts to these lone geniuses. Perhaps it is better to be skeptical about the idea of paradigm shifts. They are often portrayed as some kind of phase transition, but they are usually (or always?) foreshadowed by a generation of debate, and when history books look back, they only present a retrospective consensus on that imagined consensus which never actually existed in the debates of the day.
smnrchrds 5y ago
Everyone interprets the myth differently. I interpreted it as "most breakthroughs and progresses don't come from lone geniuses, but large groups of career scientists". For example, there is no lone genius behind the mRNA vaccine breakthrough, but a few universities and well-funded companies with many scientists working on them over a long period of time. Take all important progresses and breakthroughs, the vast vast majority of them are coming from this kind of environment. There is the occasional one-person operation, being the sole author of an influential paper. But the vast vast majority of influential papers have many co-authors. I am not saying the above is true. I don't work in science and I am not too familiar with the state of the scientific world. I am saying that when I heard about the "Myth of the Lone Genius", that's what I thought it meant.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Either "Raymond F. Boyce and Edgar F. Codd" was some kind of bizarrely complicated pseudonym or neither of them were lone geniuses.
contingencies 5y ago
Similar interpretation here. In the spirit of broadening the internet's vocabulary of 'meh', as per TLDR, I would like to propose an acronym for this category of perspective. WTMTDE: Way too meta to deserve eyeballs.

ska 5y ago

> "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true. I think you are missing here the real core of the "Myth of the Lone Genius" argument which is not to claim that lone geniuses don't exist (e.g. Ramanujan, far more than some of these other examples) but rather to reject the argument that progress is mostly made by them, or can be best understood by focusing on them. The argument boils down to: everyone's contributions are clearly not equivalent, but the vast majority of real progress is a collective effort; and that by focusing on individuals we are less efficient at learning what is effective.

saimiam 5y ago
The GP comment itself is a motte-Bailey. I’m willing to bet they will settle for some less energetic form of their original argument that the myth of the lone genius is a case of sour grapes.
HWR_14 5y ago
Ramanujan is certainly a better example than Newton or Aristotle. There were a lot of geniuses I would highlight over them if I was looking for individual talent.
- username90 5y ago
  No, Newton is exceptional. It can be argued that he did more to progress physics and maths than everyone before him combined. He did so many things, but people just say "Oh Leibniz replicated one of the things after having seen the derived works of Newton" and dismiss him after that. Newton started the Calculus of Variations, one of the most powerful methods we have for calculating things. It wasn't until Euler 100 years later that the rest of the world began to properly understand what he did then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Newton was around (preceded by and followed by) great scientific discovery. Calculus of variations was also worked on by Bernoulli, for instance, who discovered it independently. And Leibniz seems to have as good a claim to being first as Newton does. Newton built heavily on Kepler for both math and the sciences. I'm not saying Newton didn't do great work. He just seems a poor example of a single lone genius. He was brilliant and alive at a time when a lot of exciting changes were coming around. Those combined to make him great. Just not a sole genius.
sunstone 5y ago
See also Walter Pitts.

E-Reverance 5y ago

>>If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important". I think it is about not comparing the top 100 people in a field. This would already exclude the lazy/dissertation folk.

colechristensen 5y ago

When it comes down to it, I think the lone genius is overestimated in common understanding and the rebuttal overcorrects. It usually takes quite a lot of expertise to recognize what someone truly accomplished or even to appreciate or be explained. The lone genius tends to do something which has its time come, usually a bit ahead of schedule. In science the pattern tends to be long periods of incremental buildup of large volumes of straightforward work interspersed with sort of phase transitions often (but not always) triggered by the lone genius. (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions) The pieces will all come into place for a significant change waiting for a trigger. The lone genius is the one who does this early. Not in a vacuum but also not in a crowd.

asymptosis 5y ago
This seems a bit contradictory. You say that the lone genius is often overestimated, then you attribute Kuhnian paradigm shifts to these lone geniuses. Perhaps it is better to be skeptical about the idea of paradigm shifts. They are often portrayed as some kind of phase transition, but they are usually (or always?) foreshadowed by a generation of debate, and when history books look back, they only present a retrospective consensus on that imagined consensus which never actually existed in the debates of the day.

smnrchrds 5y ago

Everyone interprets the myth differently. I interpreted it as "most breakthroughs and progresses don't come from lone geniuses, but large groups of career scientists". For example, there is no lone genius behind the mRNA vaccine breakthrough, but a few universities and well-funded companies with many scientists working on them over a long period of time. Take all important progresses and breakthroughs, the vast vast majority of them are coming from this kind of environment. There is the occasional one-person operation, being the sole author of an influential paper. But the vast vast majority of influential papers have many co-authors. I am not saying the above is true. I don't work in science and I am not too familiar with the state of the scientific world. I am saying that when I heard about the "Myth of the Lone Genius", that's what I thought it meant.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Either "Raymond F. Boyce and Edgar F. Codd" was some kind of bizarrely complicated pseudonym or neither of them were lone geniuses.

contingencies 5y ago

Similar interpretation here. In the spirit of broadening the internet's vocabulary of 'meh', as per TLDR, I would like to propose an acronym for this category of perspective. WTMTDE: Way too meta to deserve eyeballs.