3 ms·
"Half a brain" is a poor metaphor for "one of the most impressive collections of researchers money could ever buy, divided by two."
by jancsika 5y ago
"Half a brain" is a poor metaphor for "one of the most impressive collections of researchers money could ever buy, divided by two."
- jart 5y agoIndeed. Carefully built team is more than the sum of its parts though. If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars?
- jancsika 5y ago> If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars? Being a bit of a stickler here, but that's still a different type of problem in your metaphor. The space shuttle will fail to launch because it's ostensibly missing critical systems now. The software team will become ineffective because it's impossible for them to stop thinking about the original number of pink elephants. Put another way-- if the original shuttle design called for half the required systems it still wouldn't have succeeded. But consider if the original Bell team had the post-breakup roster but the breakup itself never happened. (I.e., start with half the number of participants but keep that number and funding for them arbitrarily into the future.) Would you still be willing to state that this hypothetical team would have lacked the ability to succeed from the start?
- jart 5y agoI'm not claiming anything. I just think the Bell System was doing cool work on operating systems and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the government hadn't disrupted that. I pass no judgement either. Since as good as that thing might have been, the breakup also gave rise to opportunities for the tech giants we have today to emerge, for better or worse.