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So far all the comments are against great person theory. But what is the counterpoint? Companies like Apple and spaceX are just inevitable and some lucky bastar

by ITB 3y ago

So far all the comments are against great person theory. But what is the counterpoint? Companies like Apple and spaceX are just inevitable and some lucky bastards will just stumble upon them? That’s nonsense. There might be more than one candidate to become Steve Jobs but not that many. Would e-commerce have evolved without JeffB or smartphones be invented without Apple? Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country, greatly hurting America’s prospects. To this date Amazon has the best e-commerce logistics on the planet. Doing things ahead of its time, by gathering the right people and enough money, is a very unique skill. Couple that with being well positioned for a certain “inevitable” innovation and that limits the number of people even more. There’s also a compounding effect. Walking backwards from humanity’s global tech maxima, if every key innovation was late by a few years, the overall maxima might be late by hundreds of years, maybe worse. Maybe humanity ends due to an asteroid impact because we didn't get advanced enough to protect ourselves in time.

woodruffw 3y ago
The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasizes individuals rather than circumstances. In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.
- kubb 3y ago
  And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
- gniv 3y ago
  > The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents. But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    > How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.
    - gniv 3y ago
      Yes, of course. What I meant was we could have had all the stuff that lead to Galileo before the great reset that was the fall of Rome, so maybe civilization would have been ahead a few hundred years.
      - woodruffw 3y ago
        This doesn’t require belief in the great man theory: progress can ebb and flow under any theory of history. Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.
        gniv 3y ago
        We’re splitting hairs now. Let me rephrase again. There was a period when Rome was ridiculously wealthy (gold from Spain etc). It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. My point was that a few “great men” there might have changed history.
- keiferski 3y ago
  The Great Man Theory is not primarily about scientific discoveries or inventions. It’s more about political figures: Napoleon, Muhammad, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Could you elaborate on why you think this? Individual forms of the GMT focus on heroism, religious charisma, etc., but the theory in the context of historical analysis is widely understood to apply to any form of “greatness,” with scientific advancements being one form. Your own link to Wikipedia points this out, with Einstein as the example.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      From Wikipedia: > The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. From that series of lectures: 1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology 2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam 3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare 4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism 5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism Are any of those people scientists? Carlyle is talking about political and cultural influence, not technological development. Using scientists that made great discoveries as a counter-example to the theory is a straw man argument.
      - woodruffw 3y ago
        Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate authority on gravity. And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective. (But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)
- 6yh7 3y ago
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- nine_k 3y ago
  A particular person may be not the unique one to try and achieve something. But there should exist some number of "candidate great men", else there'd be nobody to take advantage of the circumstances. It looks like this number is not very large in any particular area. If not Einstein, maybe a handful other physicists could come up with, say, special relativity, but likely not hundreds, and maybe not even dozens.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    But that's actually not great man theory? The natural conclusion of what you're describing is that there's some sort of continuum or spectrum of people who might take up some opportunity. Those people are also generated by dice rolls: some have genuinely better brain chemistry, some are nurtured well by family, some find a mentor who puts a lot of effort into them, some grow up next to a training ground. If you look at any kind of excellence, there's a bunch of sliding doors moments. What if Michael Jordan dropped basketball after getting cut from the team? What if the scout decides Messi is too small? On the science side, just about anyone can not get along with their prospective supervisor, or they don't find funding, or they get offered a job doing something else. The way to think about a few people being within reach of SR is not to just scroll back a few years before it happened. There were a bunch of kids born in that generation who were interested in physics, and chances are a re-do of their lives would have turned up some different outcomes individually, but why would we think that SR wouldn't have come out eventually? It's clear people were thinking about it, and it's clear people got it once the discovery was published. The other thing to look at is cases of where the great man is lost. Does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?
    - dmn322 3y ago
      After alexander the great, greek kingdoms were left scattered along the path he went, some lasting for 100s of years. IMO he spread a system of logistics and trade required to sustain armies over that many thousands of miles, which was also could be used as the basis of a society. That system of logistics came from his father but also thousands of years of greek society before that. No offense to them, but I wouldn't say Michael Jordan or Messi have significantly impacted history. They impacted the trajectory of their sports teams, and I would think it's pretty easy for an individual to have an influence on something over that scale, but for a "great man" to be given credit for significantly shaping borders for hundreds or thousands of years, or for certain innovations that were funded by institutions that could have just as easily paid someone else... I think there's something else going on.
adw 3y ago
Apple was built on a lot of peoples' ideas, some original and many borrowed (like all companies); Steve Jobs' gift was for editing. SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company. Founders are right person, right place, right time, and _place and time are more important than the person_. Why do so many come from America? Because _place_. The right place from about 1750 to maybe 1835 was northern England; the Bay Area has had a really good run. Brian Eno, as often, has a word for it: "scenius". https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/ https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company. There's a large SpaceX office down the road from where I live (Redmond, WA) and a fair few of my ex-MSFT friends now work there, and they call say the same thing to me: "SpaceX's successes are despite Elon's involvement, not because of it". I just still don't know if I want to work there or not. BlueOrigin gave me an offer for an avionics position years ago, but the commute down to Kent, WA was a deal-killer.
  - simonh 3y ago
    Nobody else was pushing reusability in the way Musk was, or with the same approach of propulsive landing. Pretty much the whole rest of the industry was absolutely convinced it was impossible. Yes he found a few engineers willing to try to make it work, but without him going all-in on it from the top there is no way we would have propulsively landing first stage boosters today, and maybe not for many decades to come. That doesn't make Musk perfect, he may well have many negative personality traits that get in the way of progress on other fronts. On Starship as well though, plenty of engineers there confirm that it was Musk that came up with the idea to switch to Steel as the primary structural material. It may be true that if you take one 'great man' out of the picture we might still get the same innovations, but in some areas like space rockets it's not something anyone can knock up in their garage to matter how bright they are. There's also the argument that ok, any one great man might be replaceable, but often I think you'd find them replaced by another great man. Some big leaps forward take a lot of capabilities in one package to make them work, or occasionally in a great synergistic partnership such as Jobs and Wozniak, or Lennon and McCartney.
keiferski 3y ago
Even if you don’t buy the broader idea of Great Man Theory, it seems obvious to me that the idiosyncrasies of the Great Men that happen to be “selected” do have an obvious impact on history that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. In other words, the personal characteristics, family members, etc. of the supposedly interchangeable Great Man do have a unique effect on history that would be different if a different Great Man had fulfilled the role. Napoleon’s wives (the first of which couldn’t give him a child) and brothers (who were installed as local kings) are a good example. I’m sure you can think of many other more recent ones.
- davidmnoll 3y ago
  I don’t think anyone is saying that those idiosyncratic details have no local impact whatsoever just that over the long run they mostly get filtered out as noise.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    But these don’t just have local impact. They often entirely change the trajectory of history. For example: what if Caesar has a son earlier in life and by the time he is killed, this son becomes his heir instead of Octavian? The son isn’t as clever as Octavian, he loses the civil war to Antony, who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire. Rome collapses centuries earlier - or the Senate regains power. None of this seems like it would lead to the same historical outcome.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - dmn322 3y ago
      Then the roman empire would have been led by someone slightly different and perhaps had slightly different borders. > who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire This is where we diverge.. I consider setting up empire-wide infrastructure to be something that largely happens due to socioeconomic forces and the environmental conditions of the empire, not something that 1 guy decides to do alone. If Antony won the civil war, he would still be in command of an economic juggernaut, and other politicians and advisors would start suggesting projects to help out their constituents and sponsors. If he kept suggesting stupid ideas, people close to him would tell him they're stupid and he would have resistance to them. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of variance. Obviously there's a place like North Korea. But if you average out the political situation across that whole region over about 50 years... add a bit of blur to the whole thing, both to the borders, the times, the ideologies... it starts to look more like ideas reverberating through a network. Sometimes all the random noise will come together and interfere constructively to make a region of large amplitude. Basically, instead of thinking of history so much through the lens of names of rulers, etc, think of it through the lens of a random guy in the "ohio" of the empire you're considering. You think the life of some random guy in modern day Slovenia was affected much by things that were purely Octavian's whims? Even further, strip out all the names and people, and just think of it in terms of physical materials moving across the mediterranean... you think the total flow of grain from egypt to the surrounding areas was much affected by these political situations? Do you think if you looked at a video that showed the change of historic economic activity of the various regions of Rome with no dates or political boundaries shown, that you would be able to distinguish the transition of rome from republic to empire?
novok 3y ago
The smartphone existed before the iPhone with blackberry, palm and microsoft pocket pc. The big innovation behind the iPhone was the pure multitouch interface, which was in labs and such beforehand: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_the_multi_touch_interface https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th... So all of these founders did commericalize and create consumer products to make them more mass market, but the raw tech was there beforehand to make it happen.
- simonh 3y ago
  I think this underestimates the degree to which the iPhone running essentially a full pre-emptive multitasking workstation class OS mattered. The Blackberry, Palm and Pocket PC OSes were basically Windows 95 and Classic MacOS era style technology stacks. A bit more modern, sure, but nothing like OSX of the time. Bear in mind, the iPhone running a fully capable desktop class browser was jaw dropping. BlackBerry management were absolutely convinced the demo must have been faked. It's only when they got hold of actual devices that they realised it was genuine and even then it took a while for it to sink in just how far behind they were. It took Microsoft almost 3 years to figure that out. This is often discounted because it's not obvious to the user unless you're familiar with specific aspects of the technology, but in terms of the capabilities it enables as a founding technology it's night and day. This is why Android ate their lunch as well. Although it was started as a BlackBerry clone, the fact that it was a full Linux kernel under the hood positioned it to become a solid platform for networked, isolated, fully memory managed, pre-emptively multitasking background OS services, and isolated user applications, with modern power management. BB, Palm and Pocket PC were hobbled legacy platforms that might superficially emulate the UI of a modern smartphone but could never actually function and compete at the same level.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    iPhone multitasking was very limited in practice. Windows Mobile and Symbian were more advanced than you present. And Windows and Linux pocket computers existed. Convergence was inevitable.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
my problem with this theory I can only explain in my own terms my problem is that this perspective confuses together individuals and systems no great men exist in isolation, some name takes most of the credit but they're all but a sum of their circumstances, which in all cases include other top people who never get to be as famous strict clarity of this is extra important now that fully autonomous 'systems' are taking off, which makes them even more likely to be confused with individuals: who invented the slate-computer (smartphone): Apple Corporation then a whole history of apple as if they were a person whose father as another person called Steve Jobs (and their mother was Steve W?) or whatever
- simonh 3y ago
  The question isn't whether they need more people to make it all work. That's not in dispute. It's the degree to which any of these people are replaceable. If you removed any of the engineers working on the iPhone Jobs would have hired another engineer and cracked on with the project. Maybe there would have been more bugs, or slightly worse features, maybe there would be some things better. Take out Jobs, and there is no iPhone, or even an OSX to base it on. It took the competition years to catch up, and that's bearing in mind they knew they needed to. Prior to the iPhone announcement, Android was going to be a BlackBerry clone. Or take SpaceX, nobody but Musk was pushing for first stage re-use. Seven years later no other company has landed an orbital class first stage booster, or seems anywhere close to doing so, and that's with the concept absolutely proven. How long would we have to wait for someone to even try without Musk gathering a team and making it happen?
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    so become irreplaceable or be turned into a commodity...?
    - b8d_0 3y ago
      Already happened, my dude. I would run away into the forest, never to be seen again, but I got that idea from the Internet, too
DrScientist 3y ago
The what-if game is very hard to play. The effect of the opportunity cost is often forgotten. By choosing to channel resources into one area you are not funding others. What Jobs did very well at Apple was kill some stuff that weren't that useful ( Opendoc is a classic example ) and focus resources things were. But you can't see the road not travelled. In general if you look at history you see periods of stagnation around the world at various times - and I don't think that was a result of lack of 'great people' - I think how societies are organised has more impact. Governance is important.
DrScientist 3y ago
Amazon launched in Europe by simply buying the opposition and re-badging it. https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncouk-launches-uk-huge-selection-and-keen-pricing https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-deta... https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-three-leading-internet-companies https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-thr...
dmn322 3y ago
My alternative viewpoint is based on incentives. Money causes physical work to be done. It influences probability distributions. F = ma. A certain amount of money can only cause so much dirt to be hauled up a hill with a certain probability. You can't have an economy valued at $2000 that does 2000kwH of work and then go try to use $10 to do 500kwH of work, at least not in the long run. The only way to do it in the short run is if you're eating another economy and digesting their energy. "Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country" Both of those are speculation, and are also highly unlikely. It might have also happened more quickly. The US had a handful of ecommerce companies in the .com boom which were right on Amazon's tail. The limiting factor was demand which is ultimately a form of incentive. The limiting factor is not "great men" who are competent enough to get the job done, it's having a large enough pool of resources in the hands of someone or some institution which can decide to invest it in that thing. Competence doesn't have much to do with it. A severely incompetent person with a will and a large enough pool of resources can still get it done with a little luck. Musk had a will and a large enough pool of resources. He was one of the first people whose life's wealth had almost no coupling to the pre-silicon valley US economy and who became rich after the internet had proliferated. He's not particularly competent, but he was able to dream a little bigger than previous generations of filthy rich people. His wealth wasn't tied to oil or the automobile industry, so he was able to see the value of moving off of it. I think another factor that confuses people is that IMO society has a speed of information. Government policy tends to take a couple years to filter through, and then on top of that, there are statistical limits on the rate at which an individual or company can react to that, and re-channel money to appropriately take advantage of the new conditions. People seem to think that as soon as a government policy takes effect, things should start changing, but think of the mass of our society... the people, the buildings, the equipment... that all has inertia. Things don't happen in the real world at the speed they do on the internet.
jiggawatts 3y ago
My mental model for this phenomenon is that great men aren't single human beings, but more like a corporation or a brand. Many supposed "great visionaries" simply formed a team that collectively had the vision that we attribute to the leader. Steve Jobs had Jony Ive George Lucas had Ralph McQuarrie Christopher Nolan had Hans Zimmer Etc.. I'm sure there's many more who's names aren't public enough to have become general knowledge, but the point is that great generals don't win wars by themselves. They have trusted officers, which in turn have trusted men. The figurehead is just that. They may be important in the sense that they attract the best officers and the bravest soldiers, but in the end, they could not "do it on their own" in any sense.

by ITB 3y ago

woodruffw 3y ago

The counterargument to “great man theory” is that it’s ahistorical (in that most great advancements have multiple independent discoverers), and unduly emphasizes individuals rather than circumstances. In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.

kubb 3y ago
And that we are genetically predisposed towards worshipping individual human-like figures. Think for a second about Gilgamesh (one of the oldest known works of literature!), Prometheus (gave humans fire, where would we be without him), Hercules (killed a menacing beast, thank god for that), the Olympic gods, Gaius Julius Cesar, Napoleon, Lenin, modern celebrities (they're so talented and totally deserve their success). Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
gniv 3y ago
> The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents. But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?
- woodruffw 3y ago
  > How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday? Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.
  - gniv 3y ago
    Yes, of course. What I meant was we could have had all the stuff that lead to Galileo before the great reset that was the fall of Rome, so maybe civilization would have been ahead a few hundred years.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This doesn’t require belief in the great man theory: progress can ebb and flow under any theory of history. Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.
      - gniv 3y ago
        We’re splitting hairs now. Let me rephrase again. There was a period when Rome was ridiculously wealthy (gold from Spain etc). It was a time when science could have advanced rapidly but didn’t. My point was that a few “great men” there might have changed history.
keiferski 3y ago
The Great Man Theory is not primarily about scientific discoveries or inventions. It’s more about political figures: Napoleon, Muhammad, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you think this? Individual forms of the GMT focus on heroism, religious charisma, etc., but the theory in the context of historical analysis is widely understood to apply to any form of “greatness,” with scientific advancements being one form. Your own link to Wikipedia points this out, with Einstein as the example.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    From Wikipedia: > The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. From that series of lectures: 1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology 2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam 3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare 4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism 5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns 6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism Are any of those people scientists? Carlyle is talking about political and cultural influence, not technological development. Using scientists that made great discoveries as a counter-example to the theory is a straw man argument.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate authority on gravity. And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective. (But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)
6yh7 3y ago
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nine_k 3y ago
A particular person may be not the unique one to try and achieve something. But there should exist some number of "candidate great men", else there'd be nobody to take advantage of the circumstances. It looks like this number is not very large in any particular area. If not Einstein, maybe a handful other physicists could come up with, say, special relativity, but likely not hundreds, and maybe not even dozens.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  But that's actually not great man theory? The natural conclusion of what you're describing is that there's some sort of continuum or spectrum of people who might take up some opportunity. Those people are also generated by dice rolls: some have genuinely better brain chemistry, some are nurtured well by family, some find a mentor who puts a lot of effort into them, some grow up next to a training ground. If you look at any kind of excellence, there's a bunch of sliding doors moments. What if Michael Jordan dropped basketball after getting cut from the team? What if the scout decides Messi is too small? On the science side, just about anyone can not get along with their prospective supervisor, or they don't find funding, or they get offered a job doing something else. The way to think about a few people being within reach of SR is not to just scroll back a few years before it happened. There were a bunch of kids born in that generation who were interested in physics, and chances are a re-do of their lives would have turned up some different outcomes individually, but why would we think that SR wouldn't have come out eventually? It's clear people were thinking about it, and it's clear people got it once the discovery was published. The other thing to look at is cases of where the great man is lost. Does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?
  - dmn322 3y ago
    After alexander the great, greek kingdoms were left scattered along the path he went, some lasting for 100s of years. IMO he spread a system of logistics and trade required to sustain armies over that many thousands of miles, which was also could be used as the basis of a society. That system of logistics came from his father but also thousands of years of greek society before that. No offense to them, but I wouldn't say Michael Jordan or Messi have significantly impacted history. They impacted the trajectory of their sports teams, and I would think it's pretty easy for an individual to have an influence on something over that scale, but for a "great man" to be given credit for significantly shaping borders for hundreds or thousands of years, or for certain innovations that were funded by institutions that could have just as easily paid someone else... I think there's something else going on.

adw 3y ago

Apple was built on a lot of peoples' ideas, some original and many borrowed (like all companies); Steve Jobs' gift was for editing. SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company. Founders are right person, right place, right time, and _place and time are more important than the person_. Why do so many come from America? Because _place_. The right place from about 1750 to maybe 1835 was northern England; the Bay Area has had a really good run. Brian Eno, as often, has a word for it: "scenius". https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/ https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company. There's a large SpaceX office down the road from where I live (Redmond, WA) and a fair few of my ex-MSFT friends now work there, and they call say the same thing to me: "SpaceX's successes are despite Elon's involvement, not because of it". I just still don't know if I want to work there or not. BlueOrigin gave me an offer for an avionics position years ago, but the commute down to Kent, WA was a deal-killer.
- simonh 3y ago
  Nobody else was pushing reusability in the way Musk was, or with the same approach of propulsive landing. Pretty much the whole rest of the industry was absolutely convinced it was impossible. Yes he found a few engineers willing to try to make it work, but without him going all-in on it from the top there is no way we would have propulsively landing first stage boosters today, and maybe not for many decades to come. That doesn't make Musk perfect, he may well have many negative personality traits that get in the way of progress on other fronts. On Starship as well though, plenty of engineers there confirm that it was Musk that came up with the idea to switch to Steel as the primary structural material. It may be true that if you take one 'great man' out of the picture we might still get the same innovations, but in some areas like space rockets it's not something anyone can knock up in their garage to matter how bright they are. There's also the argument that ok, any one great man might be replaceable, but often I think you'd find them replaced by another great man. Some big leaps forward take a lot of capabilities in one package to make them work, or occasionally in a great synergistic partnership such as Jobs and Wozniak, or Lennon and McCartney.

keiferski 3y ago

Even if you don’t buy the broader idea of Great Man Theory, it seems obvious to me that the idiosyncrasies of the Great Men that happen to be “selected” do have an obvious impact on history that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. In other words, the personal characteristics, family members, etc. of the supposedly interchangeable Great Man do have a unique effect on history that would be different if a different Great Man had fulfilled the role. Napoleon’s wives (the first of which couldn’t give him a child) and brothers (who were installed as local kings) are a good example. I’m sure you can think of many other more recent ones.

davidmnoll 3y ago
I don’t think anyone is saying that those idiosyncratic details have no local impact whatsoever just that over the long run they mostly get filtered out as noise.
- keiferski 3y ago
  But these don’t just have local impact. They often entirely change the trajectory of history. For example: what if Caesar has a son earlier in life and by the time he is killed, this son becomes his heir instead of Octavian? The son isn’t as clever as Octavian, he loses the civil war to Antony, who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire. Rome collapses centuries earlier - or the Senate regains power. None of this seems like it would lead to the same historical outcome.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - dmn322 3y ago
    Then the roman empire would have been led by someone slightly different and perhaps had slightly different borders. > who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire This is where we diverge.. I consider setting up empire-wide infrastructure to be something that largely happens due to socioeconomic forces and the environmental conditions of the empire, not something that 1 guy decides to do alone. If Antony won the civil war, he would still be in command of an economic juggernaut, and other politicians and advisors would start suggesting projects to help out their constituents and sponsors. If he kept suggesting stupid ideas, people close to him would tell him they're stupid and he would have resistance to them. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of variance. Obviously there's a place like North Korea. But if you average out the political situation across that whole region over about 50 years... add a bit of blur to the whole thing, both to the borders, the times, the ideologies... it starts to look more like ideas reverberating through a network. Sometimes all the random noise will come together and interfere constructively to make a region of large amplitude. Basically, instead of thinking of history so much through the lens of names of rulers, etc, think of it through the lens of a random guy in the "ohio" of the empire you're considering. You think the life of some random guy in modern day Slovenia was affected much by things that were purely Octavian's whims? Even further, strip out all the names and people, and just think of it in terms of physical materials moving across the mediterranean... you think the total flow of grain from egypt to the surrounding areas was much affected by these political situations? Do you think if you looked at a video that showed the change of historic economic activity of the various regions of Rome with no dates or political boundaries shown, that you would be able to distinguish the transition of rome from republic to empire?

novok 3y ago

The smartphone existed before the iPhone with blackberry, palm and microsoft pocket pc. The big innovation behind the iPhone was the pure multitouch interface, which was in labs and such beforehand: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_the_multi_touch_interface https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th... So all of these founders did commericalize and create consumer products to make them more mass market, but the raw tech was there beforehand to make it happen.

simonh 3y ago
I think this underestimates the degree to which the iPhone running essentially a full pre-emptive multitasking workstation class OS mattered. The Blackberry, Palm and Pocket PC OSes were basically Windows 95 and Classic MacOS era style technology stacks. A bit more modern, sure, but nothing like OSX of the time. Bear in mind, the iPhone running a fully capable desktop class browser was jaw dropping. BlackBerry management were absolutely convinced the demo must have been faked. It's only when they got hold of actual devices that they realised it was genuine and even then it took a while for it to sink in just how far behind they were. It took Microsoft almost 3 years to figure that out. This is often discounted because it's not obvious to the user unless you're familiar with specific aspects of the technology, but in terms of the capabilities it enables as a founding technology it's night and day. This is why Android ate their lunch as well. Although it was started as a BlackBerry clone, the fact that it was a full Linux kernel under the hood positioned it to become a solid platform for networked, isolated, fully memory managed, pre-emptively multitasking background OS services, and isolated user applications, with modern power management. BB, Palm and Pocket PC were hobbled legacy platforms that might superficially emulate the UI of a modern smartphone but could never actually function and compete at the same level.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  iPhone multitasking was very limited in practice. Windows Mobile and Symbian were more advanced than you present. And Windows and Linux pocket computers existed. Convergence was inevitable.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

my problem with this theory I can only explain in my own terms my problem is that this perspective confuses together individuals and systems no great men exist in isolation, some name takes most of the credit but they're all but a sum of their circumstances, which in all cases include other top people who never get to be as famous strict clarity of this is extra important now that fully autonomous 'systems' are taking off, which makes them even more likely to be confused with individuals: who invented the slate-computer (smartphone): Apple Corporation then a whole history of apple as if they were a person whose father as another person called Steve Jobs (and their mother was Steve W?) or whatever

simonh 3y ago
The question isn't whether they need more people to make it all work. That's not in dispute. It's the degree to which any of these people are replaceable. If you removed any of the engineers working on the iPhone Jobs would have hired another engineer and cracked on with the project. Maybe there would have been more bugs, or slightly worse features, maybe there would be some things better. Take out Jobs, and there is no iPhone, or even an OSX to base it on. It took the competition years to catch up, and that's bearing in mind they knew they needed to. Prior to the iPhone announcement, Android was going to be a BlackBerry clone. Or take SpaceX, nobody but Musk was pushing for first stage re-use. Seven years later no other company has landed an orbital class first stage booster, or seems anywhere close to doing so, and that's with the concept absolutely proven. How long would we have to wait for someone to even try without Musk gathering a team and making it happen?
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  so become irreplaceable or be turned into a commodity...?
  - b8d_0 3y ago
    Already happened, my dude. I would run away into the forest, never to be seen again, but I got that idea from the Internet, too

DrScientist 3y ago

The what-if game is very hard to play. The effect of the opportunity cost is often forgotten. By choosing to channel resources into one area you are not funding others. What Jobs did very well at Apple was kill some stuff that weren't that useful ( Opendoc is a classic example ) and focus resources things were. But you can't see the road not travelled. In general if you look at history you see periods of stagnation around the world at various times - and I don't think that was a result of lack of 'great people' - I think how societies are organised has more impact. Governance is important.

DrScientist 3y ago

Amazon launched in Europe by simply buying the opposition and re-badging it. https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncouk-launches-uk-huge-selection-and-keen-pricing https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-deta... https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-three-leading-internet-companies https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-thr...

dmn322 3y ago

My alternative viewpoint is based on incentives. Money causes physical work to be done. It influences probability distributions. F = ma. A certain amount of money can only cause so much dirt to be hauled up a hill with a certain probability. You can't have an economy valued at $2000 that does 2000kwH of work and then go try to use $10 to do 500kwH of work, at least not in the long run. The only way to do it in the short run is if you're eating another economy and digesting their energy. "Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country" Both of those are speculation, and are also highly unlikely. It might have also happened more quickly. The US had a handful of ecommerce companies in the .com boom which were right on Amazon's tail. The limiting factor was demand which is ultimately a form of incentive. The limiting factor is not "great men" who are competent enough to get the job done, it's having a large enough pool of resources in the hands of someone or some institution which can decide to invest it in that thing. Competence doesn't have much to do with it. A severely incompetent person with a will and a large enough pool of resources can still get it done with a little luck. Musk had a will and a large enough pool of resources. He was one of the first people whose life's wealth had almost no coupling to the pre-silicon valley US economy and who became rich after the internet had proliferated. He's not particularly competent, but he was able to dream a little bigger than previous generations of filthy rich people. His wealth wasn't tied to oil or the automobile industry, so he was able to see the value of moving off of it. I think another factor that confuses people is that IMO society has a speed of information. Government policy tends to take a couple years to filter through, and then on top of that, there are statistical limits on the rate at which an individual or company can react to that, and re-channel money to appropriately take advantage of the new conditions. People seem to think that as soon as a government policy takes effect, things should start changing, but think of the mass of our society... the people, the buildings, the equipment... that all has inertia. Things don't happen in the real world at the speed they do on the internet.

jiggawatts 3y ago

My mental model for this phenomenon is that great men aren't single human beings, but more like a corporation or a brand. Many supposed "great visionaries" simply formed a team that collectively had the vision that we attribute to the leader. Steve Jobs had Jony Ive George Lucas had Ralph McQuarrie Christopher Nolan had Hans Zimmer Etc.. I'm sure there's many more who's names aren't public enough to have become general knowledge, but the point is that great generals don't win wars by themselves. They have trusted officers, which in turn have trusted men. The figurehead is just that. They may be important in the sense that they attract the best officers and the bravest soldiers, but in the end, they could not "do it on their own" in any sense.