4 ms·
And those geniuses in the "we" you described, how did they eat, how did they dress, where did they sleep, who gave them the paper they used to write their thoug
by xwolfi 3y ago
And those geniuses in the "we" you described, how did they eat, how did they dress, where did they sleep, who gave them the paper they used to write their thoughts ? Who challenged them, by their stupidity even, to go further ?
We all work together to build the context that allows for this new knowledge to emerge. The individual who uttered the new concept the first time is immaterial: they are an element of a group, and the group gets the credit, in the grand scheme.
The fact that we have extremes, like crackheads or Feynman, doesn't make Feynman isolated in his success, or the crackhead isolated in his failure. And without abject idiocy we wouldnt have brilliance.
- mdp2021 3y agoCuriously enough, I had to observe the following to a friend just yesterday: that a large number of people cannot count will impede Society, but will not impede Mathematics. (But not so «curiously»: many people have a bewildering drive towards overusing 'we', hence notes like the above.) "We" stands for a factually un-simple thing and is best avoided when, for example, it confuses collective work, group work, individual work. If "we have killed the planet" or "we have gone to the moon" have a constructive, productive sense in the context they are uttered, good, otherwise they are rationally meaningless. That "a structured collective effort facilitated Feynman" is true, that "we achieved Feynman's results" makes sense only under some interpretations. And when you meet "We have all set fire to national monuments" (Graham Chapman), well some of us have not. And when you meet "We were not so we could not", well that "we" is probably not universal.