Great Founder Theory (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#51

Post by dmn322 » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 12:43 PM UTC

ITB wrote: post #11

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 t…

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.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#52

Post by simonh » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 12:48 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #26

ITB wrote: post #11

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 t…

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_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 happe…

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.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#53

Post by dmn322 » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 12:59 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #35

woodruffw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mea…

That's what Great Man Theory is. Your impressions of it are not. It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. I agree with you that science/technology is not contingent on certain individuals and is better understood as a larger historical process. The discovery/invention of calculus is a good example. I don't agree that political history works th…

"I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did."

Would it make you feel differently if you knew that there were dozens of competing offshoots of Abrahamic religions in the area at the time? What if you viewed the Abrahamic religions as a set of policies and processes that were basically the genetic code of a society. Lots of what is in the Abrahamic texts is about how to conduct transactions effectively, establish a trusting relationship with strangers so you can edify an in-group while conducting trade with outsiders. IMO, his variation was based on determining how to set up an effective merchant society economy among groups of nomads where conflict was minimized enough to get spices from one location to another.

Many elements of islam were consistent among all the different abrahamic religious variations of the time. The fact that islam is so conservative is a result of continued incentives propagating more conservative forms of the religion. It's not inherent to the religion itself. There have been many less conservative islamic societies.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#54

Post by dmn322 » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:02 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #40

woodruffw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

But this is simply due to government policy limiting the amount of money they were throwing at the project. So you're advocating for "great incentives theory"

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#55

Post by simonh » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #30

ITB wrote: post #11

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 t…

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 takin…

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?

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#56

Post by dmn322 » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #44

nine_k wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#57

Post by narrator » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #37

narrator wrote: post #9

[flagged]

That's a very nice straw man you've built there and I have to admire the way you've managed to wedge in some devisive culture war rhetoric as well. Whatever you think about San Francisco isn't anything to do with this topic. The opposite of Great Man Theory is that rather than single individuals making the difference, most important progress is made by teams. That's it. You can agree or disagree but people opposing G…

The problem here is you consider being a criminal, criminally insane or extremely high on drugs just "culture." You refuse to draw the line of social exclusion anywhere. There is no unacceptable behavior because it's all just "culture." Is rampant theft a culture war issue? Is people not being charged for repeated random assaults a culture war issue? Is people out of their minds on meth, and passing out for hours and even dying from overdoses in public bathrooms a culture war issue?

This is why we must have the Target store with all merchandise locked in glass cases, and the Starbucks with no seating or bathrooms in order to accommodate San Francisco's unique "culture" of acceptance of those who are criminals, criminally insane or high on drugs. They would all be billionaires except for systemic bias, so we must accommodate them. The slippery slope isn't done yet. They've even started to let people off lightly on murder charges in Oakland, the ultimate strawman argument comes true[1]! So progressive!

[1] https://www.berkeleyscanner.com/2023/02/09/courts/district-a...

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#58

Post by dmn322 » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #24

gniv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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? As psychohistory rigorously proves; individuals are of no consequence to the thrusting arc of history. It is not Galileo that created history, but rather history that created Galileo.

psychohistory is from "the foundation" and last time I checked is fictional. If someone has a new theory of sociology which they've named after the field in the book, you might link it and introduce it as if it's a new unknown field, rather than some established thing that everyone should know about and agree with.

If it were truly rigorously proved and were able to make quantitative predictions, it would have some pretty significant implications for policy, finance, politics, etc..

However if the creator was brash enough to name their pet theory after the theory in the book, I'm skeptical that they were careful enough to get it right.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#59

Post by seanhunter » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 1:42 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #57

seanhunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very nice straw man you've built there and I have to admire the way you've managed to wedge in some devisive culture war rhetoric as well. Whatever you think about San Francisco isn't anything to do with this topic. The opposite of Great Man Theory is that rather than single individuals making the difference, most important progress is made by teams. That's it. You can agree or disagree but people opposing G…

The problem here is you consider being a criminal, criminally insane or extremely high on drugs just "culture." You refuse to draw the line of social exclusion anywhere. There is no unacceptable behavior because it's all just "culture." Is rampant theft a culture war issue? Is people not being charged for repeated random assaults a culture war issue? Is people out of their minds on meth, and passing out for hours and…

Where did I express an opinion about refusing to draw a social exclusion line or in fact any of that? I just said that you've dragged all those topics kicking and screaming into this conversation which is supposed to be about TFA on "Great Founder Theory". This isn't about Targets or Starbucks bathrooms or any of the other pet topics you're trying to introduce.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#60

Post by ksec » Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

adw wrote: post #17

ITB wrote: post #11

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 t…

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 importan…

>Apple was built on a lot of peoples' ideas, some original and many borrowed (like all companies); Steve Jobs' gift was for editing.

And it turns out, editing, combining multiple things together where the sums are greater than its parts, is perhaps the single most important criteria for greatness.