21–30 of 37 posts
In the interest of pedantry, wasn't Balto made by Amblin Entertainment, not Disney?
So confused, did the author watch a different movie maybe? > Disney later made a movie about him that makes no mention of Balto for the first 90% The character appears at the 5 minute mark!
I'm certainly guilty of doing that, so I can't judge.
Annoying as it may be, this situation is somewhat ubiquitous in the history of human knowledge. Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity. Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the path of scien…
> Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity. That doesn’t add up because there was no Nobel prize at all for relativity to anyone. Searching online the consensus seems to be a mix of things: * general confusion that his photoelectric Nobel was for relativity. * the experimental proof of relativity came at a time when ant…
Annoying as it may be, this situation is somewhat ubiquitous in the history of human knowledge. Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity. Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the path of scien…
Cool name for the concept, and I think making it about dogs helps take the political angle out of it. I think of this in terms of the 'great man' theory of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory And feel that it's obvious that science works the same way, and we should focus on the "science from below" a lot more than we do. Charles Fort talked about "Steam Engine Time" and it gets referenced in Discw…
For science specifically, the distinction is also known as the Newton vs. Ortega hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortega_hypothesis
The doc is on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/ObPg3ki9GOI
It was very clear that Newton in particular was building incrementally on work that other mathematicians had done before him. Leibniz was also making incremental improvements, but was apparently somewhat more visionary in his work. The Youtube comments are also interesting, including anecdotes of ancient Egyptian land surveyors using the same "sum of lines" technique (what Leibniz generalized into our modern antiderivative) in order estimate the areas of unevenly-shaped land plots along waterways for taxation.
Leibniz in particular was fascinating because it shows the incrementality of science continuing after him as well. Apparently Leibniz had built several computing machines, 150 years before Babbage, and was deliberately trying to work towards general and abstract paradigms for solving mathematical problems, 300 years before Hilbert, Church, Gödel, and Turing!
Ah, the disrespect of my great-great-uncle's dog Balto! Though to be fair Togo was great, but Balto did amazing as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Kaasen#Last_leg_of_the_...
Seems we messed up by not getting dogs involved in covid vaccine delivery.
The game Civilization was really great at representing this. Tech advancement is a DAG, rather than a chain or a tree. Reality is like this, but much, much more granular.
For instance, I'm acquainted with the inventor of the electret microphone. I'm sure that mic brought together a whole bunch of advancements, and once I was aware that miniaturizing microphones was nontrivial, it became clear that, for example, pocketable cell phones would not exist if not for tiny microphones.
I see this disconnect all the time in how we think about technology, and which innovations actually lead to major cultural changes. We get wowed by impressive inventions, like blockchain, but to date, it is largely not penetrating society outside of its own expanding hype bubbles. It's pretty clear to me that blockchain is not, of itself, transformative. Nor is it the final link in enabling a society-changing breakthrough. The question I'd ask is whether that's because other boring adjacent developments are missing? Or is it a relative dead end? I'm picking on blockchain, but a lot of other innovations could be chosen here.
In trying to predict the socio-technological future, it is important to become attuned to the boring, enabling technologies. And if I were an investor, I would also have to understand whether the economics of a potential enabling technology are attractive for achieving returns. I think of all the fiber that was laid in the 90s. Investors were right that it would eventually become really important, but they wrong that it would be lucrative for them to invest in.
> I was pretty sure Alfred Wegener (...) is a Balto. > Jasen would go so far as to argue that [some difficult achievements] makes [Wegener] the Togo The more apt conclusion from the article is probably that the Balto/Togo theory simply isn't as good a model for the scientific discovery process as the author was hoping.
I think you have to read it more as a story than a theory, and also that the conclusion is more subtle. My takeway is not that Togo is a better choice for the hero than Balto, it's that there is no correct choice. Balto, Togo, and a lot of other dogs were part of a group effort. Balto became the mascot. But humans need a simple story, so they confuse a mascot with a hero. America is named like that because someone na…
I've been thinking about something similar. Maybe somebody can shoot it down. For many achievements, most credit belongs to the role, not the person. In other words, the counterfactual of "if we didn't all agree that somebody will do this" would better prevent the achievement than "if one specific person didn't have their talent." We have phrases like "the time is ripe" because we know this. When conditions are in pl…
I agree with you about all of this, but I have one problem: Does this mean no more awards? Like, will the Nobel prize always go "to the institution" that made the discovery? Should biographies be titled POTUS: Period X-Y? You see what I mean? Part of why we attach credit to people, is because people are inherently interesting. Institutions are inherently boring, and supposed to be. Storytelling is maybe not as import…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have to read it more as a story than a theory, and also that the conclusion is more subtle. My takeway is not that Togo is a better choice for the hero than Balto, it's that there is no correct choice. Balto, Togo, and a lot of other dogs were part of a group effort. Balto became the mascot. But humans need a simple story, so they confuse a mascot with a hero. America is named like that because someone na…
Ok, but that should just make us further question whether the Balto/Togo story really has anything in common with the history of tectonics. There isn't a clear obvious hero and a hidden hero (both of whom somewhat undeservedly singled out from the group effort), there's just one well-known name, and it's not even clear which of the two characters he'd correspond to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For science specifically, the distinction is also known as the Newton vs. Ortega hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortega_hypothesis
I think the Newton - Ortega distinction is slightly different. Maybe it coincides with the Balto-Togo metaphor to some extent, but I think part of why the Balto-Togo metaphor resonates with people here is because it recognizes the role of the citers as well as the cited. Your mention of the Newton-Ortega distinction is the first I've heard of it by those names, so I'm not entirely familiar with its scope, but in read…
But whomever that was, was necessarily a dead-end- they inspired no one to build and no improvements came from their work. It was the Wright's work in 1905-7 with their demonstration pilots doing their airshow flying in their Model A's- that was what inspired thousands of other people to get into flying, into building airplanes, and into aerodynamic research and led to the rapid improvement (65 years and one day between Kittyhawk and Apollo 8 leaving Earth to orbit the moon). So even though we trace flying to the 1903 Wright Flyer, it is really the Flyer III and the Model A in 1904-6 that we trace all modern airplanes to. Therefore, it was what the Wright's did in 1906 that makes their flight in 1903 matter. But in a lot of cases those two steps were different people- someone makes the very first, another person or team makes the first practical one you can sell. And so who is more important?