The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Academia, for all its faults, is still an excellent system for collecting those who are obsessive about s subject (at least for a certain set of “established” subjects.) It’s preposterously difficult to do the PhD-through-tenure course if you’re not obsessed, and it certainly isn’t the financially optimal career path; if someone has made it through that system, you can be sure they’re happy sitting and doing their subject all day, for days.

I have to disagree with this analysis on a couple different levels.

First, the opening statement that great work is a combination of natural ability + determination. I don't believe this to be the case, and I think this logic only works when you're doing post-hoc analysis for why certain people did well and others did not. There are plenty of people who had both natural ability and determination, yet failed throughout history. Some of them only becoming known long after their death (and whom lived in poverty to that point), others which failed because their choice of interest was considered to be the 'bus ticket collector' at the time.

Which leads me to my second point: We don't actually know if someone being a 'bus ticket collector' is valuable or not until long after their obsessive interest. For example, there are people that archived videos of various new stations. Those videos at the time were considered useless, but now they're more valuable because no one else was really obsessively archiving said video. This sort of thing isn't going to make someone rich or grant them status, but it's something that turned out to be very valuable to society as a whole and something that could be used to make someone rich.

Which ties into the fact that a lot of this is luck. You have to be lucky that what you're obsessed with is truly unique, that it's something that can earn you value now, and that you have the support network or monetary means to seize opportunities when they come across you. Sometimes the greatest discoveries are things that have been found solely by accident. You might be lacking a certain item, and you substitute it with something else which leads to a big breakthrough and so forth. Obsessive interest can help lead us to something great, but sometimes we simply trip upon something greater along the way.

Perhaps a word that connotes neutrality like “impartial” would be better in this context?

Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore.

Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.

>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners

This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.

This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.

Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.