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Great Founder Theory (2020)

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Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#41

Post by simonh »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #34
adw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#42

Post by bibanez »

_xnmw wrote: post #39

In my view, Great Man Theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy with survival bias. Those who believe it are the most likely to take insane risks, and therefore most likely to end up at the head of some great movement, or die trying. All those great visionaries, those Napoleons, Jobs, Musks, Newtons and Galileos were also "natural maniacs" [1]. The ones who fail we simply call "insane" and history forgets them. Neverthele…

I agree that this is the sensible way to look at it. I oppose cults of personality on people for the same reason: even the most genial individual is human, and often not very well-balanced. Don't place made up expectations and be dissappointed, remain critical and fair (as much as you can) in judging public figures!

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#43

Post by DrScientist »

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 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.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#44

Post by lordnacho »

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 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?

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#45

Post by throwanem »

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…

Always good to see representation on HN from the strict constructionist school of historiography.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#46

Post by Kon5ole »

_xnmw wrote: post #39

In my view, Great Man Theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy with survival bias. Those who believe it are the most likely to take insane risks, and therefore most likely to end up at the head of some great movement, or die trying. All those great visionaries, those Napoleons, Jobs, Musks, Newtons and Galileos were also "natural maniacs" [1]. The ones who fail we simply call "insane" and history forgets them. Neverthele…

The old Apple ad "think different" promotes the same perspective. People credited with notable changes throughout history are by definition "crazy" since sanity is defined by being the same as anyone else.

Thinking that it's impossible to be great seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. As someone once said, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right".

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#47

Post by DrScientist »

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 that's an important distinction.

Buying books online was inevitable - just a question of time. The invasion of Iraq ( for example ) was not - in the end that came down to one or two people deciding.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#48

Post by roenxi »

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…

> It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action.

We must also draw a distinction between invention/discovery and mass use. I'd like to point at nuclear energy - it seems unlikely that invention or scientific discovery in the field have been slowed down, but mass adoption of the technology was shut down by anti-nuclear activists. Environmentalists had at least a good ten year stretch where nuclear was all but unacknowledged as a good-to-go solution to all the problems being bought up. Even now there is a pretty good chance that with some political cover for the capital investment required it is a better choice for powering a country.

It is actually easy to imagine one motivated, charismatic person in the right place and right time completely changing the practical landscape without any change to the pace of scientific advancement.

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#49

Post by DrScientist »

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…

Amazon launched in Europe by simply buying the opposition and re-badging it.

https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-thr...

Re: Great Founder Theory (2020)

#50

Post by ac2u »

__loam wrote: post #2

It's absolutely incredible to see someone take the Great Man Theory, something that has been greatly criticized in historical circles, and apply a tech bro bullshit veneer to it to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone. Here's my own Great Founder Theory: I don't think founders matter nearly as much as people in Silicon Valley think they do. They're basically there to give VCs a figu…

>to pass it off as some new and amazing thought worth sharing with everyone

The linked page does read like it's passing it off as original thought (whatever that means), but had a quick look at the linked PDF. It doesn't make any attempt to hide the historical and academic context of the Great Man Theory from the reader.

Whole thing might be bullshit, but your comment comes across as overly sneering. Whether it's worth sharing with anyone is a judgement left to the reader.

I didn't read the whole thing, but had a glance at the last chapter in China and learned a few things to look into that I didn't know about before in regards to history there. If the author self-censored to please you, that wouldn't have happened.

Your outrage over someone writing down some thoughts in a structured way and sharing it seems like a waste.

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