Really, the arguments around the "lone genius" are identical to those of the "Great man theory" of history [1].
The debate has been going on for nearly two centuries.
Suffice it to say that nobody has had the final word.
At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial -- it's entirely due to the perspective you take on "weighting" the two sides.
It's mainly a useful tool for teaching, where "great man" or "lone genius" is the thesis, "ideas in the air" or "standing on the shoulder of giants" is the antithesis, and the synthesis is... both are necessary to fully explain history/achievements.
As individualistic social creatures, the brains of human beings have evolved to understand characters. That's why we anthropomorphisize everything. Technological progress is no exception: Every revolution as well as incremental step must have a person assigned to it. If none exists, we create the idea of one (e.g. God).
I think it's useful to decompose this dialectical into "material" and a "social" dimensions. The material dimension is about change in the world[1]: places are conquered, techniques are developed. We can acknowledge and think about these changes without assigning them a cause. The social dimension is all about assigning causes to those changes. The idea that one person invents something or that it is "in the air" is ultimately a social judgement[2]. People can believe whichever narrative they want and will frequently fight about which narrative is correct.
So, to me, it is 100% true that there is no final word on the social question. We both have highly ambiguous historical examples and every reason to question if the historical examples that appear unambiguous are simply shaped by the social consensus of their time.
I do not think we need to accept that there is no final world on the material question. It seems very possible for us to improve our techniques for fostering discoveries. That's not to say it's easy to see clearly (obviously our social ties mess with us here), but I don't think they are the same.
> At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial
By this standard, isn't nearly all debate "artificial"? Two opposite sides can both have points, but how we weigh them can have enormous real world consequences.
[1] Of course, social changes are also changes in the world but let's not tie ourselves in knots too much.
[2] There is also obviously a material element here - someone does something, but I think that material action is irretrievably obscured by the social consensus layer.
Yeah I think the whole argument rests on the meaning of words: what does "lone" mean? And the article didn't really get into that, or it was fairly sloppy about it.
Also, I don't think there is that meaningful a distinction between a lone genius and a very small group.
Is what Crick, Watson, and Franklin did any less useful or interesting than what Einstein did, simply because there were multiple people working on it? I'm sure they had to "go it alone" for quite awhile (and there were probably a few more people helping them).
To me it sounds like Katalin Kariko (mRNA vaccine inventor) was something of a lone genius early in her career. Certainly her colleagues didn't believe in her work.
But apparently the more senior faculty Drew Weissman did and they made progress together. I'm not sure but it sounds like she is the main driver of the work.
My point is that it doesn't seem to matter? Either way, they had to do long term work that wasn't accepted by their peers, and turned out to be extremely valuable.
Though I guess you can say it matters because it's "easier" for 1 person to work in isolation, but it's not easy for 2 or 3 people. For example, they need lab equipment, physical space, etc. Einstein and Ramanujan didn't need that.
Anyway, there is probably useful stuff to explore there, but the article seemed to be grinding an axe and wasn't that clear about what it was saying. Obviously the truth is somewhere in between the extremes, and depends on what "lone" means.
> History [..] is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own [...] (Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Einstein to name the most obvious examples).
This line has almost the opposite effect than intended in me. Yes, Newton and Darwin were geniuses that came with revolutionary ideas, but on the other hand, for calculus and evolution it seems to have been their time. Leibniz and Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same ideas around the same time.
Came here to call out the same selection of examples as really weird for the purpose of making that point.
Newton and Darwin for the reasons you cite—and if two arrived at the same breakthrough at almost the same time, does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close, despite the fraction of a percent of the global population had, or has, the upbringing, inclination, and freedom to even approach the problem in the first place? Hell, does one even dare imagine that a thousand nobodies hadn't had the insight that would have led them straight to that breakthrough much sooner if only they'd had the background and environment to recognize it as significant, follow through to prove it, and gain publicity for their discovery? Surely not.
Aristotle, well, shit, everyone whose independent work survives from antiquity looks like a lone genius, but that's obviously, in part, because so little survives and because attribution is so sketchy. With Aristotle in particular it's not even clear how much was his work is his, directly, and how much was the work of his "school", developed over years or decades by many people, if we're talking about particular insights or inventions, and not sheer overall-importance of a person.
I know less about the environment around Einstein's breakthroughs but given the rest I'd be surprised if the author actually managed to pick a good example, for his purposes.
Wasn't it Newton himself who said: "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"? Looks like a pretty strong rebuttal of the "lone genius" POV.
I'm not an expert but I seem recall that other people were working concurrently on related, maybe tangential, questions for most of the other "great ideas" mentioned in the article
Didn't Einstein strike such a hit precisely because his (new) approach solved sought after problems? The people who helped define the problem have a large chunk of merit, in my opinion. There's no need for a theory in a vacuum.
Newton didn't just do calculus, he also structured the laws of physics. And it is pretty likely that Leibniz discovered calculus by working backwards from Netwons laws of physics, since if you have the laws of movement clearly shown like that then discovering calculus is a lot easier. Note that Newton created calculus in his quest to do the laws of motion, so he didn't publish it.
Edit: Also Newton discovered the calculus of variations and applied it to a bunch of problems, can read about it here:
It is the basis for almost all graduate level physics courses we have today and is way beyond regular calculus. Would likely have taken a few hundred years before it was discovered without Newton.
An idea of calculus was already found in ancient Greece.
Archimedes used it to calculate the area of parabola by assigning a 'weight' to a line, and using a leverage to balance it.
There is a good Numberphile YT about it called 'Parabolas and Archimedes'
I've always thought that the "Myth of the Lone Genius" is a bit of a "motte-bailey" format argument, where an aggressive, undefendable stance is advertised, and then when challenged the person who is making the argument retreats back into a more believable stance. The bailey, in this case, is "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true.
I believe people that make the bailey form of the above argument want to believe that they're important, and want their contributions to be measured on the same scale that great people's accomplishments are measured on. If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".
> "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true.
I think you are missing here the real core of the "Myth of the Lone Genius" argument which is not to claim that lone geniuses don't exist (e.g. Ramanujan, far more than some of these other examples) but rather to reject the argument that progress is mostly made by them, or can be best understood by focusing on them.
The argument boils down to: everyone's contributions are clearly not equivalent, but the vast majority of real progress is a collective effort; and that by focusing on individuals we are less efficient at learning what is effective.
When it comes down to it, I think the lone genius is overestimated in common understanding and the rebuttal overcorrects.
It usually takes quite a lot of expertise to recognize what someone truly accomplished or even to appreciate or be explained.
The lone genius tends to do something which has its time come, usually a bit ahead of schedule.
In science the pattern tends to be long periods of incremental buildup of large volumes of straightforward work interspersed with sort of phase transitions often (but not always) triggered by the lone genius. (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
The pieces will all come into place for a significant change waiting for a trigger. The lone genius is the one who does this early. Not in a vacuum but also not in a crowd.
>>If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".
I think it is about not comparing the top 100 people in a field. This would already exclude the lazy/dissertation folk.
Everyone interprets the myth differently. I interpreted it as "most breakthroughs and progresses don't come from lone geniuses, but large groups of career scientists". For example, there is no lone genius behind the mRNA vaccine breakthrough, but a few universities and well-funded companies with many scientists working on them over a long period of time. Take all important progresses and breakthroughs, the vast vast majority of them are coming from this kind of environment. There is the occasional one-person operation, being the sole author of an influential paper. But the vast vast majority of influential papers have many co-authors.
I am not saying the above is true. I don't work in science and I am not too familiar with the state of the scientific world. I am saying that when I heard about the "Myth of the Lone Genius", that's what I thought it meant.
Similar interpretation here. In the spirit of broadening the internet's vocabulary of 'meh', as per TLDR, I would like to propose an acronym for this category of perspective.
My theory is that it's a lot easier to get WORK done when you're not part of a group.
When teams form... group dynamics take place and this includes politics and conformity and social cohesion requirements. Teams demand a 'team player' that they can 'drink a beer with' which means group dynamics becomes as important, if not more important then the work being done which adds a lot of overhead to working, I.e. playing politics, selling your ideas over others, office chitchat, forging alliances to get your ideas done, etc.
Anyone whose worked in an office knows what I'm talking about.
You can't just show up and passionately go to work, there's a whole element of social interaction involved.
And often in teams people are promoted who are better at maintaining social cohesion than performing the actual work and these likable people begin to dictate the goal as much if not more than the people with the deep knowledge who put less effort into building relationships than they do into doing the work.
So the nature of a group/team tends to select for people who put a priority on maintaining social cohesion versus people who are extremely focused and knowledgeable and passionate about the work.
So a genius, if they have a choice, is pretty much always going operate alone or in groups of one or two
Just a theory.
Also:
There's a big difference between collaboration....and being a part of a team that dictates the direction of a goal.
Sure, we shouldn’t have this naive view that these so-called solitary geniuses work 1000% on their own without any input whatsoever from other people, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t do most of the heavy lifting.
Seems like a reasonable middle ground, and therefore more or less destined to be lost in a sea of extremes.
Sounds like this guy is trying to be contrarian for the sake of contrarian . Even if someone works alone, they still derive knowledge from outside. And a lot of important research papers and findings haver 2 or more authors.
The examples of true lone geniuses, to refute the claim they don't exist, are all bad. For different reasons. Ranging from lack of evidence to obviously borrowed priors.
Carefully picking cherries doesn't lead to truth. For truth, the author should try chopping that cherry tree down. What is the cultural need for the myth of the lone genius rooted in?
History (ancient and recent) is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own
Not quite. They are always building in the backs of those who came before, even ( and sometime especially ) the failures.
Simultaneous independent invention is pretty strong evidence for this. It still takes a uniquely talented person, but when a certain critical mass of prior learning and information is achieved, then for those uniquely talented people the breakthroughs may be the logical next step as they work through the problem. See Newton & Leibniz re:calculus as an example. The author dismisses this example, but both did truly do the heavy lifting, independent of each other, but still with the assistance of collaboration and shared thoughts.
The problem is that the author seems to not want to admit to degrees of "lone-ness". Either a genius did most of the heavy lifting, or they did not-- the author does not seem interested in examining the nuances of how-- and how much-- an individual achieved through relationships with other thinkers resent & past.
Even if we were to grant (incorrectly) that Newton would have achieved everything he achieved without any assistance, feedback, discussions, etc with other thinkers of his time, it would be truly ridiculous to think he would have achieved as much if not for everything & everyone who came before them.
In short, some genius intellects still benefit from fertile soil, and this does not at all take away from their incredible achievements that still required a genius intellects to put together. The author seems to think acknowledging this somehow takes away from the achievement: it does not. If anything, it elevates it: The genius takes everything that came before and the intellects of their own time, synthesizes it and then transcends it. That transcendence is incredible, but it did not occur in isolation.
And the of course there are discoveries that are achieved through gradual, often tedious chipping away at a problem. This is a lot of science, even if the massive paradigm shifts (See Thomas Kuhn's work on this topic) may come from a single unique catalyst. The catalyst needs something to catalyze though.
I think people are getting hung up too much on the "their own" part vs "full of geniuses" part.
Ok, fine, if three - instead of one - people - out of billions - came up with a revolutionary new idea - that does not, to me, discount the idea of the "lone genius", just because 2 > 1 and we can't strictly use the word "lone" anymore.
The idea would be discounted, if say, 500 million people all invented calculus independently of each other over a period of 5 months.
Of course. Knowledge is always collective. We hugely underestimate how much knowledge is externalised in cultural firmware, passed down from generation to generation, and only accumulated - when it accumulates at all - because of inventions like writing, math formalisms, cultural and creative traditions, and the scientific method.
Without a head start from previous generations you get a rather dumb monkey. Even a genius dumb monkey is going to be extremely limited in what it can do.
Even so - an educated genius monkey with the right life opportunities can still generate lone game changing insights that most monkeys can't.
Without that kind of step change insight domains will stagnate, sometimes for centuries. No amount of collective cultural activity of any kind will move them on.
The problem with the word genius is that ideas are need based. A lot of the most forward thinking innovations are made by people who are competing with as few as hundreds, or even dozens of people who are qualified to even work on the problem in the first place. Sure it's a nice achievement but I'm not into calling it genius. As a society it probably makes the most sense to develop standards such that more people can have the opportunity to work on the problem than to go crazy over a single person.
“I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by a committee… i’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… not on the committee. Not on a team” — Steve Wozniak
One metric that I have thought about is this: If this person had not existed, how long would it have been before someone else made the same discovery?
Something I noticed when I was in astronomy was that the most successful astronomers tended to do work that was high impact, but also, in a sense, obvious. But they would do that work faster than anyone else, get the first paper out, and let the citations roll in. (There was a good Twitter thread about this strategy here: https://twitter.com/neurobongo/status/1404208339295350792)
There is something to be said for this work! After all, it is important and someone needs to do it. But it seems to me that there have been singular figures who really discovered something that wasn't just "in the air," and that that's the sort of thing we reserve for the word "genius."
I'm still not completely convinced that this is the right metric though. There have been a number of scientists who are universally regarded as geniuses who discovered things that probably would have been discovered shortly thereafter if they hadn't existed. Poincaré was close to discovering the special theory of relativity when Einstein published his work. Leibniz discovered calculus at around the same time as Newton. Hilbert discovered the Einstein field equations at about the same time as Einstein. (Some sources say Hilbert was just five days earlier than Einstein.) The whole history of quantum mechanics seems like a mad dash by a group of brilliant physicists who were discovering one thing after another nearly every week in the early 20th century.
On the other hand, Poincaré, Leibniz, and Hilbert could all justifiably be called geniuses, too. So if two geniuses figure something out simultaneously, does that mean that they cancel each other out and neither of them were geniuses? Seems wrong. So I'm still not sure what the right metric is.
> Gradualism is selection and variation that happens more gradually. Over a short period of time it is hard to notice.
> In punctuated equilibrium, change comes in spurts. There is a period of very little change, and then one or a few huge changes occur, often through mutations in the genes of a few individuals.
This was the most important part of the Malcolm Gladwell book. That chapter, *Trouble With Geniuses Part 2, compares the lack of success by super genius Chris Langan to Robert Oppenheimer who graduated with honors despite attempted murder of a university faculty.
Anybody who has submitted a proposal to a standards body knows this experience. It does not matter how amazing or ingenious the idea is. The most important thing is to achieve buy in from highly skeptical people. The idea can be garbage, but if there is enough charisma and popularity associated people will eagerly polish the idea for you.
The lone genius might build that amazing thing but it takes more to achieve adoption. Originality irrationally scares the shit out of people.
I don’t think the “Myth of the Lone Genius” argues that the “lone genius” doesn’t exist, it argues that most progress comes from ordinary smarts and not lone genius, and that even the lonest of geniuses stand on the shoulders of more ordinary people.
This lost credibility as soon as it cited Einstein as an example of one of these "lone geniuses". He was anything but. He wasn't lone, and he wasn't a genius.
He happened to be born at a time and place in history when physics was rapidly going through change anyway. He was a correspondent of Caratheodory, whose mathematical work was essential for the development of general relativity. He was nearly beaten to the punch by Hilbert.
Einstein was smart, but lots of people in the world are smart without being called "lone geniuses".
I think it's important to remember that there are two types of progress - evolutionary and revolutionary.
By numbers, advancements are overwhelmingly evolutionary - small steps in a predictable direction. If you want to be a scientist or an inventor or what have you, most of your career is going to be spent on these evolutionary steps. Such evolutionary work is well suited to teams and larger organizations, and results are a consequence of the amount of effort that goes in to them rather than individual competency.
However the revolutionary advances which shift our paradigms are extremely important, despite being very rare. Such revolutions can not be planned and thus are rarely the product of large scale collaboration. Maybe an individual has a moment of insight while taking a bath, perhaps some friends on a train have just the right conversation, but it's always a unique mind viewing the problem from a new perspective that upends everything. Yes that person is probably not literally cut off from all of society, but unless you're being ridiculously pedantic "lone genius" is a pretty good description.
While as stated it's incredibly dumb to bet everything on being one of these lone geniuses, the fact is societal advance does depend on large numbers of people cultivating unique minds that might glean such rare insights under the right circumstances. Statistically you are much more likely to be successful as an accountant than an artist, but how terrible would life be if therefore no one pursued art?
You are everything there is that you can experience. The things you see, hear, etc, are really just sensory inputs produced by your own organs. Higher abstractions such as your thoughts, ideas, etc, are built upon these inputs that you produced. By changing your narratives, your physiology, etc, you can change how you feel about the world, or "the world", so to speak. You are everything there is to you.
And then there is the I/O aspect to it. By interacting with these inputs and constructing models about "the world", you learn that you can receive future inputs that you want by outputting data (e.g. moving your hand to type these words, etc) based on the right simulations about "the world". You learn of your dependencies to abstractions such as "your parents", "friends", etc. It is in this way that you are not alone.
And then there is the feeling of meaning (as well as mythical experiences and the pursuit of "higher purposes"), that which reinforces the none-loneliness of existence. To be able to share your life/work with others, or connect with others at a profound level. That is something worth greater than your accomplishments.
Newton is one of the more solitary individuals I've studied, much more than Einstein or Liebniz or Feynman or Bohr. Newton had books of calculations unpublished when Halley asked him about gravity and the moon. Would Einstein sit on books and books of info without thinking to publish it?
Or, maybe, we recognize a genius only after their idea has been validated. It's the same situation as with "prophets".
Take 1000 people and ask them for an open ended prophecy. If one of 1000 gets something perfectly right, we will focus on that person... and ignore the fact that the other 999 failed to predict anything. Then hold that one person as a great prophet.
Dreams are 10 a penny - they say.
Not to say that people who managed to properly articulate ideas and put in the "capstone" for a theory aren't important or hold a lot of knowledge/wisdom.
But I don't understand why would Aristotle, Newton or Einstein support the idea that "Lone Genius Myth" is false.
As has been said in this thread many times, there is a middle ground here: geniuses exist, of course, but are not necessarily solely responsible for great leaps forward in progress.
What’s also worth mentioning is that geniuses stand on the shoulders of abstraction, the most powerful (and scary!) force known to man. The more and more we abstract away problems, the more and more geniuses can scaffold on top of that abstraction. This compounding effect is more responsible for innovation than the admittedly gifted and great individuals who channel it.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Isaac Newton
[+] [-] crazygringo|4 years ago|reply
The debate has been going on for nearly two centuries.
Suffice it to say that nobody has had the final word.
At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial -- it's entirely due to the perspective you take on "weighting" the two sides.
It's mainly a useful tool for teaching, where "great man" or "lone genius" is the thesis, "ideas in the air" or "standing on the shoulder of giants" is the antithesis, and the synthesis is... both are necessary to fully explain history/achievements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
[+] [-] hypertele-Xii|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|4 years ago|reply
So, to me, it is 100% true that there is no final word on the social question. We both have highly ambiguous historical examples and every reason to question if the historical examples that appear unambiguous are simply shaped by the social consensus of their time.
I do not think we need to accept that there is no final world on the material question. It seems very possible for us to improve our techniques for fostering discoveries. That's not to say it's easy to see clearly (obviously our social ties mess with us here), but I don't think they are the same.
> At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial
By this standard, isn't nearly all debate "artificial"? Two opposite sides can both have points, but how we weigh them can have enormous real world consequences.
[1] Of course, social changes are also changes in the world but let's not tie ourselves in knots too much.
[2] There is also obviously a material element here - someone does something, but I think that material action is irretrievably obscured by the social consensus layer.
[+] [-] chubot|4 years ago|reply
Also, I don't think there is that meaningful a distinction between a lone genius and a very small group.
Is what Crick, Watson, and Franklin did any less useful or interesting than what Einstein did, simply because there were multiple people working on it? I'm sure they had to "go it alone" for quite awhile (and there were probably a few more people helping them).
To me it sounds like Katalin Kariko (mRNA vaccine inventor) was something of a lone genius early in her career. Certainly her colleagues didn't believe in her work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125003
But apparently the more senior faculty Drew Weissman did and they made progress together. I'm not sure but it sounds like she is the main driver of the work.
My point is that it doesn't seem to matter? Either way, they had to do long term work that wasn't accepted by their peers, and turned out to be extremely valuable.
Though I guess you can say it matters because it's "easier" for 1 person to work in isolation, but it's not easy for 2 or 3 people. For example, they need lab equipment, physical space, etc. Einstein and Ramanujan didn't need that.
Anyway, there is probably useful stuff to explore there, but the article seemed to be grinding an axe and wasn't that clear about what it was saying. Obviously the truth is somewhere in between the extremes, and depends on what "lone" means.
[+] [-] Siira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvaliente2001|4 years ago|reply
This line has almost the opposite effect than intended in me. Yes, Newton and Darwin were geniuses that came with revolutionary ideas, but on the other hand, for calculus and evolution it seems to have been their time. Leibniz and Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same ideas around the same time.
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
Newton and Darwin for the reasons you cite—and if two arrived at the same breakthrough at almost the same time, does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close, despite the fraction of a percent of the global population had, or has, the upbringing, inclination, and freedom to even approach the problem in the first place? Hell, does one even dare imagine that a thousand nobodies hadn't had the insight that would have led them straight to that breakthrough much sooner if only they'd had the background and environment to recognize it as significant, follow through to prove it, and gain publicity for their discovery? Surely not.
Aristotle, well, shit, everyone whose independent work survives from antiquity looks like a lone genius, but that's obviously, in part, because so little survives and because attribution is so sketchy. With Aristotle in particular it's not even clear how much was his work is his, directly, and how much was the work of his "school", developed over years or decades by many people, if we're talking about particular insights or inventions, and not sheer overall-importance of a person.
I know less about the environment around Einstein's breakthroughs but given the rest I'd be surprised if the author actually managed to pick a good example, for his purposes.
[+] [-] zozbot234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gota|4 years ago|reply
Didn't Einstein strike such a hit precisely because his (new) approach solved sought after problems? The people who helped define the problem have a large chunk of merit, in my opinion. There's no need for a theory in a vacuum.
[+] [-] username90|4 years ago|reply
Edit: Also Newton discovered the calculus of variations and applied it to a bunch of problems, can read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_minimal_resistance_...
It is the basis for almost all graduate level physics courses we have today and is way beyond regular calculus. Would likely have taken a few hundred years before it was discovered without Newton.
[+] [-] Xelbair|4 years ago|reply
There is a good Numberphile YT about it called 'Parabolas and Archimedes'
[+] [-] quacked|4 years ago|reply
I believe people that make the bailey form of the above argument want to believe that they're important, and want their contributions to be measured on the same scale that great people's accomplishments are measured on. If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".
[+] [-] ska|4 years ago|reply
I think you are missing here the real core of the "Myth of the Lone Genius" argument which is not to claim that lone geniuses don't exist (e.g. Ramanujan, far more than some of these other examples) but rather to reject the argument that progress is mostly made by them, or can be best understood by focusing on them.
The argument boils down to: everyone's contributions are clearly not equivalent, but the vast majority of real progress is a collective effort; and that by focusing on individuals we are less efficient at learning what is effective.
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
It usually takes quite a lot of expertise to recognize what someone truly accomplished or even to appreciate or be explained.
The lone genius tends to do something which has its time come, usually a bit ahead of schedule.
In science the pattern tends to be long periods of incremental buildup of large volumes of straightforward work interspersed with sort of phase transitions often (but not always) triggered by the lone genius. (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
The pieces will all come into place for a significant change waiting for a trigger. The lone genius is the one who does this early. Not in a vacuum but also not in a crowd.
[+] [-] E-Reverance|4 years ago|reply
I think it is about not comparing the top 100 people in a field. This would already exclude the lazy/dissertation folk.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smnrchrds|4 years ago|reply
I am not saying the above is true. I don't work in science and I am not too familiar with the state of the scientific world. I am saying that when I heard about the "Myth of the Lone Genius", that's what I thought it meant.
[+] [-] contingencies|4 years ago|reply
WTMTDE: Way too meta to deserve eyeballs.
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|4 years ago|reply
When teams form... group dynamics take place and this includes politics and conformity and social cohesion requirements. Teams demand a 'team player' that they can 'drink a beer with' which means group dynamics becomes as important, if not more important then the work being done which adds a lot of overhead to working, I.e. playing politics, selling your ideas over others, office chitchat, forging alliances to get your ideas done, etc.
Anyone whose worked in an office knows what I'm talking about.
You can't just show up and passionately go to work, there's a whole element of social interaction involved.
And often in teams people are promoted who are better at maintaining social cohesion than performing the actual work and these likable people begin to dictate the goal as much if not more than the people with the deep knowledge who put less effort into building relationships than they do into doing the work.
So the nature of a group/team tends to select for people who put a priority on maintaining social cohesion versus people who are extremely focused and knowledgeable and passionate about the work.
So a genius, if they have a choice, is pretty much always going operate alone or in groups of one or two
Just a theory.
Also:
There's a big difference between collaboration....and being a part of a team that dictates the direction of a goal.
[+] [-] rogersbacon17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
Seems like a reasonable middle ground, and therefore more or less destined to be lost in a sea of extremes.
[+] [-] dfxm12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickfigure|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|4 years ago|reply
It's arguable that lone genius collaborates but are the sole director of their idea and goal.
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcoo|4 years ago|reply
The examples of true lone geniuses, to refute the claim they don't exist, are all bad. For different reasons. Ranging from lack of evidence to obviously borrowed priors.
Carefully picking cherries doesn't lead to truth. For truth, the author should try chopping that cherry tree down. What is the cultural need for the myth of the lone genius rooted in?
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
Not quite. They are always building in the backs of those who came before, even ( and sometime especially ) the failures.
Simultaneous independent invention is pretty strong evidence for this. It still takes a uniquely talented person, but when a certain critical mass of prior learning and information is achieved, then for those uniquely talented people the breakthroughs may be the logical next step as they work through the problem. See Newton & Leibniz re:calculus as an example. The author dismisses this example, but both did truly do the heavy lifting, independent of each other, but still with the assistance of collaboration and shared thoughts.
The problem is that the author seems to not want to admit to degrees of "lone-ness". Either a genius did most of the heavy lifting, or they did not-- the author does not seem interested in examining the nuances of how-- and how much-- an individual achieved through relationships with other thinkers resent & past.
Even if we were to grant (incorrectly) that Newton would have achieved everything he achieved without any assistance, feedback, discussions, etc with other thinkers of his time, it would be truly ridiculous to think he would have achieved as much if not for everything & everyone who came before them.
In short, some genius intellects still benefit from fertile soil, and this does not at all take away from their incredible achievements that still required a genius intellects to put together. The author seems to think acknowledging this somehow takes away from the achievement: it does not. If anything, it elevates it: The genius takes everything that came before and the intellects of their own time, synthesizes it and then transcends it. That transcendence is incredible, but it did not occur in isolation.
And the of course there are discoveries that are achieved through gradual, often tedious chipping away at a problem. This is a lot of science, even if the massive paradigm shifts (See Thomas Kuhn's work on this topic) may come from a single unique catalyst. The catalyst needs something to catalyze though.
[+] [-] PopsiclePete|4 years ago|reply
Ok, fine, if three - instead of one - people - out of billions - came up with a revolutionary new idea - that does not, to me, discount the idea of the "lone genius", just because 2 > 1 and we can't strictly use the word "lone" anymore.
The idea would be discounted, if say, 500 million people all invented calculus independently of each other over a period of 5 months.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|4 years ago|reply
Without a head start from previous generations you get a rather dumb monkey. Even a genius dumb monkey is going to be extremely limited in what it can do.
Even so - an educated genius monkey with the right life opportunities can still generate lone game changing insights that most monkeys can't.
Without that kind of step change insight domains will stagnate, sometimes for centuries. No amount of collective cultural activity of any kind will move them on.
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogersbacon17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|4 years ago|reply
Something I noticed when I was in astronomy was that the most successful astronomers tended to do work that was high impact, but also, in a sense, obvious. But they would do that work faster than anyone else, get the first paper out, and let the citations roll in. (There was a good Twitter thread about this strategy here: https://twitter.com/neurobongo/status/1404208339295350792)
There is something to be said for this work! After all, it is important and someone needs to do it. But it seems to me that there have been singular figures who really discovered something that wasn't just "in the air," and that that's the sort of thing we reserve for the word "genius."
I'm still not completely convinced that this is the right metric though. There have been a number of scientists who are universally regarded as geniuses who discovered things that probably would have been discovered shortly thereafter if they hadn't existed. Poincaré was close to discovering the special theory of relativity when Einstein published his work. Leibniz discovered calculus at around the same time as Newton. Hilbert discovered the Einstein field equations at about the same time as Einstein. (Some sources say Hilbert was just five days earlier than Einstein.) The whole history of quantum mechanics seems like a mad dash by a group of brilliant physicists who were discovering one thing after another nearly every week in the early 20th century.
On the other hand, Poincaré, Leibniz, and Hilbert could all justifiably be called geniuses, too. So if two geniuses figure something out simultaneously, does that mean that they cancel each other out and neither of them were geniuses? Seems wrong. So I'm still not sure what the right metric is.
[+] [-] dharmaturtle|4 years ago|reply
> Gradualism is selection and variation that happens more gradually. Over a short period of time it is hard to notice.
> In punctuated equilibrium, change comes in spurts. There is a period of very little change, and then one or a few huge changes occur, often through mutations in the genes of a few individuals.
This comparison becomes even more apparent if we use the original definition of meme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
[+] [-] austincheney|4 years ago|reply
Anybody who has submitted a proposal to a standards body knows this experience. It does not matter how amazing or ingenious the idea is. The most important thing is to achieve buy in from highly skeptical people. The idea can be garbage, but if there is enough charisma and popularity associated people will eagerly polish the idea for you.
The lone genius might build that amazing thing but it takes more to achieve adoption. Originality irrationally scares the shit out of people.
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asymptosis|4 years ago|reply
He happened to be born at a time and place in history when physics was rapidly going through change anyway. He was a correspondent of Caratheodory, whose mathematical work was essential for the development of general relativity. He was nearly beaten to the punch by Hilbert.
Einstein was smart, but lots of people in the world are smart without being called "lone geniuses".
[+] [-] jjk166|4 years ago|reply
By numbers, advancements are overwhelmingly evolutionary - small steps in a predictable direction. If you want to be a scientist or an inventor or what have you, most of your career is going to be spent on these evolutionary steps. Such evolutionary work is well suited to teams and larger organizations, and results are a consequence of the amount of effort that goes in to them rather than individual competency.
However the revolutionary advances which shift our paradigms are extremely important, despite being very rare. Such revolutions can not be planned and thus are rarely the product of large scale collaboration. Maybe an individual has a moment of insight while taking a bath, perhaps some friends on a train have just the right conversation, but it's always a unique mind viewing the problem from a new perspective that upends everything. Yes that person is probably not literally cut off from all of society, but unless you're being ridiculously pedantic "lone genius" is a pretty good description.
While as stated it's incredibly dumb to bet everything on being one of these lone geniuses, the fact is societal advance does depend on large numbers of people cultivating unique minds that might glean such rare insights under the right circumstances. Statistically you are much more likely to be successful as an accountant than an artist, but how terrible would life be if therefore no one pursued art?
[+] [-] archibaldJ|4 years ago|reply
And then there is the I/O aspect to it. By interacting with these inputs and constructing models about "the world", you learn that you can receive future inputs that you want by outputting data (e.g. moving your hand to type these words, etc) based on the right simulations about "the world". You learn of your dependencies to abstractions such as "your parents", "friends", etc. It is in this way that you are not alone.
[+] [-] archibaldJ|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JAlexoid|4 years ago|reply
Take 1000 people and ask them for an open ended prophecy. If one of 1000 gets something perfectly right, we will focus on that person... and ignore the fact that the other 999 failed to predict anything. Then hold that one person as a great prophet.
Dreams are 10 a penny - they say.
Not to say that people who managed to properly articulate ideas and put in the "capstone" for a theory aren't important or hold a lot of knowledge/wisdom.
But I don't understand why would Aristotle, Newton or Einstein support the idea that "Lone Genius Myth" is false.
[+] [-] SarikayaKomzin|4 years ago|reply
What’s also worth mentioning is that geniuses stand on the shoulders of abstraction, the most powerful (and scary!) force known to man. The more and more we abstract away problems, the more and more geniuses can scaffold on top of that abstraction. This compounding effect is more responsible for innovation than the admittedly gifted and great individuals who channel it.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Isaac Newton