[ok_craig]

Not sure why people are always so interested in cutting down other peoples' heroes.

"Oh, Einstein wasn't special, if he didn't get it, the next guy would have. Check out these folks instead." Somehow not sensing the irony that if we all did then worship the other ones you're talking about, you or someone like you would then just make the same claims on those people.. that they're not special, it was about timing and luck.

It's really not about the achievements for some people. (You.) It's just about having a person who only an elite recognizes. You're part of that elite and you're smarter for it because you see this other person's specialness and the rest of the world doesn't and you're better than them for it.

Einstein was great and original and irreplaceable. Your need to have found something better than what the common man worships doesn't make the other heroes you come up with worth any more, or Einstein any less. You just gotta get over it.

[titzer]

No, sorry. It's not about me at all. If I felt like I was special for having different heroes than everyone else then I wouldn't bother trying to draw attention to their accomplishments. It's about our culture's disproportionate focus on one particular person and their contributions to the exclusion of a much more complicated reality.

[joshmarlow]

You know, whether right or wrong in this case, I think you're on to something. As a culture, we do like to focus on singletons - we like the idea of lone geniuses toiling away and changing the world and skip over the amount of team-work/collaboration that goes into real advances.

So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.

[Retra]

People often forget that, in addition to being brilliant, Einstein also had some of the best training available. He was a student to some very big names.