You have 2 sailors - one weak, the other great. They have the same wind behind their sails. Who will finish the race first?
The great sailor, of course.
Now, same experiment, except the weak sailor now gets a 1000 km/hr wind and the great one gets a 1 km/hr wind (hypothetically of course). Who wins the race now?
The weak sailor.
Now, who was responsible for winning the race? Was it the wind or was it the person who captured the wind? What's more important - the person who captures, or the gust that fills his sail? Replace sail with society and sailor with founder (adjust for time/economy/education/family). Now who's responsible for the success of the company? Was it the single factor person? Or the inumerable factor society?
What's more likely - that people are special (you're all special - just like mother told you), or that the situations they are placed in are? Are there really great men (or women), or are there in fact merely extraordinary situations that produce, as a side effect, those self-same "great" men/women?
Why do inventions have multiple origins, why are there always multiple companies in the same spaces being founded at the same time, why does innovation happen in specific situations rather than with specific groups of people? There were hundreds of search engines/social networks. The telephone was patented on the same day by multiple people. The radio has one of the most messy histories of invention I have ever seen.
"Founder as Victim, Founder as God" sounds a great deal like humans have a poor understanding of randomness. 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs are replaced every single year. Why is that? Maybe it's because people don't understand randomness and the astounding complexity inherent in large systems (the Earth for example).
Replace the CEO - that'll fix all our problems! Change strategy, that did it! We just need more synergy, better management, great leadership!
Let's ignore global macro factors like extraneous lowering of energy/technology costs, the economic cycle, geopolitical risk, time between war, sex, age, race, strong laws, strong defence, personal networks, position in society, number of humans alive, access to education, access to capital, actions of third parties, chance meetings and all the other things that go into these systems.
Yeah, the founders, that's who's important!
Just wave away everything else - we do love our narratives don't we (imagine life without films!).
This is fundamental attribution error at work. The world is more complex than the people in it. CEOs don't cause great companies as much as you'd like that to be true. People don't cause great things to happen as much as people want that to be true. The world is very complex and humans are incredibly stupid.
Most people have trouble getting their heads around controlled static experiments in physics/AI. That's a tiny, tiny system. It takes a great deal of arrogance to talk of the world in such a generalized, grandiose way, without a shred of evidence apart from personal biases and inductive reasoning.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
You only see the winners people. Randomness is more important than you think it is.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
I always find it interesting when a contemporary argument boils down to old ones. (This isn't a criticism). Your argument against the Great Man Theory is best expressed in War and Peace, where Tolstoy goes on long discussions on the imaginary significance of great men, including obviously Napoleon. Or, as Isaiah Berlin says in the "Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life:
...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world...
Comments
You have 2 sailors - one weak, the other great. They have the same wind behind their sails. Who will finish the race first?
The great sailor, of course.
Now, same experiment, except the weak sailor now gets a 1000 km/hr wind and the great one gets a 1 km/hr wind (hypothetically of course). Who wins the race now?
The weak sailor.
Now, who was responsible for winning the race? Was it the wind or was it the person who captured the wind? What's more important - the person who captures, or the gust that fills his sail? Replace sail with society and sailor with founder (adjust for time/economy/education/family). Now who's responsible for the success of the company? Was it the single factor person? Or the inumerable factor society?
What's more likely - that people are special (you're all special - just like mother told you), or that the situations they are placed in are? Are there really great men (or women), or are there in fact merely extraordinary situations that produce, as a side effect, those self-same "great" men/women?
Why do inventions have multiple origins, why are there always multiple companies in the same spaces being founded at the same time, why does innovation happen in specific situations rather than with specific groups of people? There were hundreds of search engines/social networks. The telephone was patented on the same day by multiple people. The radio has one of the most messy histories of invention I have ever seen.
"Founder as Victim, Founder as God" sounds a great deal like humans have a poor understanding of randomness. 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs are replaced every single year. Why is that? Maybe it's because people don't understand randomness and the astounding complexity inherent in large systems (the Earth for example).
Replace the CEO - that'll fix all our problems! Change strategy, that did it! We just need more synergy, better management, great leadership!
Let's ignore global macro factors like extraneous lowering of energy/technology costs, the economic cycle, geopolitical risk, time between war, sex, age, race, strong laws, strong defence, personal networks, position in society, number of humans alive, access to education, access to capital, actions of third parties, chance meetings and all the other things that go into these systems.
Just wave away everything else - we do love our narratives don't we (imagine life without films!).This is fundamental attribution error at work. The world is more complex than the people in it. CEOs don't cause great companies as much as you'd like that to be true. People don't cause great things to happen as much as people want that to be true. The world is very complex and humans are incredibly stupid.
Most people have trouble getting their heads around controlled static experiments in physics/AI. That's a tiny, tiny system. It takes a great deal of arrogance to talk of the world in such a generalized, grandiose way, without a shred of evidence apart from personal biases and inductive reasoning.
You only see the winners people. Randomness is more important than you think it is.I always find it interesting when a contemporary argument boils down to old ones. (This isn't a criticism). Your argument against the Great Man Theory is best expressed in War and Peace, where Tolstoy goes on long discussions on the imaginary significance of great men, including obviously Napoleon. Or, as Isaiah Berlin says in the "Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life:
...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world...
Oh man and here I was thinking I was being slightly original with my little parable quoting Shakespeare :D.
Happy to be a modern rehash of Tolstoy's thoughts - I still haven't gotten around to reading War and Peace so I had no idea.
Everything is a remix is it not?
After the tide refused to follow his orders and stop rising, Cnut hung up his crown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut_the_Great#Ruler_of_the_wav...