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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

The same species that invented youtube also makes youtube comments. Keep that in mind.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589926.

Have you actually checked youtube comments in the recent months? The algorithms seem to be changing a lot and the top comments for most videos are actually very on-point, positive and non-abusive, even if somewhat skewed towards fun content and jokes.

If you watch the Viking video clips from the NASA office and see the group of nerdy 70s people who got us to space... you start to appreciate that it’s not always a uniform species for inspiration, the crossover with the lowest common denominator is less interesting in practice, or worrying. Something I dont always remember every time I come across popular threads on Twitter and want to claw my eyes out. (And yes I know you’re joking.)

It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one.

We do not need everyone to be Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi, or Michelangelo, or Bach or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Newton or Galileo we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us. We've not always been good at that.. but we've been getting better at it.

> It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one.

This is such a ridiculous hero praising statement. It's also completely wrong.

While we love to hero worship, none of these heroes worked in isolation or without correspondence with others. Be it their teacher, peers they were having letter relationships with, their partners, their students or other people.

The OP said "we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us".

You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you misinterpreted me there. I didn’t claim that they worked in isolation or accomplished it on their own. I was simply pointing out that the work, knowledge and understanding by the very few have always benefited the many. Look at the parent comment and you will understand the context.

It's just not a healthy or grounded (or accurate) approach to encourage hero worship.

1% of humanity is something like 75 million people. That's plenty of people to correspond and work together with.

1% is actually now about 90 million as the world population currently approximated at around 9 Billion. And increasing by around 90-100Mil a year

Where did you get that number? The United Nations thinks that we're going to hit 8 billion by around 2023 and 9 billion by about 2037 [0].

[0] https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/

It seems that the '1%' is symbolic, though. Just a round 'very small' number that sounds nice. Probably way less currently, orders of magnitude less.

It seems that the proportion of ground-breaking individuals is less a function of population than of the state of things. Meaning, it doesn't matter how many are trying if there are only ever X slots available for 'greatness' at a given time. E.g. when one Musk or one Gandhi arises, a thousand others might have just missed that spot for this life.

At the very least, there is a relation between the two — pushing population to extreme numbers obviously increases the number of exceptional individuals because there is more need; but I see a rather linear bottleneck here, whereas context dictates a lot of what you can and can't do. In that sense, the greatest are the most adaptive (evolution-style, applied to civilization), they find the 'correct formula' to solve in their own space and time. And execute on it.

I think it's more of a “few thousand people” worldwide at any given time in recorded history, maybe 10x or 100x more today than in Ancient times but... nowhere near the population growth ratio.

Obviously, it's all just my subjective perception. I could be so wrong it's actually not-not funny to think about it... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Individual doesn't need to be "ground-breaking" to push humanity forward. Just pushing a little bit helps as well. I think that for instance even majority of postdocs (in useful areas of studies) and significant part of open source developers pushes humanity forward. On individual level it might not be very significant, but take millions of such little pushes and it becomes huge.

That's what we'd think intuitively, but not what's demonstrated empirically in reality, history.

It seems that at some point, it takes more of us to crack the same amount of "scientific difficulty" as it were — hard to be a lone genius typically these days.

I don't know. But you definitely speak of a bias that I had and got almost unequivocally debunked by a colder, more statistical (retrospective, empirical) than logical perspective (models, thought experiment). I personally trust the former more ('facts' in layman terms).

It's not the same amount of scientific difficulty though. Low hanging fruit (relatively speaking) was already picked. Impact of even greatest geniuses toady is miniscule compared to geniuses of yesteryear. Andrew Wiles', Grigori Perelman's and Terence Tao's impact on humanity is not even one thousandth of Leibniz's.

Be careful what you infer. The part that you asserted was 'completely wrong' was of your own inference.

Remember the HN guideline to assume the best possible intent of other people's comments.

None? More research needed to discover Isaac Newton's buddy to whom we evidently owe so much. Then we can get to work on Proust, Emily Dickinson, Michaelangelo, Kubrick, Thoreau and Nietzsche. All presumably unfairly taking the fame.

At least for Kubrick, this task is quite easy thanks to the credit roll at the end of his movies.

It's actually quite a hard task. You'd have to figure out who - if their name had not been on the credit roll - would have made the difference between the movies being as good as they were and much less good. Talent isn't fungible, and great talent can make all the difference. Great talent still needs to be supported, so that's where the remainder of that credit roll comes in. But the third gaffer likely could have been anybody and the movie would have come out the same.

Yes, and usually the people they worked with or learned from were also extremely talented.

You think most people are exceptional?

If original thought was common it wouldn't be original. This seems like it’s basic power-law stuff.

It's pretty much just a tautology (which can't even be false). Of course it's true that only a small minority of people will ever have a major impact on many other people.

I agree. Everyone looks to the captain of a ship (Jobbs, Bezos, Obama, Armstrong, Trump) and they forget about the hundreds or thousands of people who all worked to actually make and implemented the things to make their voyage possible.

"It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward."

Do you have a citation for this?

Does it look like a fact statement or opinion?

Like a fact statement.

I was thinking about that fact yesterday, when I pondered on my disgust at people looking in my shopping cart, and one person telling his wife they should also buy tea.

I'm probably a bad person for feeling that, but I just wanted to punch the guy in the face, because I'm sure people like him buy all the toilet paper.

Then it dawned on me that if you can't be smart and innovative, evolution-wise, at least be nosy, insidious, envious and without scruples.

Let the 1% bright humans get you out of your mess(like elect Xenophon your leader in times of crysis) then strike them down once the danger has passed.

Quite depressing actually.

Your comment is ironic on so many levels. Cheers to the OP. I think everyone needs a positive message right now. Thanks for delivering one.

This comment should be framed.

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