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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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