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Comment by robbiep | Hacker News Reader

I’m honestly confused by the points of view that hold that unless a person was/is as pure as the driven snow they deserve to be scrubbed from the history books.

Jobs, Churchill, Gates, Musk - I don’t understand. It’s as if proponents of that view believe that the only people deserving of recognition are those that were completely internally consistent, including by the times in which they are being judged (ie present tense).

Humans are complex. None of us (or at least, very very few of us) are fully internally consistent. The personality flaws that cause the greatest consternation may also be those that lead to our greatest triumphs. If they are not criminal, why not recognise people for doing great things? And why is it so hard to say add the caveat that like all humans, they had their flaws?

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I don't think parent is saying that Jobs should be "scrubbed from the history books", quite the opposite really.

They're saying that we shouldn't just talk about all the positive things that Jobs did as if he was some kind of paragon - the history books should also talk about the bad.

But also don't let that one attribute of the person taint and overshadow a lifetime of accomplishments. I've seen a lot of this in the last few years on these sites. You start a thread about someone with a lifetime of achievements, and someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or (going farther back) "Buuuuut he was a slave-owner", implying that one attribute nullifies everything else the person did. Yes, everyone has flaws. Nobody is perfect. Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! You're never going to find Mother Teresa (who, by the way, is also a target of these kinds of "but she also" nit-picks).

History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.

I think the best current example of this is the ‘cancel billionaires’ writ large in the billionaire race to space.

Yes wealth inequality is probably one of the biggest issues of our generation. Yes it is probably unethical that people are able to amass such huge fortunes particularly in some examples less reflective of the current crop of tech billionaires through tax loopholes and the fact that if you have money its easier to get more money. Yes musk is a billionaire but almost all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that? Also, why is the meme that if we still have world hunger we shouldn’t have a space program back again? As though the world isn’t large enough for us collectively to pursue more than one avenue of progress at once.

The issue is not about a space program, the issue is that it's a space program that is largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires, i.e. a significant portion of funding is coming from government, through contracts and/or subsidies.

On top of that is that the billionaires are using their money to fly to space, instead of really changing the world for better, which they clearly good do. At the same time there is a significant portion of our community that idiolises these people and acts as if they are in fact changing the world for better.

> redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires

are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question? i was under the impression that they were sinking their time and money into them too, as more of a hobby than a money-maker

> are these space programs really profitable for the billionaires in question?

They aren't. We have currently two billionaire hobby space programs. One is a pure hobby and doesn't do actual space yet (suborbital hops != orbit). The other one exists solely to open Mars for regular access and eventual colonization, in the process also opening up near-Earth space for general exploration and exploitation. If it succeeds, it'll create an unprecedented amount of lasting value for humanity in general.

Really, complaining about billionaire space is one of the dumbest part of the current zeitgeist.

If you read the wikipedia page for SpaceX (which is as neutral as you are likely to get) you see that in the first 10 years of operation, SpaceX spend $1 billion, of which $200M were private investments (Musk $100M) and $400M came from NASA via progress payments on launch contracts, so yes SpaceX was primarily funded through government contracts. It doesn't really matter if they made a profit or not, the growth of SpaceX is largely build on government spending.

To quote you:

> largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires

Which means that you are saying that Musk is getting taxpayer money from SpaceX. This clearly isn't the case, he's sinking his own money into it too

I'm not sure how you think investment works. He is not donating his money to SpaceX and it disappears. If the government contracts increase the value of SpaceX it is increasing his investment.

> It doesn't really matter if they made a profit or not, the growth of SpaceX is largely build on government spending.

Well, yes, they're a real company providing real services and getting paid in exchange.

Anyway, whether the contracts are private or government is off-topic (if it was, I'd point out that the government is getting a really good deal here, which is a very rare case in large-scale government spending). The point is, all that money isn't being funneled to line Musk's pockets, it's being reinvested straight into "let's go to Mars" R&D program.

And the product of this investment will benefit all, it's not just some billionaire rollercoaster unlike others * cough * blue origin * cough *.

How?

In ways we are already seeing tangible benefits: supply missions and passenger missions to the ISS, Commercial and military satellite launches, Starlink. Future benefits this tech would potentially support: asteroid mining, colonising other planets.

The other company I reference have not made a commercially viable rocket that will get you into orbit.

Also, if we want to end world hunger we will need to figure out how to build a highly efficient means of distributing perishable goods. Selling off all of Jeff Bezos' assets and then trying to use the proceeds to do that seems highly wasteful.

> all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that?

Something that was tried in Sweden in the eighties was Employee Funds [0]. In short, tax the companies and use the money to buy stock in the same. Put the stock in funds controlled by the employees, which, in practice meant the unions. I think the original proposal was meant as a way to softly introduce a true socialist society, where the means of production (the capital) eventually would be completely owned by the workers.

The funds were never particularly popular outside the big labour union. Even the ruling Social Democrats that implemented the solution did it reluctantly after pressure from the unions. The funds was scrapped in the early nineties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

And then wait for an Enron style fraud to emerge and wipe out the employee’s assets? Why not invest in broad market index fund instead if cash is being spent?

I would be pretty pissed if my compensation was being tied up in the risk of 1 company like that.

Not one fund per company. Just a few funds that owns a lot of companies. Also, it’s not clear how the proceeds of those funds would be distributed.

This is all been tried before. It is the same as defined benefit pension funds with a board of trustees made up of union members. Anyway you cut it, if there is a board tasked with allocating a big pot of money, there will be corruption.

So far the least corrupt method is a low cost broad market index fund. There are fewer people in the chain of decision making, hence less agency risk. Passive index funds do the job better than human investors with lower probabilities of corruption.

We have surprisingly little corruption in Sweden. Not that it doesn’t exist, but it’s far from the norm.

Anyway, I’m not arguing for the solution. I just brought it up as I think it’s an interesting historical footnote. Even the finance minister of the ruling party that introduced them famously wrote a poem that goes something like (in fine translation by google)

  The wage earners' funds are fucking crap,  
  now we've dumped them all the way here.
  Then they should be filled with every union bigwig
  who supported us so strongly in our struggle.
  Now we do not have to go more rounds,
  until the whole of Sweden is full of funds.

I think this whole affair is hilarious, but I’m afraid it is somewhat lost in translation.

Sorry, I should not have written my post in a way that insinuates you were advocating for that. It is interesting history. It does seem something is lost in translation for the poem.

That works when a company is profitable, which it seems spacex isn’t; and as a musk style startup I (presume, with no evidence) that employees would have some stock. Perhaps.

Well said.

There are probably tens of millions of people and ten thousand MIT graduates who love and study physics more because of Walter Lewin. Does that justify the ways that he was abusive or morally ambiguous? Hell no!

Despite the controversy and very public cancellation of Prof. Lewin, his lectures are my top recommendation for studying introductory physics.

> Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! [...] History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.

Then again, pretty often the bad stuff is what influenced history a lot. And it is simply not true that all the bad stuff was just because back then the poor thing of person did not knew better. Pretty often, the same person being celebrated was the driver of the "bad stuff" , not merely follower acting like everyone else.

And yet again, bad stuff often is what made achievement and victories possible. So then, people who made more ethical decisions did not earned as much. That deserves recognition too.

> Buuuuut he was a slave-owner

You say this mockingly, as if being a slave owner should not overshadow everything else you do in life.

Yes, it should. It absolutely should. Being a slave-owner is massively, grotesquely evil. It should be what you are remembered and rightly denounced for.

> Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions!

Considering slave-owning to be morally wrong is not a modern invention. It was considered wrong at the time too, just not by those who were profiting off it.

For instance, I don't think you'd find many slave who did not think it was evil.

So by your logic we should remember people like George Washington as essentially evil. How is that fair? One’s achievements and flaws must be considered inside their historical context, not our modern viewpoint.

> inside their historical context

Even among just the founders, slavery wasn't an institution universally accepted even in Washington's day.

Yes. Yes, we should.

Yes.

Then man kept other humans as slaves. That is evil. There is no question about this. People in his own time thought this was evil. He did it anyway. He was evil.

He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times.

So he was an ass to work with... That doesn't void anything else that was done, nor should it be a highlight. Worth mentioning, sure.

Visionaries are usually hard to deal with (perhaps because they are fighting against the grain). Most visionaries are wrong, but that diversity is what pushes us forward.

To some degree yes... but to some degree you sound like you're claiming they did what they did in a vacuum.

iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.

[1]: if not earlier. randomly skimming wikipedia finds e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices

> We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.

I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward.

Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas.

It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.

There was a tipping point just before smartphones where J2ME apps were surging in popularity and feature phones were getting cheaper and better, where it was obvious that something was going to happen. My phone had google maps, ebooks, the web browser opera mini, and a very slow gameboy emulator running on it as J2ME apps in 2006.

J2ME phones were doing incredibly well outside the US from what I remember seeing - they're part of the reason Japan was seen as being so technologically advanced in the consumer realms.

And Android also runs Java. It being a full Java rather than the weird inconsistent nonsense that was J2ME is heavily due to significant compute improvements - in that sense, Android was merely ahead of the curve, and made some good architectural choices to make it perform well.

So yeah, I think the powerful personal phone revolution was inevitable. They might not look like iphones, but they would absolutely look better than Windows CE before they hit a billion users.

Plus, really. Look at Palm OS. Look at iPhones. There's not a huge UX conceptual leap there - it's much more in the premium hardware, and later in the unified app store, proving that the market for mid-high-price good devices existed (more expensive WinCE devices already had a small but consistent market. Pro/consumer-grade was inevitable). And I think there's room to argue that we'd be better off without the app store monopolies that resulted, so that could go either way (though I fully grant the massively superior user experience at the time).

Was the shift to full Java that important? I'm still baffled it wasn't a bigger deal. But the reality is that no one slapped on a new skin and recompiled their desktop java application and then ran in on Android

Even all these years later it's still basically impossible to make a Java application that runs on mobile and desktop (it's technically possible with Gluon but I've never seen it in the wild).

At best the shift allowed you to reuse libraries .. which is not a small win, but seems like a fraction of whats possible

I'm not deep in the Java mines so maybe I've missed some big picture issues around convergence - and why it wasn't even attempted. Would be curious to hear from the gurus :)

I don't know many of the dev details of J2ME personally, but I have encountered many blog posts and whatnot about how inconsistent development for it was. There were many runtimes, many different sets of available libraries, and many many unique bugs to work around - Java's "write once, run anywhere" at its absolute worst, basically.

So "full" Java brought both a significant wave of standardization, and gained access to an utterly HUGE set of libraries, tools, and developers that were mostly unavailable before.

So language-wise it's a somewhat small improvement as you are probably expecting. Android could have been another J2ME, and everything probably would've worked the same. But it greatly lowered the barriers to entry, which is basically a requirement for a large and active app ecosystem.

Thanks for the insight. Yeah, I can see how all these slightly off JVMs can really sour things. Esp. with regards to tooling and development ease. There was a whole era of these not-quite-JVM like things. Like JavaCard also comes to mind (I think it's still what runs on SIM cards).

I think it's understandable given how under-powered the devices were - but the end was sort of inevitable

I had a dell windows mobile device around that time. It had a tiny mechanical keyboard and a stylus. You could copy & paste, but the OS was so underpowered it couldn’t run multiple programs at the same time. You could install software by plugging it into a computer and running an installer that copied files via USB. Programs (and the OS) crashed all the time. It was the sort of device only a gadget fiend could love.

Android at the time was similarly awful. I remember talking to an android engineer at Google a few years later. I was asking him why android’s UI still sucked compared to iPhones. He said android was the only mobile operating system still standing which was invented before the iPhone. They had to essentially piece by piece reinvent the whole core OS to make it relevant after the iPhone came out. That was taking longer than they would like - because of course it was. But to their credit, they got there.

Google at the time was working in the same hardware ecosystem as Apple and they didn’t invent the iPhone. And that’s not criticism - the design of the iPhone is only obvious in hindsight. If Apple didn’t do it, who knows what our phones would look like today. Probably much worse.

The touch screen keyboard, swipe to unlock, rich fonts, full multitasking & app switching. This was all revolutionary at the time. Steve jobs was an arse. But he (and his team) pulled off a revolution with the iPhone. He deserves credit for that.

The difference is that the iPhone ran a "full" OS without the "baby software" on every other device at the time.

The opposite was true actually - the original iPhone couldn't run third-party applications at all.

What it did have was a much bigger and better touchscreen that didn't need a stylus. (Even that wasn't really a technical innovation per se - rather it was the willingness to charge over twice as much as previous phones that made it possible).

Yeah - capacitive touch tech was far from new, but it was still super expensive compared to resistive. Price made it largely not an option until around the time that Apple adopted it (which they were definitely ahead of the curve on, and they made fantastic use of it). It was pretty clear at the time that nobody was all that fond of styluses, but they were the sole pragmatic option available then.

That, and many people were glad to have plastic screens - iPhones shattering because you looked at them too enthusiastically was a source of many lols and many expensive repairs / re-purchases. The early iPhones still scratched nearly as easily (keys or sand were more than sufficient), but they were nowhere near as durable overall. Decent screen durability, screen protectors, and protective cases took years to arrive - the gorilla glass of the time was far, far more fragile than it is now.

To be precise, the original iPhone can run third-party apps, but couldn’t from the beginning. The AppStore was introduced with iPhone OS 2 a year after the launch.

The iPhone was most certainly not the most full OS at the time.

Can you explain what capabilities it had that were different?

all the other baby devices had copy/paste functionality though.

Sure, a lot of similarly functional smartphones had existed, but that didn't matter because nobody used them. Steve Job's intuition about user experience was at least several years ahead of everyone else's. Improvements are generally incremental, but the iPhone nailed so much the first time: the app icons, pinch to zoom, using the accelerometer for portrait and landscape mode, adaptive screen brightness, and the use of the proximity sensor.

The first Nokia Communicator[1], arguably the first smartphone, was released in 1996 and just had its 25 year anniversary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator

Arguably, Nokia is a good example of "money and connections won't save you if you persistently go astray".

I liked Nokias, I even programmed for Symbian OS, but boy, that was one convoluted system. The UI was pure hell, badly documented, error-prone and had to be tailored to every device out there (of which Nokia churned out a lot), unless you wanted to risk bad artifacts.

They also LOVED to introduce major compatibility breaks.

I had a 3G windows phone the year before the 2G iphone came out that did everything the iphone did other than visual voicemail.

Still, the iphone did everything so luch better that I switched.

> He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times.

Steve Jobs?

This is going to need a fair amount of substantiation, because those are some wild claims.

I assume the parent is referring to MobileMe, iPod socks and NeXTSTEP for PA RISC.

Here you go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

Thanks, but I know who he was and what he did.

Personally I tend to side more with rms's position on the passing of Steve Jobs.

I just wonder how credulous someone needs to be in order to assert that guy ".. completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times."

Perhaps if I'd ever owned or used any Apple products, I may have bought into these grand claims. Alas my ICT history has been Commodore, PC-compat, Palm, Nokia, GNU/Linux, begrudgingly Microsoft, and Google products, etc.

EDIT:

From the link you shared:

"Jobs later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple"."

"According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the $5,000 paid out), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350."

Wozniak was / is a legend. Steve Jobs was persistently awful.

>"Jobs later reflected that had it not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple"."

>Steve Jobs was persistently awful.

I don't think the first statement supports the second, he did give some credit there. I think often awful.

although where awful is concerned, was he worse than a lot of powerful people. We have a lot of awful people to look at, where does Jobs fall on the scale, because when I look at Jobs he doesn't look anywhere as bad as Harvey Weinstein. Lots of people who frequent HN probably went around thinking Bill Gates was much worse than Steve Jobs, is he still or is Jobs the worse one now?

You're right. The first statement speaks to his reliance on others - continuing through his career - to develop the actual ground-breaking technologies that he was subsequently credited with. That annexation of credit is an awful trait that most of us have experienced, and none of us respect.

As to a leader-board of awfulness - we may be missing the point there. Sure, yes, lots of powerful people are awful, but one doesn't excuse the other.

I suspect for a lot of free software advocates, idealists if you will, it's hard (and more importantly, pointless) to try to measure who was the most awful person in terms of compromising people's freedoms.

> That annexation of credit is an awful trait that most of us have experienced, and none of us respect.

not sure if I understand you here - you're not suggesting he annexed the credit - he quite clearly shared it or in that quote almost gave it entirely away.

>Sure, yes, lots of powerful people are awful, but one doesn't excuse the other.

yeah I don't know if most people, given the power, won't be awful some times. Also I'm not sure if almost all people are not awful sometimes, if given the right pressure.

So when someone is complaining about the awfulness of any one person I guess I actually want more than anecdotes of how rude they were, considering how awful people can be. (That money thing is one but well, I've also noticed people when they don't have money will sometimes be untrustworthy about it)

And lo, just 13 days on, there's (yet another) story on HN [1] about Steve Jobs being an arsehole.

"Alvy Ray Smith helped invent computer animation as we know it—then got royally shafted by Steve Jobs"

The article paints Jobs, in much more detail than the byline above, as an extremely toxic personality.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422777

I'm not an Apple or Jobs apologist - I'm sure you've noticed - but I can see why someone who was would want to paint each individual example of poor behaviour as isolated, accidental, deeply regretted, not indicative etc - rather than on trend for some deep, persistent, unpleasant character flaws.

The absence of any technical brilliance is fairly well documented, and Woz was the first, possibly most famous, person he leveraged / misled (depending how charitable you want to be).

So, yes, I am saying he annexed the credit. The quote that we're talking about - musing on how there wouldn't have been an Apple without Woz - was from a 2011 book, where he looks back, from his multi-billionaire perspective, at someone he shafted repeatedly some decades earlier. Who knows the tone of this comment - to me it doesn't feel like a '...and I feel bad about it' type comment, just a casual aside.

Mind, Woz was just one of many casualties along the way, too.

> So when someone is complaining about the awfulness of any one person I guess I actually want more than anecdotes of how rude they were, considering how awful people can be.

The stories of Jobs' awfulness are many and manifest. Start with a web search on 'stories of steve jobs being awful', or go straight to Lisa Brennan-Jobs' book. Arguably every story about someone is by definition an anecdote, so perhaps this won't be enough for you.

In any case, the guy certainly did NOT 'completely transform modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times', seemed to have no notable skills beyond showmanship, and was awful.

evidently not thinking Jobs is the worst of the worst must be downvoted.

> Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs may not have invented the personal computer, smartphone, or computer-generated animated movies, but he definitely popularized all of them

In the US yes, the rest of the world not so much. They were already popular or had other influences initially.

You're relying a lot on "or had other influences".

None of those things were invented by him, or by the companies he worked with. They were mass-marketed by him.

Indeed but things like smartphones already had mass appeal in Europe and Asia, from the likes of Nokia in Europe and NTTDocomo in Japan.

I'm not sure I would say 'changed the human trajectory for everyone', but I certainly think its fair to say that he was instrumental in substantially disrupting/transforming or created new markets in the technology (personal and business) space. The Apple 2 and Mac certainly disrupted personal computing in numerous ways (although perhaps the PC clone is a better example here). The Next box was a commercial failure, but a technological step forward for software. Mobile phones / tablets were clunky and did not have a great touch or internet experience before the iPhone. Apps / app stores have enabled a whole new paradigm for how users access global distributed services (and before someone says - mobile web, that experiences still is generally, subjectively a worse user experience than most apps).

While there are plenty of stories about his abusive behavior (usually to his staff) especially in his younger days, there are equally plenty of positive anecdotes about him as a human. Personally I don't think I would have enjoyed working for him, but I feel it would have been an experience I would have not regretted. Like all of us, he was flawed in some areas, good in others.

>So he was an ass to work with

I am starting to wonder if this is a tech thing. Because if you talk to people in many other industry, you will have a high chances of seeing / meeting one.

And there are plenty of people who worked with him have no problem what so ever. And all of them are ones that are willing to stand up for themselves and talk back to Steve.

I mean, by the age of late 30 one should realise most of the work we have today are really really shit. This may not be apparent in tech. But it is commonly the case everywhere else. Trying to push for higher quality and inertia will absolutely drive a person insane.

"transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet"

That's some real hyperbole. We had phones and pc's already, it wouldn't of transformed our lives or changed our trajectory but yes he has been influential in shaping what that looks llike A cosmetic impact sure.

> the history books should also talk about the bad

I'm not so sure. For example, I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life.

I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life.

Then you probably should be reading about his work in a science text book rather than a history book. For history books, the background and context of the people and events is as important as the events themselves.

You have a point, but my meaning is I will not adversely judge his accomplishments by listing his failures in other aspects of his life.

How Steve Jobs treated his daughter, for example, is between him and his family. Diminishing his business accomplishments because of that is simply small-minded.

That's your perspective, which is fine and dandy but that's not everyone's view. I for a change am interested in whole picture, not just nit-picking parts of humans to idolize and glorify them.

If I should respect someone's opinion or success in life, well that respect needs to come from someplace. And in my eyes its just harder to earn it compared to your viewpoint - excellence in 1 singular aspect isn't cutting it.

There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. The others, not so much.

> There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect.

Or they've just managed to successfully hide their feet of clay, or you've just decided that you like their awesomeness so much you're going to overlook their peccadilloes.

Name any accomplished person, and you'll find haters.

It kind of sounds like you’re prioritizing how his work benefitted you, over a judgement of whether he was a good person. That’s reasonable to me, although I disagree!

Huge impacts are complicated, but being a good person is something I expect of everyone. If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.

> It kind of sounds like you’re prioritizing how his work benefitted you

Jobs hasn't benefited me much in any significant way. I've never been an Apple fanboy, never worked for Apple, never got rich off Apple stock, don't care much for Toy Story. I have an Apple mini, but used it only for porting D to it.

But I enjoy real life rags-to-riches stories, and Jobs is one of them.

> If a person cannot be empathetic and kind to others around them, in my estimation, they have failed at their purpose here on earth.

When Jobs passed, he left behind a lot of people who loved him (I'm not talking about fanboys, but people who were his friends and family.)

I recently attended the memorial of a close friend who died. Nearly a hundred people showed up, all trading stories about him. He left behind quite a lot of people who loved him, too.

But the events and background would not be significant unless the events happened.

I think there is plenty of volunteers heaping scorn on Jobs and Musk on every significant forum.

Surely not everyone has to join them, or?

We have biographies for that.

Which is essentially a subset of history books.

> Humans are complex. None of us (or at least, very very few of us) are fully internally consistent.

More importantly, humans are different. Some are heads and shoulders above others morally or in other ways, and judge them accordingly.

> There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging that has nothing whatever to do with the biblical "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and if this fear speaks in terms of "casting the first stone," it takes this word in vain. For behind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done. The moment moral issues are raised, even in passing, he who raises them will be confronted with this frightful lack of self-confidence and hence of pride, and also with a kind of mock-modesty that in saying, Who am I to judge? actually means We're all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

> why not recognise people for doing great things?

In this case, because they can't be called "great things" without diminishing human greatness and actually greats -- they're just product, often in the service of selfish, banal, mediocre ends. Certainly with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook. None of their luminaries can even tie the laces of people who can tie the laces of great people. So why can't the money be enough, why do we need to fawn over people, too?

> Jobs, Churchill, Gates, Musk - I don’t understand.

One of them was an asshole. The other one was... a white supremacist to say the least.

"Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes _ [to] spread a lively terror _" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job." [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/iraq.arts

You have misunderstood the point I am trying to make. I’m aware he has said and been responsible for things that are pretty distasteful today, and potentially by a bunch of people in his day. That doesn’t nullify his contribution to history, it just makes him another flawed human

I'm very uncomfortable putting Jobs in the same camp as Churchill, and even putting him in the same camp as Gates and Musk. (although admittedly, those do seem to at least be more fair comparison.)

The main problem with Jobs is that he developed a cult following that (at least in my opinion) was never deserved. Gates never developed this, and has rightly been criticized for his practices at Microsoft, while still being praised for his charity work in later years. Musk arguably has a similar cult following, and to add to that, I know very little about him, so maybe of three you listed, Musk is the most fair comparison.

I didn’t intend to compare Churchill to Jobs or the others in terms of achievements, it was more a comment on criticism I have seen of him in the last year which nullifies all of his accomplishments on the basis of racist comments, which, however unpalatable they may seem today, appear to have ben unfortunately quite in keeping with many of his peers of the day. (I know there were other actions of his that have been criticised as well but let’s just keep it to one example at the moment). So, maybe bad comparison but my intent was illustrative only

>I have seen of him in the last year which nullifies all of his accomplishments on the basis of racist comments

Ah, I have completely missed this particular controversy. I was been wondering if this was really a debate about cancel culture. In that sense, I hear you. I'm vehemently anti-cancel culture, and I don't particularly care if some prominent historical figure had the "wrong" views.

There's nothing in the above comment about scrubbing from the history books. It's about veneration.

There's plenty of people who are remembered in history but just not lauded for their actions. All the commenter is advocating is for a better understanding of historical figures.

History books often contain contentious or unusual behaviour. The same for people reminiscing about others.

Jobs yelled at people, fired them, and apparently worse? I don't know all the specifics, but...

Of those he yelled at, how many conversations, without yelling, were had first? How many were had one on one first, but he was ignored?

How many pleasant, amicable conversations were had. What's the ratio?

To hear some talk, apparently Jobs was walking around Apple HQ, just randomly screaming at, and belittling others, all day long?!

This seems inaccurate.

And the 'style of the time' is critical, as parent says. You cannot judge a person's leadership style by today's standards, that's absurd, instead, how would Jobs be rated against the average manager/boss of the time?

In the 80s, I had many a manager/boss which would be know to yell and belittle people. People would also crack racist jokes, make fun of alternate life styles, and in many cases only doing it to fit in, not really even caring or thinking wrong of it.

History must be viewed as a contemporary would.

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