Hacker News Reader

Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

All geniuses were a manufactured product, bar none. Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign. No different from Gaga or Beyonce in the present. Beyonce exists as an idea more so than a person.

What is nominally a group of individuals working collectively to solve a problem became attributed to a single person purely for marketing purposes. It is easier for most people to remember one name, or attribute an effect to a singular cause (by extension causer).

What we remember through the mists of time is not the best, but what garnered the most attention in that era. Those two are not the same, never have been. What you call genius mow was back then an influencer.

Now modern technology has made it possible for anyone to become an influencer. And so, geniuses are everywhere and nowhere, all at once. The influencers that survive into the next era (I’m looking at Elon) will be the geniuses of our time.

View on HN

It's useful to be skeptical of Great Men Theory narratives but I think that you are taking it too far. Yes, we absolutely should avoid overstating the impact of "great men". It usually leads to wrong conclusions & a hyperfocus on the role of individuals as of they were independent of the society around them.

Yet, completely dismissing the possibility of remarkable individuals having very oversized impacts on humanity and history is also extremely diminutive. Yes, they were usually also lucky to be at the right place, at the right time and being surrounded by the right people. But their individual actions/efforts were still crucial catalysts to actually put all of those things together. It would be just as weird to dismiss the impact of individuals in history or science as it is to focus too much on them

> Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign.

You managed to pick two of the most alone geniuses in history. Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked. Einstein's miracle year was done completely outside academia and the only two other people in the Olympia Academy said they had nothing to do with it.

"Newton was afraid to even tell anyone about calculus because he was worried about being mocked."

He was more worried about being scooped. And he was the president of the Royal Society when that argument broke out.

Would Einstein still be more famous than Edsger Dijkstra if he hadn't become the media's face of science?

Hindsight is 2020. Einstein had some help with the boring bits of math and the ideas were vaguely "in the air" at the time and being worked on by several individuals, fair enough.

Even still, I haven't met anyone who, for example, knows and understands the full derivation of his most famous equation that would say his fame is overstated.

Really? What about Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician whose solutions to problems were generally considered completely novel and unconnected to other's results. Eventually he worked with Hardy, but sadly died early.

Or Alexander Grothendieck, who when given at university a choice of 14 open problems to pick one to work on one over a period of several years, solved several within months. Again he had a mixed experience of early training, and worked independently at first. Of course, he later collaborated with many others.

Newton literally said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" because he acknowledged that his work built on that of others. Indeed, if he had communicated his results earlier, maybe he would have worked with Leibniz on the calculus.

While people do like to focus on a singular visionary - rather than a history of invention or scholarship - that does not mean that there were not extraordinary individuals in history. Yes, they also had to be in the right place and the right time. They also had to have the time (usually, enough money) and the connections.

Wasn't that Newton quote a swipe at Robert Hooke, who was known to be quite short?

Hah, I was not aware of that. Although from the description on wikipedia, it seems the two were not quarelling at the time he wrote that phrase in a letter to Hooke.

I like where you are going with this, but the Newton example seems really bold.

Didn't most of his discoveries come during a pandemic where he had to work alone from home without much contact with the outside world?

Viewing my 4th grade history of Newtown knowledge through your lens, I am questioning how much of his story was now marketing.

But to do have specific examples of how his accomplishments came from a collective?

> Einstein and Newton are products, not individuals, of an ancient marketing campaign.

Isaac Newton is on the short list of candidates for the most intelligent person who ever lived. "Marketing" is ancillary to that fact, at best.

Turing would be a better example, perhaps. See https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/turing-oversold.html

Product implies that we can reliably deliver via process. How does one reliably produce Beyonce?

Nailed it. Also Terry exists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com