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Comment by luser001 | Hacker News Reader

Almost everything good and bad that humans have done is due to the drive of a SMALL number of (or single) individuals (American Decl. of Independence, Soviet revolution, Indian freedom struggle, race to colonize the world, WW2, 9/11, Iraq invasion).

That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.

There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.

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The whole "great men made history" meme is kind of discredited. It's true to a point, and it's certainly a lot more interesting (therefore easy to remember) if you say that WWII was Hitler vs. Churchill and Stalin, but it's not entirely correct.

In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.

Also you often have the same thing invented multiple times independently, at the same time or in different times.

So if by some accident we missed a genius, she would probably be replaced by a bunch of merely clever people.

I wouldn't use "great", just "weird enough not to be infected by the mind virus du jour".

We depend on weird people.

On the other hand, the past decade has taught us again and again how powerful crowdsourcing can be.

It may be useful for finding ideas to earn money, but I have seen no indications that crowd sourcing is at all useful for solving complex questions, designing complex machinery, or discovering any form of truth.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/07/29/crowdso...

Missed the whole protein folding thing, did you?

That's the exception that proves the rule.

Also, the crowd sourcing aspect of the whole protein folding thing merely involved doing the grunt work, of which there was so much the scientists that set up the parameters for it couldn't possibly do it all themselves. The true achievement was thinking up the parameters for the thousands of monkeys to twiddle, not the twiddling itself.

This strikes me as a "no true Scotsman" argument.

Never heard of that before. But yeah, after looking it up on Wikipedia, you're right.

So let me correct it - it's not the exception that proves the rule, it's yet another example of crowd sourcing contributing little of true significance.

totally agree but at 1:100,000 there are 70,000 of those people alive today.

And you have >10^6 Wikipedia articles. How many of those are biographies? 1:100000 suggests that any state-league rugby player is a great man.

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