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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered why we say "giants" here. It would be more accurate and empowering to say "everything was built on the shoulders of our ancestors" they weren't giants. They were regular people.

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It’s a quote from Newton, so that’s obviously why we say it.

The reason he said ‘giants’ is supposedly that it was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was famously short. Impressively, if true then he both managed to get this dig in and to be remembered for his humility as a result of it.

Newton is a fascinating guy. Did way more work in alchemy trying to turn lead into gold than he did in math and physics (the mercury he used probably made him nuts). He took a day job running the British treasury where he investigated counterfeiters which was punishable by death at the time. And he was responsible for setting the exchange rate between gold and silver. He messed up, all the silver was worth way more melted down and used to make things like utensils than it was as currency so it disappeared from circulation which was critical for creating the gold standard that would last the next 300ish years

The correct answer is that, while it is of course true that they were just humans, we label them as giants in retrospect due to their accomplishments.

However the fun answer is: Voltron. For example our smartphones were built by Steve Jobs piloting a Voltron’d up giant. It has Tesla as one hand, Edison as the other, and their rivalry drives a lot of the dialogue. Von Neumann and Clerk Maxwell make up the torso, and the main villain for the first couple seasons is actually Maxwell’s Demon.

I think it's because one can see the "horizon" better whilst standing on a giant - the horizon being the future of scientific/engineering progress (or whatever we'd like to call it). But yes it's a good point, I'm not a fan of appealing to authority either which is kind of how the quote makes it seem. We had this exact discussion in an engineering class so the above is relevant to my experience only

The answer depends on your culture and worldview. Is it more individualistic - or communal?

For some people, there are literal geniuses/die-hards/quacks that changed the industry/tooling/mindset.

For other people, they believe there are no 10x engineers and society as a whole is always to credit.

Interesting, referring to remarkable people as giants doesn't exist in your native language?

Yes but the point being that technological achievements aren't the work of a small group of remarkable people. They are due to the hard constant work of regular people making incremental improvements that add up to the achievements we see.

If anything, a giant in this case is an organization of humans who have toiled on those small improvements through many years.

Those regular people making incremental improvements are the aforementioned giants...

It's a metaphor

geez.

Louise

You are literally asking why we don't say what is literally true and instead we say something that elicits an image by comparison.

That's the answer. Because they choose to use a metaphor instead of speaking literally.

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