New industries come from crazy people (2021)
palladiummag.com
palladiummag.com
And who would have thought that he could win a heavy metal award with a flute? The man was a true innovator.
<side note> If I remember how the band Jethro Tull got its name, it is because they had to change the band's name after every gig. The band was that unpopular, and would be told to never come back. Until one day they got lucky, and that day's name was Jethro Tull.
With no acclaim there are few stories. There’s Mansa Musa’s father who crossed the Atlantic from Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Muhammad
For some reason the failures ground the triumphs.
Of exploration that is, the Spanish Conquest of the America’s being grim.
But he didn't even invent the 4-year crop rotation system; that was already in use in Holland when he introduced it in England. (http://www.saburchill.com/history/chapters/IR/003f.html)
He was basically the Elon Musk of post-medieval agriculture: taking credit for the work of others because he marketed it (and himself) better than they did.
Most people who end up like Kanye, for example, don't become insanely rich, they end up alienating everyone in their lives if they don't take care of themselves, and eventually end up in prison, institutionalized, homeless or dead.
(Though they don’t follow their incentives perfectly because institutions are still made of humans who care about people)
No one is an island.
The supporting network around you also plays a significant part.
Rich crazy people are known as eccentrics, precisely because they don’t lose their wealth and safety net.
I agreed that most attempts to invent new industries ended up in failure, by either crazy or regular people. That's because it's insanely hard to do so in the face of competition by the incumbents, not to mention going against the opinion of logical and well reasoning smart people, who are of course right 99.9 % of the time. For those who succeeded however, they are crazy -- as defined by the author -- most of the time. I think that's what the author intends to convey. If you can think of any new industry that invented by "normal" people who work within the system, I'd love to hear.
I see no point in speculating about what the author may have thought about but omitted from the article.
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
— Reinhold Niebuhr, the Serenity Prayer
Most great things are accomplished by them, often by teams of them. They don't just run around and brag about their success.
For instance Polio wasn't nearly eradicated by people like Musk, it where hard working ordinary people.
BTW most of the things attributed to Musk are done by his employees, the ordinary guys who never accomplish great things /s
I think the idea is crazy people make the proof-of-concept, non-crazy people perfect the idea.
With the important note that things getting moved forward by crazy people is not the same thing as saying most crazy people move things forward. Most do nothing of note.
Solutions are seldom the result of one lonely working geniuses.
For instance the internet or FB changed the world, but I wouldn't categorize their inventors as those crazy ones mentioned in the article.
We just tend to attribute special features to the most well known people, higher endurance, greater skill, stronger will.
There are way to many inventions and companies to thinks the world is formed by a few 'crazy' ones.
The only crazy one who achieved that are the real crazy ones and they didn't change the world to the better, see Putin.
Even that was a team effort and I doubt that people like Sabin count as that kind of crazy mentioned in the article.
Those are average scientists, not meant pejoratively, on the contrary, doing their job and sometimes the results have a big impact.
Danitation was created by digging thousands miles of pipes, nanufacturing billuons of toilets, designing facilities to produce billions of bars of soap.
Peolle is sillicon valley run in circles chasing innovation in transport, but more than half of high speed rail in the world eas built over the past 9 years in china. 90% of eorld electric busses run in china. India has probided toilets for 600 million people. All of that required soneone to pick up a shovel, and political will to organise shoveling.
Although Elon Musk likes his LSD or so I’ve heard, and a ‘trip’ is basically a self induced euphoric psychosis which can be compared to a schizophrenic episode.
They claim there is a lack of voices talking to them, but the effects on their serotonin system does lead to a euphoric and psychotic state.
You might want to revisit the literature. That idea, known as pychotomimetism, is an old one, and was disproved in the case of LSD many decades ago.
However, you are not solely to blame as the mainstream drug literature continues to promote this error (much of it is bunk), and even the Wikipedia page on pychotomimetism continues to list LSD (without a source, of course).
Although it’s been a while since I took a gander, I’m fairly certain that the leading researchers stopped treating LSD as a psychotomimetic in the late 1970s to early 1980s. The idea you are defending came out of the 1950s. A lot has changed in our understanding since that time.
The more current paradigm for LSD borders on its therapeutic and entheogenic properties, which are admittedly difficult to categorize and verbalize beyond certain metaphors, analogies, and mythological symbols. As an atheist, it interests me, because when you take LSD, you realize that this experience is the root of religion.
And if you’re someone who considers themselves religious and you’ve never had a psychedelic experience, well, you’re missing out on an opportunity to truly understand what religion is and what it’s all about, and how it works in the human mind.
The experience itself goes far beyond that oddity, of course. In addition to that insight, you will also receive a new perspective on the arts, as every imaginable design, pattern, and image will appear during your trip.
There are, of course, many other highlights one could discuss. For me, I’m convinced it helped me recover memories from my childhood, and some people will tell you it can lead to closure on things in your life by promoting acceptance and peace of mind. Obviously, it’s not for everyone, and should be used wisely and with caution, just like anything else.
Edit: I would encourage you to read up on religious archetypes. They are not as broad as you seem to suggest, and are quite limited in scope and shared by most religions. Interestingly, these archetypes are all found in the psychedelic experience, indicating to some researchers that ancient religious practices in the past may have once had a psychoactive ritual sacrament. Over time, these rituals were either lost or abandoned, and replaced with symbolic sacraments. There’s an enormous amount of literature on this, so it would be difficult to briefly summarize it here, but suffice it to say, the leading religious archetypes are all found in the LSD experience. In a nutshell, the entheogenic theory suggests that modern religious beliefs and practices come from and originate from these experiences. This doesn’t mean these ideas are real or that god is real or that the Buddha was right, or that Christ was literally resurrected—it means that religion arises out of some kind of strange interaction with psychoactive substances and human brains. Obviously, this is highly controversial and disputed, but it does have some evidence in history, in practices such as the soma in the Vedic religions of India and the use of the kykeon during the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, as only two notable examples. In more recent years, researchers have tried to link these substances to religions like Judaism, finding solid, demonstrable evidence of cannabis use (as a psychoactive incense, high doses of cannabis are classified on a spectrum in the psychedelic category) in ancient Israeli shrines, and in Christianity, noting the strange, out of place imagery of fungi in the 12th-century Plaincourault Chapel, as just one example, besides the claims of John M. Allegro, who has been widely dismissed for brazenly claiming, from his scholarly interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jesus was a metaphor for the mushroom itself, and was never intended to be taken literally as a real person. I can imagine how disturbing these ideas might be to sincere religious believers who are heavily emotionally invested in their archetypes as real, literal, living and breathing ideas, but the psychedelic experience shows us otherwise—it’s all in our mind.
but yeah, psychodelics always invoke a sense of unity in higher doses, and maybe that is a spectrum of feeling a 'holy' experience in a religious context. but what i perceive is; every person has an unique idea of it! even if they all say the same thing, my inner interpretation always perceive as a new thing or at least an addition to what i define as a religious interpretation of what life is or why we are here etc.
but as an atheist myself, you probably know my repulse towards a belief in a god, specially if it mimics or mirror itself in humans...
off topic: i am reading a book about elements on periodic table and the author mentions at some point about people observing that a mass extinction happens after 20 million years or so... and if we can prove it, it makes the existence of life way more interesting. as nowadays, i think the more we get closer to god, or a divine, unity thing, more i believe we should trust the scientific method, and go look for a sustainable way to get out of this solar system, secure, and maybe find some relatable life that maybe believe in something closer of what we have today: a god or entity that made this all possible
edit: i am drunk and it is new year eve... take it with a dose of compassion :P
Happy new year!
Worse, it ends with:
America was not always the only country that permitted breakthrough industrialists to build unproven new industries and upend the economic order, but it is today.
Silicon Valley would not have happened elsewhere. Neither would the dot-com era, or a viable electric car industry (proved out by Tesla). Every FAANG is American and their only viable competition is in China.
I don’t know what the next transformative industry is going to be, but I’d be shocked if it came from a risk-averse place like Western Europe.
I’ve discussed this here before, I think, but SV could have happened in the UK, as they were well ahead of everyone else in some areas. The reason it didn’t, as I’ve been repeatedly told by people who live there, is because at that time they had an entrenched culture that was "anti-anorak", or against hacker culture. The funding wasn’t there because proto-hackers were looked down upon by the establishment as powerless nerds incapable of furthering societal progress. On the other hand, SV happened in the US because these so-called anoraks were given a chance that bore fruit with a large defense budget to further the post-WWII era of technological development.
> could have happened in the UK, as they were well ahead of everyone else in some areas.... large defense budget to further the post-WWII era of technological development.
It kind of _did_ happen in the UK, but earlier, for the same reasons of defence funding, but during the WWII era. Characters like Turing and Cockrell (inventor of the hovercraft), Tommy Flowers (Colossus) were all "off center wheels" so to speak. They did their work in sheds using makeshift tools. They got a shot out of necessity. What happened in Britain between about 1935 and 1955 was an enormous technological push.
> The reason it didn’t, as I’ve been repeatedly told by people who live there, is because at that time they had an entrenched culture that was "anti-anorak"
We still have. Geek never really became cool here. That's an American thing. But the truth is, after the war we were flat broke. Very few smart people had the leisure time and capital to risk as in the US. And then successive governments mismanaged our fledgling computer industry like ICL and Ferranti.
Today the dominant job prospects for a geek in Britain are working for Google, Apple, Microsodt, IBM... it's embarrasing, humiliating given our history, and the disgraceful legacy of successive bad governments.
> SV happened in the US because these so-called anoraks were given a chance that bore fruit
I think that's the nub of it. But we haven't really learned in the UK. Our class system and fear of "outsider" innovation is still entrenched.
For example, I don't need a license to write software, or sell it. I don't need any signoff from regulators. Nor is there a cottage industry of suing software developers. There are no laws specifying how the software is written.
Isn’t that generally true worldwide?
The US in general is more business friendly, which leads to people wanting to invest their dollars in US business.
I recall some German friends of mine being quite surprised at how easy it is to start a business in the US. Though some businesses the government is very hostile to, like being a landlord.
Ut happened because of cheap and plenty of VC money.
Ok, so why didn't other countries have "cheap and plenty of VC money" at the same time? Why not the UK, or Germany, or Japan?
Of all the rich countries that existed in the world at the time, why did only the US develop a Silicon Valley type of situation?
It was never about money -- plenty of other countries had rich investors. It was about willingness to take risk. US venture capital was unique in the world at that time, and it was because of their culture.
It seems part of Silicon Valley culture and technological breakthrough came from people coming from industries involved in the space program.
Space program has been the real kick-starter of VC. No other countries (except USSR) had such program.
Silicone valley would probably also not be possible with modern regulations. But... That has a name. Regulatory capture is far from new. And doesn't require crazy people.
Looking at tech and ignoring how much brain and money power was thrown at nuclear technology is doing a disservice to why the US was so far ahead in many fields for a long while.
As someone who has a US passport, loves cities, and lives half the year in the US, this is particularly frustrating to me. It seems that no matter how wealthy or powerful you become, it's still basically illegal to build innovative things on land you own in the US (anywhere near other people).
We're in a pit of success. Our workers cost a lot, and that's generally a good thing.
We could lighten regulations and import immigrant workers, but the real turnaround will be when automation finally teaches construction. AGI or robotics or whatever. Give it 50 years and costs will come right back down.
That is, construction was cheaper back when we had no regard for the people that owned or had interest in the land we were constructing on. The so called "spite mounds" of the Seattle regrade are a good example. Some were literally for an owner that was out of town. Not sure that kind of crap should fly.
Thinking is systems, discontinuous, non-linear collective phenomena precipitate social changes like a breaking wave. Invariably somebody will be at the cusp and a smaller number might even have the energy, ruthlessnes and thick skin to survive there for a longer period.
This makes them no more "responsible" for a new industry than a molecule is responsible for the existence of the wave. But paint that well placed molecule with a fluerescent marker and it does a good job identifying the location of the discontinuity.
This is really the main role of the "crazy people". To signal to the silent "normie" multitudes the existence of a shock front.
And there certainly have been great women, too often somebody else got credit for far too long, but there have been plenty.
Khun, summarized, said that (in science but really applicable anywhere) development tends to happen with long periods of many people making incremental changes interspersed with short bursts of paradigm shifts where the basic assumptions change… often led by small groups or individual outsiders.
This is more or less what i am saying. When conditions are ripe for change, change happens, irrespective of whether there is a "crazy person" around or not. Individuals mostly make a small difference in timing.
Things can be prepared but also waiting for the right spark. There are also lots of circumstances of similarly prepared places where the revolution only happens in one place.
It would probably have a strong dependence on the size of the system (the number of people alive) and the degree of interconnectedness in terms of information and resource flow. The smaller and more disconnected, the more the actual relevance of individual behavior. That is just a guess, though.
But perpetuating in the 21st century the myth that "new industries come from crazy people" feels more of an Ayn Randian agenda than a path towards harnessing human creativity.
Yes, fame can be quite silly and doled out unfairly but the pushback trying to claim individuals who did trigger these paradigm shifts aren’t all that valuable is likewise silly. There is plenty of room between the extremes.
Contribution is an exponential distribution, you don’t get by by cutting out the few who contribute a lot or the many who contribute a little.