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
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.
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.
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!