The man who didn’t invent Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (2021)

Wait what? The Tabasco pepper literally originated from Mexico, and it's named after a state.

garage : startup :: mom's kitchen : novel junkfood

> Human memory may be unreliable after just a few seconds

Is your argument that Montañez's memory is accurate but that of everyone who was interviewed (20 people?) are not?

Sure 20 people could be lying. It's unlikely, and they have no motive really. They were paid for their work already. He's the one trying to profit from their work.

I've seen this up close during my time in ML research.

I'd often jokingly mention an idea, only for someone to get a state-of-the-art paper out of the exact same idea within a year of that. It annoyed me at first, but with time, I realized that this was a rather familiar occurrence.

Many top labs are tight-lipped even when talking about peripheral topics, because so many of their peers are within months of reaching the same answer, and even the smallest hint might lead to a peer getting there first. My conversations with top researchers indicate that all research in ML is about 'getting there first' rather than producing something that requires a mythical epiphany.

It does take away from the glamor of it a little bit. If Salieri had been months away from composing Mozart's best work himself, that would have taken away from the timelessness of his work.

For a while, when I came up with a really clever, original one-liner, I'd search Twitter history and find that it had already been made dozens of times.

Worse, we started a business and scoured around, looking to see if anyone had ever tried it. A little over a year in, we realize someone else had started it, two years before us, but with slightly different terminology. Fortunately, but we're both still around and kicking over a decade later, though with a good understanding now of why not many other folks had tried it.

Feast your brain on this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

It is really amazing to see how many discoveries and inventions I've heard of were independently made by two or more people within a few years of each other.

Calculus, Newton, and Leibniz is another example.

> These days

The DS9 folks have outright said that they've not done things because people assumed or guessed online. The first one that springs to mind is Eddington.

> Although "The Adversary" shows Eddington was misidentified as a Changeling, public opinion nevertheless became wary that he was a member of that species, to the puzzlement of the DS9 staff writers. Stated Ira Behr, "After 'The Adversary', everyone on the Internet was convinced that Eddington was a changeling, even though we went out of our way to show that he wasn't. We all looked at each other and said, 'There's no way this guy is ever gonna be a changeling!'" Behr laughed. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 253))

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_Eddington

Misremembering some really critical parts like "I pitched it to the CEO Roger Enrico and that's how the product got launched" is pretty suspect.

Getting the year wrong: Forgivable. Getting some minor details wrong: Understandable.

But when literally nothing about your story fact checks and the most critical parts are contradicted by evidence, I think it's time to reconsider whether it really happened at all.

Was it a miss? I think it’s too early to say.

I think they turn into cranks much earlier. Part of this is that I think despite engineering not actually functioning that way, engineers can often get away with falling into cult logic (there is one true path) in a way that other disciplines are more resistant to. Look at hackerrank and whiteboarding- wtf is that if not straight cult logic.

I think this tendency is mainly one for /successful/ engineers, ones that society has repeatedly rewarded for completing engineering projects to the satisfaction of others. Somebody works hard through a couple decades of looking at difficult but project-based problems and coming up with solutions. These projects start small and well-defined ("design the least expensive $thing that can accomplish $goal using this library of components") but are of increasing complexity and eventually start to look a lot like politics and sociology ("build a team that is capable of creating a successful product for the $industry industry").

They succeed at all of them, possibly even because they are actually very smart, and so come to the view that life is a series of projects that can be completed successfully, after which they will be rewarded with money and admiration. When engineering projects of sufficient ambition cease to become available (there are only so many Channel Tunnels or moon rockets to organize and build), they jump sideways into other disciplines with this template. Often that other discipline is politics, and their methods and mental models are just wrong because the engineering that these people know (not all engineering) is about completing projects within constraints, but politics has poorly defined constraints and is not a "project" (because there is no end).

This isn't really limited to engineers. All of us are in danger of thinking that our experience has prepared us for more than it really has. If anything, its more of a danger for lawyers and MBA types.

As an engineer I resent that. The causation is reversed. I got into engineering because of my tendency to, uh, think independently, not the other way around. It just took a while for me to think independently about physics, politics, medical...take your pick, and arrive at independent conclusions.

Kind of both, I think.

You can make tortilla chips without frying them. Just heat them up slowly and the tortilla will become hard as a tortilla chip. Have used this method to make tostadas.

I'm sure the Mexicas knew of this back then. Leave them too long in a hot surface and they become tostadas. Break them manually and now you have tortilla chips!

If they're as hot as advertised that bag will last you a loooooong time.

People don't do this.

Montañez is apparently a liar who was once a marketing director and is now heavily marketing himself and his made up story. That sort of thing really does take daring and courage but I'm not sure I'd call it 'accomplishing something impressive', especially considering that the lies were found out and exposed.