Great Founder Theory (2020)
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Would e-commerce have evolved without JeffB or smartphones be invented without Apple? Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country, greatly hurting America’s prospects. To this date Amazon has the best e-commerce logistics on the planet.
Doing things ahead of its time, by gathering the right people and enough money, is a very unique skill. Couple that with being well positioned for a certain “inevitable” innovation and that limits the number of people even more.
There’s also a compounding effect. Walking backwards from humanity’s global tech maxima, if every key innovation was late by a few years, the overall maxima might be late by hundreds of years, maybe worse. Maybe humanity ends due to an asteroid impact because we didn't get advanced enough to protect ourselves in time.
In other words: it’s hard to believe that there’s something intrinsic about Newton, Galileo, etc. that would have fundamentally prevented the arc of human history and knowledge had they not done what they did. The much more parsimonious explanation is that “great men” were in the right place at the right time to apply their (undisputed!) talents.
Is it surprising that we want to believe in "great men"?
But isn’t this part of the point? How many times did we not get the right person in the right place? How much further would we be if we had gotten, say, a Galileo during Rome’s heyday?
Who says we didn’t? There isn’t a single point in human history that wasn’t covered by exceptional intelligence; the observation is that this doesn’t make discoveries fungible over time. Discovery, innovation, invention, etc. are instead all compounding processes.
Besides: there is no point in history that’s identifiable as “the fall of Rome.” The Western Empire declined over the course of three centuries; the Eastern Empire arguably never fell at all. The idea of the “fall” comes from the same period of historical theorization as the “great man” framework; it’s not widely accepted as a useful milestone today.
I don't think this is accepted anymore. The material conditions for the Industrial Revolution were pretty specific and didn't show up in the age of Rome, despite all their riches.
As psychohistory rigorously proves; individuals are of no consequence to the thrusting arc of history. It is not Galileo that created history, but rather history that created Galileo.
If it were truly rigorously proved and were able to make quantitative predictions, it would have some pretty significant implications for policy, finance, politics, etc..
However if the creator was brash enough to name their pet theory after the theory in the book, I'm skeptical that they were careful enough to get it right.
Your own link to Wikipedia points this out, with Einstein as the example.
> The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History.
From that series of lectures:
1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology
2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam
3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare
4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism
5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns
6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism
Are any of those people scientists?
Carlyle is talking about political and cultural influence, not technological development. Using scientists that made great discoveries as a counter-example to the theory is a straw man argument.
And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective.
(But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)
It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. I agree with you that science/technology is not contingent on certain individuals and is better understood as a larger historical process. The discovery/invention of calculus is a good example.
I don't agree that political history works the same way, nor do I think that historical actors like Muhammad or Napoleon are simply interchangeable cogs that could have easily been replaced by anyone else. Certainly they were shaped by their circumstances, but I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did.
Technological development and individual political action are two different things. By using discoveries to argue against the theory as a whole, you are setting up a straw man.
Buying books online was inevitable - just a question of time. The invasion of Iraq ( for example ) was not - in the end that came down to one or two people deciding.
We must also draw a distinction between invention/discovery and mass use. I'd like to point at nuclear energy - it seems unlikely that invention or scientific discovery in the field have been slowed down, but mass adoption of the technology was shut down by anti-nuclear activists. Environmentalists had at least a good ten year stretch where nuclear was all but unacknowledged as a good-to-go solution to all the problems being bought up. Even now there is a pretty good chance that with some political cover for the capital investment required it is a better choice for powering a country.
It is actually easy to imagine one motivated, charismatic person in the right place and right time completely changing the practical landscape without any change to the pace of scientific advancement.
Would it make you feel differently if you knew that there were dozens of competing offshoots of Abrahamic religions in the area at the time? What if you viewed the Abrahamic religions as a set of policies and processes that were basically the genetic code of a society. Lots of what is in the Abrahamic texts is about how to conduct transactions effectively, establish a trusting relationship with strangers so you can edify an in-group while conducting trade with outsiders. IMO, his variation was based on determining how to set up an effective merchant society economy among groups of nomads where conflict was minimized enough to get spices from one location to another.
Many elements of islam were consistent among all the different abrahamic religious variations of the time. The fact that islam is so conservative is a result of continued incentives propagating more conservative forms of the religion. It's not inherent to the religion itself. There have been many less conservative islamic societies.
Otherwise yes certainly Islam is as diverse and variant as any other religion and its current iteration (in the Middle East, at least - India and Indonesia being different situations) is mostly a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
I'm not sure I buy it... I just don't think things hinge so delicately on individuals. Generally if one person has an idea, thousands of people around them have the same idea. The limiting factor is how many of those thousands have the time, resources, and will to follow through with the idea. The distribution of excess time, resources & will has a pretty strong correlation to environmental & socioeconomic factors.
As for the borders of whatever empire expanded from that region, sure they would have been different. I don't think there would have been an exact correlate of Islam necessarily.
But if you look at the period of ~500s to ~1500s as a golden age for merchant kingdoms in that region, where they built off the intellectual foundations that were spread by rome, I think that was basically inevitable.
I also think it makes sense that something like a religious ideology would be a catalyst for that, to unite so many disparate people in a way they can trust each other and work together in a decentralized fashion.
And for that religious ideology to stick around and take a conservative turn after centuries of antagonism, colonialism, and interference from the west, that also seems like a pretty natural course of events.
The specifics of each country definitely have variance and could have turned out differently. But as you zoom out I think that if trends are happening on a scale of 10s or 100s of millions people, it's got a deeper underlying cause.
I think of it in terms of physics. A person can't lift a huge steel beam by themselves. There's a larger force at play when the beam gets lifted... a larger well of potential energy. The aligning of that well of potential energy to the goal of lifting the beam takes a certain amount of time. One person could lift it by themselves over time if they create a lever and add counterweights, but it would take more time. However a skyscraper? A single person could never build a skyscraper on their own. Think of how much mass is in an army and how much energy is exerted in moving that army across a continent. How can a person deliberately cause so much mass to be moved? They can only do so by tapping into a well of potential energy that already was created. That potential energy must come from somewhere, and when the army moves across the continent, they are expending that potential energy. The process can only continue if the energy well is being replenished. That replenishment is part of the machinery of society. An individual person isn't going to singlehandedly author that machinery in a group larger than the size of an ape troupe. It takes a lot of energy to modify that machinery at the scale of even a small city. A single person can only make minor contributions to the modification of the machinery at the historical scale.
The natural conclusion of what you're describing is that there's some sort of continuum or spectrum of people who might take up some opportunity.
Those people are also generated by dice rolls: some have genuinely better brain chemistry, some are nurtured well by family, some find a mentor who puts a lot of effort into them, some grow up next to a training ground.
If you look at any kind of excellence, there's a bunch of sliding doors moments. What if Michael Jordan dropped basketball after getting cut from the team? What if the scout decides Messi is too small? On the science side, just about anyone can not get along with their prospective supervisor, or they don't find funding, or they get offered a job doing something else.
The way to think about a few people being within reach of SR is not to just scroll back a few years before it happened. There were a bunch of kids born in that generation who were interested in physics, and chances are a re-do of their lives would have turned up some different outcomes individually, but why would we think that SR wouldn't have come out eventually? It's clear people were thinking about it, and it's clear people got it once the discovery was published.
The other thing to look at is cases of where the great man is lost. Does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?
No offense to them, but I wouldn't say Michael Jordan or Messi have significantly impacted history. They impacted the trajectory of their sports teams, and I would think it's pretty easy for an individual to have an influence on something over that scale, but for a "great man" to be given credit for significantly shaping borders for hundreds or thousands of years, or for certain innovations that were funded by institutions that could have just as easily paid someone else... I think there's something else going on.
What's so special about him, other than him being the guy who did what he did? Sounds a bit dismissive and that's not the impression I want to make, but aren't there loads of people with forceful characters, most of whom do not get to sit at the steering wheel?
I'm responding to what you said here: "does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?" with a pretty glaring example of what you're saying (which provides counter-evidence to the view we both share).
Then the rest of my comment is an attempt to show that it wasn't just Alexander the great being a "great man" that causes his expansion, but instead it was a system of logistics that the Greeks happened upon.
I'm saying: because they needed the logistics, they developed the logistics. Because they had the logistics, they had the ability to expand. Because they had the ability to expand, someone did. That person happened to be the son of a king (Philip II of Macedon) whose logistics enabled him to expand through Greece. I'd venture to guess his father was probably involved in some politics and warfare logistics as well... indicating that this was a capacity developed over generations due to an environmental requirement
Maybe everyone realizes this these days, but I didn't realize until a few years ago that ancient armies traveling for months were like traveling cities, and in a way they could be like caravans as well, trading. Perhaps Philip II's big innovation was a systematic method of trading instead of pillaging with the surrounding cities, which would allow establishing continuing political relationships, which explains the kingdoms lasting for 100s of years more. Expansion by brute force was certainly going on with neo-Assyria 500 years or so earlier, but with Alexander the great, from what I can gather, there was lots of communication with surrounding towns. It appears an army would plop down for a month and regroup. They'd buy food and weapons. They'd probably find some people unhappy with their current emperor and do some recruiting. Expansion by brute force requires even more massive amounts of logistics than the sort of military caravan thing Alexander may have had going on and I find it really difficult to believe he could have gotten as far as he did with that strategy.
If Alexander inherited such an army as well as a new form of logistics that allowed him to travel further, it would make him more of an avatar of a larger force behind him. That's more how I believe things tend to happen versus him just being some genius tactician who won because he was smarter than all the barbarians... even if that's what he believed was the cause of his success.
> Maybe everyone realizes this these days, but I didn't realize that ancient armies traveling for months were like traveling cities, and in a way they could be like caravans as well, trading.
The acoup guy does a great job of explaining this kind of thing.
SpaceX is an entirely unoriginal company (really good execution, though). The genius of SpaceX is in the systems which enable that execution. It's not even really a particularly significant company.
Founders are right person, right place, right time, and _place and time are more important than the person_. Why do so many come from America? Because _place_. The right place from about 1750 to maybe 1835 was northern England; the Bay Area has had a really good run.
Brian Eno, as often, has a word for it: "scenius". https://austinkleon.com/2017/05/12/scenius/
There's a large SpaceX office down the road from where I live (Redmond, WA) and a fair few of my ex-MSFT friends now work there, and they call say the same thing to me: "SpaceX's successes are despite Elon's involvement, not because of it".
I just still don't know if I want to work there or not. BlueOrigin gave me an offer for an avionics position years ago, but the commute down to Kent, WA was a deal-killer.
That doesn't make Musk perfect, he may well have many negative personality traits that get in the way of progress on other fronts. On Starship as well though, plenty of engineers there confirm that it was Musk that came up with the idea to switch to Steel as the primary structural material.
It may be true that if you take one 'great man' out of the picture we might still get the same innovations, but in some areas like space rockets it's not something anyone can knock up in their garage to matter how bright they are. There's also the argument that ok, any one great man might be replaceable, but often I think you'd find them replaced by another great man. Some big leaps forward take a lot of capabilities in one package to make them work, or occasionally in a great synergistic partnership such as Jobs and Wozniak, or Lennon and McCartney.
And it turns out, editing, combining multiple things together where the sums are greater than its parts, is perhaps the single most important criteria for greatness.
In other words, the personal characteristics, family members, etc. of the supposedly interchangeable Great Man do have a unique effect on history that would be different if a different Great Man had fulfilled the role.
Napoleon’s wives (the first of which couldn’t give him a child) and brothers (who were installed as local kings) are a good example. I’m sure you can think of many other more recent ones.
For example: what if Caesar has a son earlier in life and by the time he is killed, this son becomes his heir instead of Octavian? The son isn’t as clever as Octavian, he loses the civil war to Antony, who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire. Rome collapses centuries earlier - or the Senate regains power.
None of this seems like it would lead to the same historical outcome.
> who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire
This is where we diverge.. I consider setting up empire-wide infrastructure to be something that largely happens due to socioeconomic forces and the environmental conditions of the empire, not something that 1 guy decides to do alone. If Antony won the civil war, he would still be in command of an economic juggernaut, and other politicians and advisors would start suggesting projects to help out their constituents and sponsors. If he kept suggesting stupid ideas, people close to him would tell him they're stupid and he would have resistance to them.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of variance. Obviously there's a place like North Korea. But if you average out the political situation across that whole region over about 50 years... add a bit of blur to the whole thing, both to the borders, the times, the ideologies... it starts to look more like ideas reverberating through a network. Sometimes all the random noise will come together and interfere constructively to make a region of large amplitude.
Basically, instead of thinking of history so much through the lens of names of rulers, etc, think of it through the lens of a random guy in the "ohio" of the empire you're considering. You think the life of some random guy in modern day Slovenia was affected much by things that were purely Octavian's whims? Even further, strip out all the names and people, and just think of it in terms of physical materials moving across the mediterranean... you think the total flow of grain from egypt to the surrounding areas was much affected by these political situations? Do you think if you looked at a video that showed the change of historic economic activity of the various regions of Rome with no dates or political boundaries shown, that you would be able to distinguish the transition of rome from republic to empire?
> I consider setting up empire-wide infrastructure to be something that largely happens due to socioeconomic forces and the environmental conditions of the empire, not something that 1 guy decides to do alone
Yes, well, that's not how history actually happened. I suggest reading more about Augustus the individual and the decisions he made. A different person would have made different decisions – which yes, would have reverberated down to the common man in "Ohio", especially if his formerly peaceful locale is now a warzone or if his children are drafted into the military.
Augustus laid the bureaucratic and financial foundation for the Empire and without him, there's no guarantee that the Roman Empire actually exists. So again, no, the empire would not "have been led by someone slightly different and perhaps had slightly different borders." It may have splintered into eastern and western divisions sooner, been overrun by barbarians more quickly, or fractured into the pieces held by the various factions.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/905/reforms-of-augustus...
This exact same scenario has happened many times WRT Muhammad, Napoleon, Constantine, George Washington, et cetera et cetera. The idea that individuals are just interchangeable cogs is just a 20th century cultural trope, not an accurate reading of history.
None of what you just said directly addresses what I intended to communicate. Nobody is suggesting that people don't make any decisions. Nobody is suggesting that literally everything would have happened exactly the same if different people were involved.
What I am suggesting: there are a number of characteristics which are required to become a US president right now. Those characteristics drastically skew the probability of certain decisions being made versus if a person were picked at random. Furthermore, if by statistical anomaly someone did make drastically different decisions, there are several correction mechanisms that would prevent the effects from reaching too far... see Julius Caesar for example. But he's even an exception that proves the rule, as his ascent to power was only possible once the republic was in a certain state of decay.
So yes, Augustus made many decision that changed the course of history. However so did many other people, and just like the binomial distribution of catching stoplights green or red causes trip times to be normally distributed as the number of stoplights goes to infinity, decisions which bolster or hinder macroeconomic factors cause them to be normally distributed as the number of decisions and decisionmakers goes to infinity.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
So all of these founders did commericalize and create consumer products to make them more mass market, but the raw tech was there beforehand to make it happen.
Bear in mind, the iPhone running a fully capable desktop class browser was jaw dropping. BlackBerry management were absolutely convinced the demo must have been faked. It's only when they got hold of actual devices that they realised it was genuine and even then it took a while for it to sink in just how far behind they were. It took Microsoft almost 3 years to figure that out.
This is often discounted because it's not obvious to the user unless you're familiar with specific aspects of the technology, but in terms of the capabilities it enables as a founding technology it's night and day. This is why Android ate their lunch as well. Although it was started as a BlackBerry clone, the fact that it was a full Linux kernel under the hood positioned it to become a solid platform for networked, isolated, fully memory managed, pre-emptively multitasking background OS services, and isolated user applications, with modern power management.
BB, Palm and Pocket PC were hobbled legacy platforms that might superficially emulate the UI of a modern smartphone but could never actually function and compete at the same level.
Only user applications had limited access to background processing, but that sandboxing was only possible because it was a modern Unix system with robust process isolation and fine grained access controls.
Microsoft didn’t think any of that mattered either. They tried to compete with the Windows CE core for 3 years before abandoning it and started work on an NT based OS, but it was too late.
iOS limited access to background processing by terminating apps after 10 minutes and when resources were needed. This was a new policy not new technology. Other operating systems left background processing in users' hands deliberately.
Windows Phone released 3 years after iOS. Work started earlier obviously.
my problem is that this perspective confuses together individuals and systems
no great men exist in isolation, some name takes most of the credit but they're all but a sum of their circumstances, which in all cases include other top people who never get to be as famous
strict clarity of this is extra important now that fully autonomous 'systems' are taking off, which makes them even more likely to be confused with individuals:
who invented the slate-computer (smartphone): Apple Corporation
then a whole history of apple as if they were a person whose father as another person called Steve Jobs (and their mother was Steve W?) or whatever
Take out Jobs, and there is no iPhone, or even an OSX to base it on. It took the competition years to catch up, and that's bearing in mind they knew they needed to. Prior to the iPhone announcement, Android was going to be a BlackBerry clone.
Or take SpaceX, nobody but Musk was pushing for first stage re-use. Seven years later no other company has landed an orbital class first stage booster, or seems anywhere close to doing so, and that's with the concept absolutely proven. How long would we have to wait for someone to even try without Musk gathering a team and making it happen?
The effect of the opportunity cost is often forgotten. By choosing to channel resources into one area you are not funding others.
What Jobs did very well at Apple was kill some stuff that weren't that useful ( Opendoc is a classic example ) and focus resources things were. But you can't see the road not travelled.
In general if you look at history you see periods of stagnation around the world at various times - and I don't think that was a result of lack of 'great people' - I think how societies are organised has more impact. Governance is important.
https://amazonuk.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
https://press.aboutamazon.com/1998/4/amazon-com-acquires-thr...
"Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country" Both of those are speculation, and are also highly unlikely. It might have also happened more quickly. The US had a handful of ecommerce companies in the .com boom which were right on Amazon's tail. The limiting factor was demand which is ultimately a form of incentive.
The limiting factor is not "great men" who are competent enough to get the job done, it's having a large enough pool of resources in the hands of someone or some institution which can decide to invest it in that thing. Competence doesn't have much to do with it. A severely incompetent person with a will and a large enough pool of resources can still get it done with a little luck. Musk had a will and a large enough pool of resources.
He was one of the first people whose life's wealth had almost no coupling to the pre-silicon valley US economy and who became rich after the internet had proliferated. He's not particularly competent, but he was able to dream a little bigger than previous generations of filthy rich people. His wealth wasn't tied to oil or the automobile industry, so he was able to see the value of moving off of it.
I think another factor that confuses people is that IMO society has a speed of information. Government policy tends to take a couple years to filter through, and then on top of that, there are statistical limits on the rate at which an individual or company can react to that, and re-channel money to appropriately take advantage of the new conditions. People seem to think that as soon as a government policy takes effect, things should start changing, but think of the mass of our society... the people, the buildings, the equipment... that all has inertia. Things don't happen in the real world at the speed they do on the internet.
Many supposed "great visionaries" simply formed a team that collectively had the vision that we attribute to the leader.
Steve Jobs had Jony Ive
George Lucas had Ralph McQuarrie
Christopher Nolan had Hans Zimmer
Etc..
I'm sure there's many more who's names aren't public enough to have become general knowledge, but the point is that great generals don't win wars by themselves. They have trusted officers, which in turn have trusted men. The figurehead is just that. They may be important in the sense that they attract the best officers and the bravest soldiers, but in the end, they could not "do it on their own" in any sense.
Here's my own Great Founder Theory: I don't think founders matter nearly as much as people in Silicon Valley think they do. They're basically there to give VCs a figure head they can point to and claim some new effort to financialize and monopolize another part of our economy is backed by some brilliant ass hole they found somewhere who started this thing in their garage. There have of course been very intelligent and hard working founders, but imo whether your startup succeeds has much more to do with product market fit and timing than it does with the quality of the founder. Just look at what a shitheel uber had at the beginning.
This reads funny to me since unwittingly you seem to agree to the Great Founder Theory. Product market fit is hard to come by but is relatively easy to recognize. This is the role of VCs. You try to argue that founders are interchangeable but I don’t see it. If anything, VCs are more interchangeable.
The linked page does read like it's passing it off as original thought (whatever that means), but had a quick look at the linked PDF. It doesn't make any attempt to hide the historical and academic context of the Great Man Theory from the reader.
Whole thing might be bullshit, but your comment comes across as overly sneering. Whether it's worth sharing with anyone is a judgement left to the reader.
I didn't read the whole thing, but had a glance at the last chapter in China and learned a few things to look into that I didn't know about before in regards to history there. If the author self-censored to please you, that wouldn't have happened.
Your outrage over someone writing down some thoughts in a structured way and sharing it seems like a waste.
Of course it is... if the author said to you in real life, at a party, "I've been working on a book called X and it roughly follows this thesis", a regular person wouldn't immediately take your tone, it's an entirely online persona, and if it's not, then it's not well socially adjusted.
Ridicule has it's place, but you're acting like the author is pretending that the Great Man Theory doesn't exist and is trying to hoodwink the reader.
>with chapters named "How Elon Musk made engineering cool again"
I mean the chapter was about the dual falcon landings and the tesla in space, both cool things that captured mainstream media attention. Not controversial to say so. Hyperbole if it depicted it as a lone wolf Elon Musk effort, but it's a Chapter title, not something to get exited over.
>deserve ridicule.
Hey if that's how you wanna direct your precious time, go for it. Seems author is a political scientist type figure. I usually take their musings with a heavy pinch of salt, but I don't really go as out of my way as you do to get hot and bothered and treat it like it's a crime against the zeitgeist that it's taking up a few KB of bandwidth.
[1] On Natural Maniacs: https://collabfund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/
Thinking that it's impossible to be great seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. As someone once said, "whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right".
https://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Great_Found...
A non-pdf introduction to it here:
https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25...
What I really see, at calm time, great man is not important, because just free market work good enough.
But at tough time, great man could save lot of lives, lot of resources.
Same thing works at very large organizations - at lowest levels of hierarchy, general persons are good enough, but on top, need great man.
So idea, that at some scale, need exceptional people.
I stopped reading past this.
What about that second sentence then?
>What are the origins of institutional health or sclerosis?
When it comes to sclerosis or more tragic decline I guess we'll have to chalk that up to not-so-great successors to truly great founders . . . in theory.