Came here to call out the same selection of examples as really weird for the purpose of making that point.
Newton and Darwin for the reasons you cite—and if two arrived at the same breakthrough at almost the same time, does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close, despite the fraction of a percent of the global population had, or has, the upbringing, inclination, and freedom to even approach the problem in the first place? Hell, does one even dare imagine that a thousand nobodies hadn't had the insight that would have led them straight to that breakthrough much sooner if only they'd had the background and environment to recognize it as significant, follow through to prove it, and gain publicity for their discovery? Surely not.
Aristotle, well, shit, everyone whose independent work survives from antiquity looks like a lone genius, but that's obviously, in part, because so little survives and because attribution is so sketchy. With Aristotle in particular it's not even clear how much was his work is his, directly, and how much was the work of his "school", developed over years or decades by many people, if we're talking about particular insights or inventions, and not sheer overall-importance of a person.
I know less about the environment around Einstein's breakthroughs but given the rest I'd be surprised if the author actually managed to pick a good example, for his purposes.
>does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close
I think about this in the computer security industry, and my conclusion is that no, they were not. You do this in depth research on a niche topic. You submit it to an industry conference with 1000 attendees, 100 people attend your talk, 10 have the background understanding for it, and it is relevant to 1 other person's work.
There is a surprisingly finite number of people working on certain problems. I am working on a hypervisor for binary instrumentation right now. It is because a single person streamed themselves building one over the course of a week. [1] How many other people watched the hours of video and were inspired to undertake such a project? I know of 1 other. The community is small, but let's extrapolate that to 5 people.
I am not saying we are working on something so revolutionary, but on a rather niche problem, there are less than half a dozen people working on it. We also have other obligations in life like work, school, or personal relationships. So it is likely there will only be 1 or 2 applications fully realized.
Could someone else do it? Absolutely, but very few are motivated on such a specific problem. They may have an interest in some other topic instead.
It's definitely true that as knowledge and research become deeper and more specialized that few people realistically can be sufficiently immersed in it to even have an idea of what the Hard Problems that are Nonetheless Regarded as Probably Tractable are, let alone the background and time to work on them.
Einstein is also a really bad example; there is Hendrik Lorentz for special relativity and David Hilbert for general relativity wo would've probably produced the exact same results maybe some years later had Einstein never existed.
In fact, I can not think of a single (!!) scientist that progressed his field in a truly revolutionary manner; every great thinker that comes to mind had contemporaries that could have substituted for them with only minor delays in progress.
I fully agree with the author that geniuses exist, it's just that they all were/are replaceable.
How much delay do you estimate on the discovery time of Newton's three laws of motion, if Newton was deleted from history?
Suppose I told you that you could delete five people born in the 1800s, of your choosing, from history. How much do you think you could delay the general understanding of special relativity?
Isn't Einstein the poster-boy for the theory that people we regard as a lone genius were actually in constant communication with sub-geniuses we've never heard of that helped him?
I thought he was more held up as an archetype of the "strange" ones who people misunderstand at first, but end up contributing in a large way. That's why he was plastered on classrooms and his image used in anti-bullying campaigns in the 90's.
Of course, in those he was always stood out alone but probably more for the convenience of a simple message for children/mass consumption.
Some of his appeal to pedagogy had to do with pure myth-making surrounding him, like the "Einstein failed math, so don't worry, lone kid in your class still struggling with long division, you may yet be a math genius, so don't give up!" stuff that was such a large part of how he was presented for a long time (may still be, as far as kids in school are concerned). There's a lot of "everyman who just tried hard and made it big" stuff about his biography that's, at best, disingenuously contextualized, yet is plausibly most of his presence in the popular imagination and in pop culture.
i wonder if that's perhaps the best example of how 'lone genius' works, and that our dismissal of his responsibility for work cited to him is misguided?
as in, the genius is in creating a framework, like that old meme about creating new boxes for other people to think inside
It can both be the case that some people did great things, and that better understanding the full context of how they did that, and what exactly they did personally do to achieve that end, is useful if we wish to imitate them or provide good policy, environments, teaching, and resources for others to do the same.
Excessively crediting the individual, or misunderstanding their work, may lead us to believe ourselves capable of less than we actually are—"Sure, I like painting and I'm good at it, but I could never make as many great paintings as so-and-so, that would be impossible!" weeeellllll so-and-so was a great artist, true, that's not wrong, but about 3/4 of the paint on your favorite work of his was applied by his assistants, so you might not be so far off as you imagine, and also you may need to redirect some of your efforts at skill-improvement if you want to match his output—say, to selecting, and managing, and not-feeling-guilty-about-not-crediting, assistants.
Which is to say, really, that I'm agreeing with you: the possibility that Aristotle may not have personally, solely, and remarkably capably, founded and written the inaugural texts for several major fields of study in Western science and academics, doesn't mean that he didn't do some great things, but it may change how one pursues imitating any part of his achievements, and the apparent attainability of doing great work of anything like the same order.
I've never understood the line of thinking in this sub-thread. What important point is being made by nitpicking and tearing down people who - for perhaps a complex set of reasons including luck - have managed to reach legendary hero status? Why not just let them have it, let people have their heroes?
The whole "well, he wasn't that great, he had help, and probably a lot of other people could have done what he did..." argument just reeks of bitterness, jealousy, and sour grapes.
Aristotle managed to go down as the genius of his day, his contemporaries didn't. Do we really gain anything by vaguely questioning that?
Aristotle is pretty clearly not a lone genius -- his philosophy is a direct descendant of Plato's (who was his teacher). He even (reputedely) began by writing dialogues (like Plato. These are now lost). And though he has been the perhaps the most influential (entirely because of his adoption by Islamic and then Christian scholastics in the middle ages), he had numerous contemporaries (Diogenes and Xenophon are standouts here). But those thinkers work is simply lost to us, or was never written down (Socrates for example never wrote down his teaching and it was controverial of Plato to do so).
Aristotle is one of the worst examples to give for evidence of the "lone genius", in any case. His work is clearly the output of constant dialogue with his students and with his contemporaries. It primarily consists of considering the various pre-Socratic, Platonic, Sophist, and other philosophical views of his time, and showing how they don't solve pressing philosophical problems (the aporia) then forming an argument which adopts parts of their thinking and rejects others so that the philosophical impasse can be overcome. If anything he's a synthetic thinker, a unifier of the whole of Greek thought (that is his particular genius). He's nothing without his contemporaries.
I think the "lone" part of the phrase is what's problematic. I don't think people intend to claim that they worked entirely on their own in isolation. I interpret it more as having been noticeably in a league of their own; possessing some special vision or quality that separated them from their peers.
The same thing comes up all the time with Steve Jobs, people will say variants of "he's nothing without his contemporaries." And yet, he somehow managed to be the driving force that brought all those people together to create some amazing things, and those contemporaries believed in him. I guess it does just come down to differing philosophies where some people are unhappy with glorifying individual efforts.
> What important point is being made by nitpicking and tearing down people who - for perhaps a complex set of reasons including luck - have managed to reach legendary hero status? Why not just let them have it, let people have their heroes?
That you see any of that in this sub-thread is an example of how both "sides" of this issue (Jesus, why are there sides? And this article is entirely part of the problem) are talking/writing straight past one another (not to blame you for that being the case—you see those things in this sub-thread, meanwhile I didn't intend them in my posts and don't see them at all in mine or others').
Newton and Darwin for the reasons you cite—and if two arrived at the same breakthrough at almost the same time, does one dare imagine that a dozen or more others weren't damn close, despite the fraction of a percent of the global population had, or has, the upbringing, inclination, and freedom to even approach the problem in the first place? Hell, does one even dare imagine that a thousand nobodies hadn't had the insight that would have led them straight to that breakthrough much sooner if only they'd had the background and environment to recognize it as significant, follow through to prove it, and gain publicity for their discovery? Surely not.
Aristotle, well, shit, everyone whose independent work survives from antiquity looks like a lone genius, but that's obviously, in part, because so little survives and because attribution is so sketchy. With Aristotle in particular it's not even clear how much was his work is his, directly, and how much was the work of his "school", developed over years or decades by many people, if we're talking about particular insights or inventions, and not sheer overall-importance of a person.
I know less about the environment around Einstein's breakthroughs but given the rest I'd be surprised if the author actually managed to pick a good example, for his purposes.