The myth of the myth of the lone genius

https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-myth-of-the-lone

by mpweiher • 5 years ago

139 126 5 years ago

rogersbacon.substack.com

Sure, we shouldn’t have this naive view that these so-called solitary geniuses work 1000% on their own without any input whatsoever from other people, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t do most of the heavy lifting.

Seems like a reasonable middle ground, and therefore more or less destined to be lost in a sea of extremes.

stickfigure• 5 years ago

Or rephrasing it: The 10X scientist exists.

beckman4662• 5 years ago

The 10X scientist exists.

...because they had 10X more patience and love. Likely also better pedagogical materials and better teachers.

rufus_foreman• 5 years ago

I would say more like the zero to one scientist exists.

dfxm12• 5 years ago

Seems like a reasonable middle ground that doesn't support the author's premise, either.

hprotagonist2• 5 years ago

And yet, it's a direct quote from the article.

nickthemagicman4• 5 years ago

There's also a difference between collaboration and being on a team or group that directs the goal.

It's arguable that lone genius collaborates but are the sole director of their idea and goal.

paulpauper2• 5 years ago

Sounds like this guy is trying to be contrarian for the sake of contrarian . Even if someone works alone, they still derive knowledge from outside. And a lot of important research papers and findings haver 2 or more authors.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 5 years ago

The problem with the word genius is that ideas are need based. A lot of the most forward thinking innovations are made by people who are competing with as few as hundreds, or even dozens of people who are qualified to even work on the problem in the first place. Sure it's a nice achievement but I'm not into calling it genius. As a society it probably makes the most sense to develop standards such that more people can have the opportunity to work on the problem than to go crazy over a single person.

alexgmcm• 5 years ago

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

luffapi• 5 years ago

You can use a lot of brain power just surviving in extremely hostile situations.

PopsiclePete5• 5 years ago

We can't prove that. It feels good to believe it, sure, but it's also possible that precisely zero people working in sweatshops have ever had Einstein's talent.

Sure, it's easy to say - take away the sweatshops, provide them with UBI and voila - suddenly we have 5000 Einsteins on our hands.

But it's also possible we'll still have zero. It's not like we don't have millions of people leading "cushy" (by comparison lives) in the West already, yet - no more Einsteins?

peteforde• 5 years ago

One of the most interesting takeaways for me: "Ideas don't matter is a PsyOp"

mvaliente2001• 5 years ago

History [..] is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own [...] (Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Einstein to name the most obvious examples).

This line has almost the opposite effect than intended in me. Yes, Newton and Darwin were geniuses that came with revolutionary ideas, but on the other hand, for calculus and evolution it seems to have been their time. Leibniz and Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same ideas around the same time.

gota• 5 years ago

I'm not an expert but I seem recall that other people were working concurrently on related, maybe tangential, questions for most of the other "great ideas" mentioned in the article

Didn't Einstein strike such a hit precisely because his (new) approach solved sought after problems? The people who helped define the problem have a large chunk of merit, in my opinion. There's no need for a theory in a vacuum.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Einstein generated multiple original game changing insights across multiple domains.

There were people who might have generated one new Einstein insight on their own - Minkowski and Hilbert were both on their way towards GR after SR was presented - but no one else was even remotely likely to have generated all of them.

HWR_144• 5 years ago

IIRC, Einstein's biggest insight was cutting the Gordian Knot that other physicists faced when looking at the universal speed limit of the speed of light. Others tried to work around it. Einstein said "what would I have to do to make that true and keep other physics".

handrous5• 5 years ago

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.

myrmidon• 5 years ago

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.

ZeroGravitas2• 5 years ago

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?

carom• 5 years ago

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.

1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSkhUfcCXvqHsOy2VUxuo...

jrowen2• 5 years ago

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?

smegcicle• 5 years ago

aristotle

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

zozbot234• 5 years ago

Wasn't it Newton himself who said: "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"? Looks like a pretty strong rebuttal of the "lone genius" POV.

PopsiclePete5• 5 years ago

And yet - why are so few others capable of standing on the shoulders of said giants? Here I am, with more giants' shoulders to stand on, if I wished it, with easy access to vast wealth of information that Newton (or someone living in the 1980's) couldn't even dream of - and yet - my contributions to calculus are precisely zero.

I studied drumming for 6 years and could easily be outmatched (and have been) skill-wise by a 5-year-old with talent.

Are there just no "geniuses" at all? Could anyone paint the Sistine Chapel? Carve out David? Paint the Mona Lisa? Play drums for Led Zeppelin? Invent new fields in mathematics? Is 99.9999% of humanity just ... what? lazy?

nickthemagicman4• 5 years ago

I think there's a difference between collaboration to gather information.. and being on part of a team that directs the goal of an idea.

username903• 5 years ago

Newton didn't just do calculus, he also structured the laws of physics. And it is pretty likely that Leibniz discovered calculus by working backwards from Netwons laws of physics, since if you have the laws of movement clearly shown like that then discovering calculus is a lot easier. Note that Newton created calculus in his quest to do the laws of motion, so he didn't publish it.

Edit: Also Newton discovered the calculus of variations and applied it to a bunch of problems, can read about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_minimal_resistance_...

It is the basis for almost all graduate level physics courses we have today and is way beyond regular calculus. Would likely have taken a few hundred years before it was discovered without Newton.

Xelbair• 5 years ago

An idea of calculus was already found in ancient Greece. Archimedes used it to calculate the area of parabola by assigning a 'weight' to a line, and using a leverage to balance it.

There is a good Numberphile YT about it called 'Parabolas and Archimedes'

dharmaturtle• 5 years ago

I'm reminded of gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium in evolution. https://necsi.edu/gradualism-and-punctuated-equilibrium

Gradualism is selection and variation that happens more gradually. Over a short period of time it is hard to notice.
In punctuated equilibrium, change comes in spurts. There is a period of very little change, and then one or a few huge changes occur, often through mutations in the genes of a few individuals.

This comparison becomes even more apparent if we use the original definition of meme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

tluyben2• 5 years ago

The person writing this article goes in hard but comes down a bit. Sure all work of genius is based on prior work but that does not take away that a lot of impressive work (Einstein, a lot of math, etc) was done alone in a room. Sure after a lot of reading but not with a lot of blah blah with collaborators at the time of the 'new'(evolutionary) invention. Seems like a bit of an angry article from someone with a grudge toward something to do with solitary inventors?

nverno• 5 years ago

his grudge was with other people who have a grudge with solitary inventors. But, yea, pretty much

crazygringo2• 5 years ago

Really, the arguments around the "lone genius" are identical to those of the "Great man theory" of history [1].

The debate has been going on for nearly two centuries.

Suffice it to say that nobody has had the final word.

At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial -- it's entirely due to the perspective you take on "weighting" the two sides.

It's mainly a useful tool for teaching, where "great man" or "lone genius" is the thesis, "ideas in the air" or "standing on the shoulder of giants" is the antithesis, and the synthesis is... both are necessary to fully explain history/achievements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

hypertele-Xii• 5 years ago

As individualistic social creatures, the brains of human beings have evolved to understand characters. That's why we anthropomorphisize everything. Technological progress is no exception: Every revolution as well as incremental step must have a person assigned to it. If none exists, we create the idea of one (e.g. God).

aeturnum• 5 years ago

I think it's useful to decompose this dialectical into "material" and a "social" dimensions. The material dimension is about change in the world[1]: places are conquered, techniques are developed. We can acknowledge and think about these changes without assigning them a cause. The social dimension is all about assigning causes to those changes. The idea that one person invents something or that it is "in the air" is ultimately a social judgement[2]. People can believe whichever narrative they want and will frequently fight about which narrative is correct.

So, to me, it is 100% true that there is no final word on the social question. We both have highly ambiguous historical examples and every reason to question if the historical examples that appear unambiguous are simply shaped by the social consensus of their time.

I do not think we need to accept that there is no final world on the material question. It seems very possible for us to improve our techniques for fostering discoveries. That's not to say it's easy to see clearly (obviously our social ties mess with us here), but I don't think they are the same.

At this point I think it's best to simply acknowledge that there's truth to both sides, and that therefore the debate is ultimately artificial

By this standard, isn't nearly all debate "artificial"? Two opposite sides can both have points, but how we weigh them can have enormous real world consequences.

[1] Of course, social changes are also changes in the world but let's not tie ourselves in knots too much.

[2] There is also obviously a material element here - someone does something, but I think that material action is irretrievably obscured by the social consensus layer.

crazygringo2• 5 years ago

By this standard, isn't nearly all debate "artificial"?

No. Most of scientific debate eventually gets settled on one side or another, and plenty of history can be settled similarly too, even when there are multiple causes/influences behind an event. You just do the research, and if the facts are available the answer ultimately will be too.

But it's important to separate out the "big philosophical unanswerable" questions like this one, because they are different. They're really about exposing and teaching paradigms rather than having a single answer.

chubot• 5 years ago

Yeah I think the whole argument rests on the meaning of words: what does "lone" mean? And the article didn't really get into that, or it was fairly sloppy about it.

Also, I don't think there is that meaningful a distinction between a lone genius and a very small group.

Is what Crick, Watson, and Franklin did any less useful or interesting than what Einstein did, simply because there were multiple people working on it? I'm sure they had to "go it alone" for quite awhile (and there were probably a few more people helping them).

To me it sounds like Katalin Kariko (mRNA vaccine inventor) was something of a lone genius early in her career. Certainly her colleagues didn't believe in her work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125003

But apparently the more senior faculty Drew Weissman did and they made progress together. I'm not sure but it sounds like she is the main driver of the work.

My point is that it doesn't seem to matter? Either way, they had to do long term work that wasn't accepted by their peers, and turned out to be extremely valuable.

Though I guess you can say it matters because it's "easier" for 1 person to work in isolation, but it's not easy for 2 or 3 people. For example, they need lab equipment, physical space, etc. Einstein and Ramanujan didn't need that.

Anyway, there is probably useful stuff to explore there, but the article seemed to be grinding an axe and wasn't that clear about what it was saying. Obviously the truth is somewhere in between the extremes, and depends on what "lone" means.

Siira• 5 years ago

It’s not a matter of perspective; It’s a matter of definitions.

quacked• 5 years ago

I've always thought that the "Myth of the Lone Genius" is a bit of a "motte-bailey" format argument, where an aggressive, undefendable stance is advertised, and then when challenged the person who is making the argument retreats back into a more believable stance. The bailey, in this case, is "no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true.

I believe people that make the bailey form of the above argument want to believe that they're important, and want their contributions to be measured on the same scale that great people's accomplishments are measured on. If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".

ska• 5 years ago

"no one person is truly responsible for progress or breakthroughs, and everyone's contribution matters", which is ridiculous, and the motte is "no man is an island, and all breakthroughs rely on the actions of others", which is obviously true.

I think you are missing here the real core of the "Myth of the Lone Genius" argument which is not to claim that lone geniuses don't exist (e.g. Ramanujan, far more than some of these other examples) but rather to reject the argument that progress is mostly made by them, or can be best understood by focusing on them.

The argument boils down to: everyone's contributions are clearly not equivalent, but the vast majority of real progress is a collective effort; and that by focusing on individuals we are less efficient at learning what is effective.

saimiam• 5 years ago

The GP comment itself is a motte-Bailey. I’m willing to bet they will settle for some less energetic form of their original argument that the myth of the lone genius is a case of sour grapes.

HWR_144• 5 years ago

Ramanujan is certainly a better example than Newton or Aristotle. There were a lot of geniuses I would highlight over them if I was looking for individual talent.

sunstone• 5 years ago

See also Walter Pitts.

E-Reverance• 5 years ago

>If there's no such thing as the Lone Genius, then your lazy dissertation on a topic no one really cares about matters in the same way that the Bryce-Codd paper on data normalization matters, because "everyone's work is important".

I think it is about not comparing the top 100 people in a field. This would already exclude the lazy/dissertation folk.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

When it comes down to it, I think the lone genius is overestimated in common understanding and the rebuttal overcorrects.

It usually takes quite a lot of expertise to recognize what someone truly accomplished or even to appreciate or be explained.

The lone genius tends to do something which has its time come, usually a bit ahead of schedule.

In science the pattern tends to be long periods of incremental buildup of large volumes of straightforward work interspersed with sort of phase transitions often (but not always) triggered by the lone genius. (see also Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions)

The pieces will all come into place for a significant change waiting for a trigger. The lone genius is the one who does this early. Not in a vacuum but also not in a crowd.

asymptosis3• 5 years ago

This seems a bit contradictory. You say that the lone genius is often overestimated, then you attribute Kuhnian paradigm shifts to these lone geniuses.

Perhaps it is better to be skeptical about the idea of paradigm shifts. They are often portrayed as some kind of phase transition, but they are usually (or always?) foreshadowed by a generation of debate, and when history books look back, they only present a retrospective consensus on that imagined consensus which never actually existed in the debates of the day.

smnrchrds• 5 years ago

Everyone interprets the myth differently. I interpreted it as "most breakthroughs and progresses don't come from lone geniuses, but large groups of career scientists". For example, there is no lone genius behind the mRNA vaccine breakthrough, but a few universities and well-funded companies with many scientists working on them over a long period of time. Take all important progresses and breakthroughs, the vast vast majority of them are coming from this kind of environment. There is the occasional one-person operation, being the sole author of an influential paper. But the vast vast majority of influential papers have many co-authors.

I am not saying the above is true. I don't work in science and I am not too familiar with the state of the scientific world. I am saying that when I heard about the "Myth of the Lone Genius", that's what I thought it meant.

ZeroGravitas2• 5 years ago

Either "Raymond F. Boyce and Edgar F. Codd" was some kind of bizarrely complicated pseudonym or neither of them were lone geniuses.

contingencies• 5 years ago

Similar interpretation here. In the spirit of broadening the internet's vocabulary of 'meh', as per TLDR, I would like to propose an acronym for this category of perspective.

WTMTDE: Way too meta to deserve eyeballs.

SiempreViernes• 5 years ago

Well this was a bit of shoddy history of science that was aggressively waved in my face by a writer who very eager to get to the sequel, whose title one may suspect will contain the words "I", "genius" and little else...

I mean, one of the things Newton famously wrote was "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." which isn't entirely in the spirt of the long genius myth.

And if Galileo is allowed into the genius pantheon, what to do with the little episode where he convinced the contemporary world that comets were actually just clouds...

notriddle• 5 years ago

Galileo was famous for being a martyr, not a genius.

abz10• 5 years ago

Didn’t Galileo recant and it was his assistant who was killed?

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - Very fair that I was being overly contrarian/aggressive but I'm not sure if this invalidates what I think was clearly the point of the article (but maybe not clear). Inspirational stories and cultural narratives matter, especially to young talented thinkers who face challenging circumstances/criticism. Sure this may only matter on the margins, but in a modern science that is increasingly a crapshoot in terms of individual success, we want scientists who have confidence in themselves to think individually. As other commenters pointed out working in a team is not the same as working by yourself, they lead to distinct forms of thinking/working that have their own strengths/weaknesses. Science requires more teamwork than ever, that's necessary and a good thing but that doesn't mean there are costs.

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Also why does the fact that Galileo thought some crazy shit mean that he wasn't a genius?

MyHypatia• 5 years ago

This article is attacking a strawman. Newton, Einstein, Ramanujan, etc. were geniuses. It is not controversial to say that. They did not work in complete isolation, and were in regular contact with the scientific community at that time. Acknowledging that even the "lone geniuses" did not work in complete isolation does not detract from their extraordinary contributions. Even lone geniuses have to communicate their ideas to a community of people capable of understanding them, using language and analogies to make their novel ideas understood and adopted. I am sure there are many lone geniuses that we don't know about because they were unable to effectively communicate their ideas to the right audience.

Throughout history there have been many examples of people who want the glow of being a "lone genius" to join the ranks of Einstein and Newton. In order to accomplish this they have downplayed the work of others. It is easier and more compelling for journalists and screenwriters to run with the lone genius story, because it makes the narrative less complicated. I appreciate that we examine a more complete picture of what it takes to accomplish extraordinary goals, whether it's a solitary or team effort.

brrt• 5 years ago

Also, there's Leibniz, for Newton :-)

Finnucane• 5 years ago

For a fair number of these figures, there's not just the people they communicated with, the prior work they drew on, but often competitors, people they knew were working on the same or similar problems. This is particularly the case with technical inventions.

JAlexoid2• 5 years ago

We also forget, if Newton were truly a "Lone Genius"... then we would be using Leibniz's calculus.

How many millenia did it take for heliocentric theory to be adopted? Yet we attribute it to Copernicus, as he managed to convince enough people to accept it.

sumtechguy• 5 years ago

I personally liked the series Connections that showed off that many of these guys did not live in a vacuum. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588

Basically mostly everything is fairly incremental but every once and awhile you get someone who connects 3 or 4 different fields together and something really cool happens. If you work by yourself you will become odd and stale. Bouncing ideas off others helps weed out junk and maybe even help you get a better understanding of what is going on. Or they may ask a question you did not think of and woosh you found something even more cool.

I had an idea a few days ago that most ML seems to be mostly curve fitting (except when it isnt). But what if you could turn that network back into a formula instead of a set of nodes with weights and particular follow rules. Those sets of formulas could yield some interesting ideas, I think, if you could compare them. Like there may be a set of formulas that are just hiding there but are smeared across 1000 nodes. Not even sure where to begin on that. But an interesting idea none the less. One of the smart ones could see the idea and also figure out where to start and tease out the idea until it is done.

ItsMonkk• 5 years ago

The model I like to think of this is that intelligence is speed and knowledge is distance, but you start at the peak of a mountain and the farther you go the slope is increasingly getting sharper, so you keep getting faster.

Terrance Tao is a genius. He can go from sub-field in math to sub-field in math and solve a problem that stumped someone dedicated in that sub-field for years. But he is only able to solve those problems because of the understanding that the sub-field expert developed over those years in addition to the broad context that he has developed jumping from sub-field to sub-field.

He started with a lot of speed. As he's worked with more individuals, he's covered significantly more ground that other people, which has compounded to make him unbelievably fast.

One of the main take-aways from this model, is that if we are in an economy that only allows the wealthy Einstein's to flourish, not only are we losing the poor Einstein's we're quite literally slowing Einstein down.

We must do everything we can to ensure that we find smart dedicated people and allow them to thrive.

Zamicol• 5 years ago

Einstein was ostracized from academia. He is the quintessential lone genius.

Einstein's 1905 papers were ignored, even by his own teacher Minkowski. Einstein was considered an arrogant academic failure. The "lone genius" was that Einstein knew that he was right and and smarter than his peers and superiors, so he kept working.

Max Planck was the one who identified Einstein's Brownian motion paper as significant. Planck knew that Einstein was onto something and that if Planck continued "quantum"/atom research history would acknowledge Einstein's previous work.

Planck didn't want to needlessly share his glory so he pushed Einstein's relativity work. Planck elevated Einstein's relativity work in an effort to remove Einstein from the quantum.

Einstein betting on himself continued. He promised Mileva his Nobel prize money in 1918 long before it was certain in 1921.

goodpoint• 5 years ago

Einstein was ostracized from academia. He is the quintessential lone genius.

This is all true but most of the "lone genius" narrative paint people in an almost supernatural light.

Einstein work was widely recognized later on. Also, he interacted with plenty of people and read a lot and he never denied that.

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

Newton is one of the more solitary individuals I've studied, much more than Einstein or Liebniz or Feynman or Bohr. Newton had books of calculations unpublished when Halley asked him about gravity and the moon. Would Einstein sit on books and books of info without thinking to publish it?

jjk166• 5 years ago

I think it's important to remember that there are two types of progress - evolutionary and revolutionary.

By numbers, advancements are overwhelmingly evolutionary - small steps in a predictable direction. If you want to be a scientist or an inventor or what have you, most of your career is going to be spent on these evolutionary steps. Such evolutionary work is well suited to teams and larger organizations, and results are a consequence of the amount of effort that goes in to them rather than individual competency.

However the revolutionary advances which shift our paradigms are extremely important, despite being very rare. Such revolutions can not be planned and thus are rarely the product of large scale collaboration. Maybe an individual has a moment of insight while taking a bath, perhaps some friends on a train have just the right conversation, but it's always a unique mind viewing the problem from a new perspective that upends everything. Yes that person is probably not literally cut off from all of society, but unless you're being ridiculously pedantic "lone genius" is a pretty good description.

While as stated it's incredibly dumb to bet everything on being one of these lone geniuses, the fact is societal advance does depend on large numbers of people cultivating unique minds that might glean such rare insights under the right circumstances. Statistically you are much more likely to be successful as an accountant than an artist, but how terrible would life be if therefore no one pursued art?

JAlexoid2• 5 years ago

Or, maybe, we recognize a genius only after their idea has been validated. It's the same situation as with "prophets".

Take 1000 people and ask them for an open ended prophecy. If one of 1000 gets something perfectly right, we will focus on that person... and ignore the fact that the other 999 failed to predict anything. Then hold that one person as a great prophet.

Dreams are 10 a penny - they say.

Not to say that people who managed to properly articulate ideas and put in the "capstone" for a theory aren't important or hold a lot of knowledge/wisdom.

But I don't understand why would Aristotle, Newton or Einstein support the idea that "Lone Genius Myth" is false.

slowhand09• 5 years ago

Nicola Tesla.

A favorite quote from "Finding Bobby Fischer":

"He's better at this than I've ever been at anything in my life. He's better at this than you'll ever be, at anything."

There are things I'm really good at. I've met and "worked" with people that are the genius, and the savant, the 10X engineer/developer/tactician/athlete. The people I'd love to start a company with but couldn't because I'd be by far the weakest link. I can be a team captain, but I'd sit the bench on a team of their peers. My skill may be in recognizing what I excel at on my best day, is below their effort with a hangover, while playing hurt, while multitasking.

HWR_144• 5 years ago

Why not try to put together a team where you are the weakest link? I'd love that. Someone has to deal with all the bullshit that needs to be done but not at a genius level. As long as I'm respected by the team, it could work fine.

quirkot• 5 years ago

The scientists used here are poor examples for supporting the authors thesis. Someone like Shakespeare is a far better example to find a Lone Genius because he didn't participate in an accumulative field.

wmat• 5 years ago

“I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by a committee… i’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… not on the committee. Not on a team” — Steve Wozniak

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - great quote, this is very close to the spirit of my argument.

artemonster• 5 years ago

I am really split after reading this article. On the one hand it promotes „middle ground“ as in: surrounding community matters, on the other hand it demotes the contributions of these said geniuses.

For example: you cannot invent rocket powered spaceflight with 1000 mediocre engineers and unlimited resources, you would still need THAT ONE LONE GENIUS that assembles all puzzle pieces together. Soviets tried and they’ve ended up digging Koralev out of gulag to do it, US tried and they had to resort to literally giving an employment opportunity to a fucking Nazi. Not to diminish work effort of all side contributors, but its the master that makes the art of it.

Modern equivalent: El Anatsui. Lots of workers work on his „trash art“, but it is he, who composes the piece. Please do not dimish that.

They are not „lone“, but they ate still geniuses.

antognini• 5 years ago

One metric that I have thought about is this: If this person had not existed, how long would it have been before someone else made the same discovery?

Something I noticed when I was in astronomy was that the most successful astronomers tended to do work that was high impact, but also, in a sense, obvious. But they would do that work faster than anyone else, get the first paper out, and let the citations roll in. (There was a good Twitter thread about this strategy here: https://twitter.com/neurobongo/status/1404208339295350792)

There is something to be said for this work! After all, it is important and someone needs to do it. But it seems to me that there have been singular figures who really discovered something that wasn't just "in the air," and that that's the sort of thing we reserve for the word "genius."

I'm still not completely convinced that this is the right metric though. There have been a number of scientists who are universally regarded as geniuses who discovered things that probably would have been discovered shortly thereafter if they hadn't existed. Poincaré was close to discovering the special theory of relativity when Einstein published his work. Leibniz discovered calculus at around the same time as Newton. Hilbert discovered the Einstein field equations at about the same time as Einstein. (Some sources say Hilbert was just five days earlier than Einstein.) The whole history of quantum mechanics seems like a mad dash by a group of brilliant physicists who were discovering one thing after another nearly every week in the early 20th century.

On the other hand, Poincaré, Leibniz, and Hilbert could all justifiably be called geniuses, too. So if two geniuses figure something out simultaneously, does that mean that they cancel each other out and neither of them were geniuses? Seems wrong. So I'm still not sure what the right metric is.

austincheney• 5 years ago

This was the most important part of the Malcolm Gladwell book. That chapter, *Trouble With Geniuses Part 2, compares the lack of success by super genius Chris Langan to Robert Oppenheimer who graduated with honors despite attempted murder of a university faculty.

Anybody who has submitted a proposal to a standards body knows this experience. It does not matter how amazing or ingenious the idea is. The most important thing is to achieve buy in from highly skeptical people. The idea can be garbage, but if there is enough charisma and popularity associated people will eagerly polish the idea for you.

The lone genius might build that amazing thing but it takes more to achieve adoption. Originality irrationally scares the shit out of people.

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - well said, I shared your comment below. In situations like what you describe, cultural narratives and inspirational stories matter... swinging to far toward the myth of the lone genius might have negative effects, at least on the margins

tlarkworthy• 5 years ago

like everything, societal contribution is Pareto.

ForHackernews• 5 years ago

History (ancient and recent) is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own - that’s why the archetype even exists in the first place (Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Einstein to name the most obvious examples).

Wait, what now?

One of Newton's most famous quotes is, "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" directly acknowledging his debt to those who came before him.

Furthermore, Newton invented calculus at roughly the same time as Leibniz (independently) discovered the same mathematical principles. To me, that strongly suggests that the groundwork had been laid and somebody (or multiple somebodies!) was ripe to make the breakthrough.

That doesn't mean Newton wasn't a genius, but I think it does suggest that the "Great Man theory of history" is false. Even geniuses are products of their environment and no genius is singular and irreplaceable.

Picking another example from the list above, Wallace independently proposed many of elements of the theory of natural selection: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zwvpsg8/revision/1

nickthemagicman4• 5 years ago

My theory is that it's a lot easier to get WORK done when you're not part of a group.

When teams form... group dynamics take place and this includes politics and conformity and social cohesion requirements. Teams demand a 'team player' that they can 'drink a beer with' which means group dynamics becomes as important, if not more important then the work being done which adds a lot of overhead to working, I.e. playing politics, selling your ideas over others, office chitchat, forging alliances to get your ideas done, etc.

Anyone whose worked in an office knows what I'm talking about.

You can't just show up and passionately go to work, there's a whole element of social interaction involved.

And often in teams people are promoted who are better at maintaining social cohesion than performing the actual work and these likable people begin to dictate the goal as much if not more than the people with the deep knowledge who put less effort into building relationships than they do into doing the work.

So the nature of a group/team tends to select for people who put a priority on maintaining social cohesion versus people who are extremely focused and knowledgeable and passionate about the work.

So a genius, if they have a choice, is pretty much always going operate alone or in groups of one or two

Just a theory.

Also:

There's a big difference between collaboration....and being a part of a team that dictates the direction of a goal.

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - Well said, and this is definitely something like I was going for, but you probably said it more clearly.

nickthemagicman4• 5 years ago

Hey thanks! Great article by the way! Very thought provoking, I think you did a great job explaining it. Thanks for writing it! It's nice to hear someone else shares some of the same ideas I've been thinking for a while now.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

I don’t think the “Myth of the Lone Genius” argues that the “lone genius” doesn’t exist, it argues that most progress comes from ordinary smarts and not lone genius, and that even the lonest of geniuses stand on the shoulders of more ordinary people.

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

History (ancient and recent) is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own

Not quite. They are always building in the backs of those who came before, even ( and sometime especially ) the failures.

Simultaneous independent invention is pretty strong evidence for this. It still takes a uniquely talented person, but when a certain critical mass of prior learning and information is achieved, then for those uniquely talented people the breakthroughs may be the logical next step as they work through the problem. See Newton & Leibniz re:calculus as an example. The author dismisses this example, but both did truly do the heavy lifting, independent of each other, but still with the assistance of collaboration and shared thoughts.

The problem is that the author seems to not want to admit to degrees of "lone-ness". Either a genius did most of the heavy lifting, or they did not-- the author does not seem interested in examining the nuances of how-- and how much-- an individual achieved through relationships with other thinkers resent & past.

Even if we were to grant (incorrectly) that Newton would have achieved everything he achieved without any assistance, feedback, discussions, etc with other thinkers of his time, it would be truly ridiculous to think he would have achieved as much if not for everything & everyone who came before them.

In short, some genius intellects still benefit from fertile soil, and this does not at all take away from their incredible achievements that still required a genius intellects to put together. The author seems to think acknowledging this somehow takes away from the achievement: it does not. If anything, it elevates it: The genius takes everything that came before and the intellects of their own time, synthesizes it and then transcends it. That transcendence is incredible, but it did not occur in isolation.

And the of course there are discoveries that are achieved through gradual, often tedious chipping away at a problem. This is a lot of science, even if the massive paradigm shifts (See Thomas Kuhn's work on this topic) may come from a single unique catalyst. The catalyst needs something to catalyze though.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

Of course. Knowledge is always collective. We hugely underestimate how much knowledge is externalised in cultural firmware, passed down from generation to generation, and only accumulated - when it accumulates at all - because of inventions like writing, math formalisms, cultural and creative traditions, and the scientific method.

Without a head start from previous generations you get a rather dumb monkey. Even a genius dumb monkey is going to be extremely limited in what it can do.

Even so - an educated genius monkey with the right life opportunities can still generate lone game changing insights that most monkeys can't.

Without that kind of step change insight domains will stagnate, sometimes for centuries. No amount of collective cultural activity of any kind will move them on.

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

Yes, I generally agree with this. Fertile soil may abound for countless years before just the right seed takes hold. The presence of fertile soil should not eclipse what the seed becomes, but neither should "what it becomes" be seen as independent from that fertile soil.

If there is a "myth of the myth", it is only that the concept of "lone genius" focuses too much on the achievements of the seed, while the "myth of the lone genius" focuses too much on the fertile soil. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

PopsiclePete5• 5 years ago

I think people are getting hung up too much on the "their own" part vs "full of geniuses" part.

Ok, fine, if three - instead of one - people - out of billions - came up with a revolutionary new idea - that does not, to me, discount the idea of the "lone genius", just because 2 > 1 and we can't strictly use the word "lone" anymore.

The idea would be discounted, if say, 500 million people all invented calculus independently of each other over a period of 5 months.

ineedasername3• 5 years ago

The vast majority of geniuses were lucky enough to be born into families that were very much above the lower socioeconomic classes of their times. These were not "lone" geniuses, not when everything about their early lives gave them advantages above the majority that allowed them to pursue a life that left room for intellectual pursuit.

Whether it's 1 or 10 that made discoveries around the same time, they have still taken advantage of 1) every piece of knowledge they've encountered that came before them and 2) At least limited, and often not very limited, collaboration or "bouncing ideas of off" people around them. 3) The circumstances of their birth. These can't be discounted.

These are, however, matters of degree, and as I said it can still take a unique intellect to put the pieces together. That can't be discounted, but there still must be pieces to put together. Even Ramanujan had tutors from a very early age who taught him quite a bit, along with multiple books on the subject of mathematics, to help him along his way. Each of these sources had in turn built upon many years and many minds' worth of knowledge. Ramanujan is probably the most "lone" of lone geniuses that I can think of, and still he would likely not have achieved nearly as much without that foundational knowledge.

This is not just about simultaneous discovery-- although that does demonstrate the "fertile ground" aspect of things. It is fundamentally about the sum total of knowledge that came before a genius and the social network of very smart, though perhaps not genius intellects, that served as sounding boards, critics, etc.

And though the author of this article wants to discount the "luck" aspect of these individuals, it is extremely notable that most if not all of the individuals that spring to mind came from circumstances of birth that allowed for their intellect to flourish. They were born into circumstances of middle class or higher where resources supplemental to the basic necessities required for life & sustenance could be devoted to their education & leisure time to pursue their interests: Einstein was not born into a working class family with parents confined to jobs of physical labor. Newton's family similarly was not of the labor class. Nor was Ramanujan's. Or Leibniz's.

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - Yes to this.

racl101• 5 years ago

I didn't even know this was a thing. So sad that we gotta come up with this politically correct historic revisionist nonsense that attempts to discredit the great minds of the past.

zzzeek• 5 years ago

this author seems very upset. As though the current crop of "lone geniuses" they refer to is going to be tragically deterred by messaging that somehow convinces them that "lone geniuses don't even exist".

to that I would say this author maybe doesn't fully understand the "lone genius". If someone is truly the next Einstein or Newton, they're going to figure it out; they won't be overly deterred, and they will make use of things such as self-awareness, a slightly pathological level of hyperfocus, and of course quite often just plain arrogance.

Being able to cut through noise and inaccurate or mis-messaging by society is kind of a ground floor task for people who are going to change the world with something, so I think they'll be OK.

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - Not upset at all, but I can see why you would think that. The tone was perhaps overly-aggressive, but we are talking about it so that's good I guess. I'm not nearly as confident in the arguments as it may seem.

I guess I'm not nearly confident as you are that a would-be "genius" will just figure it out. From another comment here "This was the most important part of the Malcolm Gladwell book. That chapter, *Trouble With Geniuses Part 2, compares the lack of success by super genius Chris Langan to Robert Oppenheimer who graduated with honors despite attempted murder of a university faculty.

The lone genius might build that amazing thing but it takes more to achieve adoption. Originality irrationally scares the shit out of people."

The messaging we send young thinkers may not have a huge effect, but it could be worth something on the margins.

archibaldJ2• 5 years ago

You are everything there is that you can experience. The things you see, hear, etc, are really just sensory inputs produced by your own organs. Higher abstractions such as your thoughts, ideas, etc, are built upon these inputs that you produced. By changing your narratives, your physiology, etc, you can change how you feel about the world, or "the world", so to speak. You are everything there is to you.

And then there is the I/O aspect to it. By interacting with these inputs and constructing models about "the world", you learn that you can receive future inputs that you want by outputting data (e.g. moving your hand to type these words, etc) based on the right simulations about "the world". You learn of your dependencies to abstractions such as "your parents", "friends", etc. It is in this way that you are not alone.

archibaldJ2• 5 years ago

And then there is the feeling of meaning (as well as mythical experiences and the pursuit of "higher purposes"), that which reinforces the none-loneliness of existence. To be able to share your life/work with others, or connect with others at a profound level. That is something worth greater than your accomplishments.

b20000• 5 years ago

newsflash: the lone genius exists. it is just that companies do not want you to know. because that way, you will continue to work for shitty compensation packages.

drewcoo• 5 years ago

Author needs to read a book.

The examples of true lone geniuses, to refute the claim they don't exist, are all bad. For different reasons. Ranging from lack of evidence to obviously borrowed priors.

Carefully picking cherries doesn't lead to truth. For truth, the author should try chopping that cherry tree down. What is the cultural need for the myth of the lone genius rooted in?

asymptosis3• 5 years ago

This lost credibility as soon as it cited Einstein as an example of one of these "lone geniuses". He was anything but. He wasn't lone, and he wasn't a genius.

He happened to be born at a time and place in history when physics was rapidly going through change anyway. He was a correspondent of Caratheodory, whose mathematical work was essential for the development of general relativity. He was nearly beaten to the punch by Hilbert.

Einstein was smart, but lots of people in the world are smart without being called "lone geniuses".

derbOac• 5 years ago

Stigler's Law of Eponomy is relevant to this discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

asymptosis3• 5 years ago

Reminds me of Saunt Lora's Proposition from Neal Stephenson's Anathem :D

rogersbacon179• 5 years ago

Author here - you may enjoy another post of mine that mentions this - https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/eponymous-laws-part-3-mis... and https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/eponymous-laws-part-i-law...

IntrepidWorm• 5 years ago

The way I understood the myth is that history tends to distill what were at the time collective achievements, and gradually ascribe them to one or two deified figureheads. It's not to say that those individuals were not geniuses, simply that as time passes, the context surrounding their discovery is naturally lost and then mysticized as some singular "eureka" moment instead of the more likely and relatable long progression of constructive concepts.

SarikayaKomzin• 5 years ago

As has been said in this thread many times, there is a middle ground here: geniuses exist, of course, but are not necessarily solely responsible for great leaps forward in progress.

What’s also worth mentioning is that geniuses stand on the shoulders of abstraction, the most powerful (and scary!) force known to man. The more and more we abstract away problems, the more and more geniuses can scaffold on top of that abstraction. This compounding effect is more responsible for innovation than the admittedly gifted and great individuals who channel it.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Isaac Newton

The myth of the myth of the lone genius

Related Stories