Im not sure what you expect to gain from correcting the narrative on this. People who actually innovate understand the process is messy and contingent. There is place for individuals. There is a place for teams. There are generalists and specialists. Someone needs to look at the bank accounts and resolve conflict. And the whole process is predicated on a billion things you'll never understand, much less take credit for.
The public is going to believe whatever they want about technical progress, and the "great man" narrative sells. Resaerch isn't free, so I just live with it.
My pet theory is all this is monkey-brain. We instinctually expect the top of a heirarchy to "master" everything below it. The problem is that someone needs to be at the top, but modern organizations are so complicated that its impossible to master any of it, much less the whole thing.
This is obvious with Musk because he has top-spot in an impossibly broad array of very complex companies. Moreover, he's hard to cirticise on all the normal capitalist stuff, since he provides real benefit and isn't obviously optimizing for short term capitgal gains at the expense of labor, the enviroment, etc. So all we got is "he doesnt deserve it" lol
Thanks for the thought provoking comments. Though, I'd say that it would be unreasonable to expect record correction to push the needle on any of the dominant stories we have about science and tech. They're far too resilient.
So, just bear with us. We'll get there. We'll eventually look into what sustains the great man story, why people that should know better act as if they believed it were true, and how we might redesign innovation processes to better take into account how invention really happens (Musk's companies). Only with #3 happening, actually changing institutions for supporting innovation, is there hope for the story to change.
I liked the brevity of your info and the giving credit where credit is due.
Im not sure what you expect to gain from correcting the narrative on this. People who actually innovate understand the process is messy and contingent. There is place for individuals. There is a place for teams. There are generalists and specialists. Someone needs to look at the bank accounts and resolve conflict. And the whole process is predicated on a billion things you'll never understand, much less take credit for.
The public is going to believe whatever they want about technical progress, and the "great man" narrative sells. Resaerch isn't free, so I just live with it.
My pet theory is all this is monkey-brain. We instinctually expect the top of a heirarchy to "master" everything below it. The problem is that someone needs to be at the top, but modern organizations are so complicated that its impossible to master any of it, much less the whole thing.
This is obvious with Musk because he has top-spot in an impossibly broad array of very complex companies. Moreover, he's hard to cirticise on all the normal capitalist stuff, since he provides real benefit and isn't obviously optimizing for short term capitgal gains at the expense of labor, the enviroment, etc. So all we got is "he doesnt deserve it" lol
Thanks for the thought provoking comments. Though, I'd say that it would be unreasonable to expect record correction to push the needle on any of the dominant stories we have about science and tech. They're far too resilient.
So, just bear with us. We'll get there. We'll eventually look into what sustains the great man story, why people that should know better act as if they believed it were true, and how we might redesign innovation processes to better take into account how invention really happens (Musk's companies). Only with #3 happening, actually changing institutions for supporting innovation, is there hope for the story to change.