[Rochus]

> All of us are replaceable

That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.

[marcus_holmes]

That's an ego illusion. It hurts to admit that we're not replaceable, but we are. The job might not get done as well, or done in a different way than we'd do it, but it'll still get done.

[ramblerman]

It's certainly true for most of us but not the names the op mentioned.

I would argue the real ego resistance is in not accepting such people exist.

[Bakary]

Both are true: there are supernaturally talented people and also an incredibly wide world.

If you take an intellect so impressive that they are one in ten million, there will be still be almost eight hundred of those people in the world.

We are also reasoning from the POV of our own reality. We see the people we did get, but it could be the case that we missed some brilliant minds that do exist in some alternative universe, but came ahead anyway. There are so many factors in play.

[MontyCarloHall]

> If you take an intellect so impressive that they are one in ten million, there will be still be almost eight hundred of those people in the world.

Intellects aren’t fungible. Even if there are 800 Fabrice Ballard-level minds out there, I doubt most of them have honed their brain on the exact problems he’s worked on. You can’t just find another one-in-ten-million mind and put them to work on the problems of another 1/1e7 mind and expect comparable results.

[Bakary]

Essentially it's a clash between the Great Man conception of history and the process version. The Great Man version is easier to understand. You can look at a specific individual and easily conclude that their actions had an enormous impact. For people such as Mao who had sway over billions, it is certainly a conclusion that seems to withstand quite a bit of scrutiny. But any person is a product of their context and we have to deal with multi-factored forces that might be impossible for a single human mind to model or grasp given the quantity of data. This is particularly relevant for scientific pursuits as opposed to political decisions. Newton and Leibniz sound irreplaceable if you read their biographies, but they came up with calculus separately around the same time. The same goes for Darwin and Wallace. If the conditions are ripe, individuals matter less. Technology isn't a predefined ladder like in the civ games, but every civ is at a juncture where so and so technology has a probability of being discovered. It's not unrealistic to assume that if certain lab conditions exist, it's only a matter of time until someone stumbles on to penicillin even if from a historical and emotional perspective it seems like a freak accident.

I can't draw a conclusive answer to these questions following the logical consequence of my own arguments, but at least we have to come at the problem with the knowledge that our own minds are drawn to simple narratives and to individual achievements. Hence assuming replaceability in the absence of very strong evidence to the contrary

[marcus_holmes]

There's a whole set of problems that people can work on. There's solutions for most of them. Some of those solutions aren't very good, but they're the best we have.

Fabrice Bellard has worked on a subset of the problems we have. He's created good solutions for them. But if he hadn't, we would have some other, lesser, solution for those problems. Like we do for the problems he hasn't worked on.

No, you can't expect comparable results. But you can expect some results.

[MontyCarloHall]

> We would have some other, lesser, solution for those problems. [...] No, you can't expect comparable results. But you can expect some results

Which is exactly my point: if you can’t expect comparable results, the person is not replaceable.

[espadrine]

Replaceability is a vain concept.

Simile: saying “your brain is replaceable”. Beyond the fact that the most likely context is a threat, it is a poor argument: while technically true, what would remain of me would not be meaningfully me. And the surgery is work that would be hard-pressed to generate the expected value, such that the only reason to do it, is either out of anger or as a consequence of irremediable damage.

Companies are stories. The decisions are made internally, but their meaning is narrated externally. If you change the protagonists, the story changes. The case of Uber’s self-driving car division is quite an example of that.

Does the change in Google’s story converge to a positive or a negative light?

[marcus_holmes]

> Does the change in Google’s story converge to a positive or a negative light?

Like all stories, the meaning and message of the story is formed in the mind of the reader, not the mind of the writer.

Every reader will make their own meaning, and fit that into their own story.

It's impossible to say whether this change results in a positive or negative effect: it will be positive for some, negative for some.

[Rochus]

>> It hurts to admit that we're not replaceable, but we are

The more people, the less the individual is valued. But that does not make the individual less valuable. Unfortunately, for a few years now, respect for the performance and qualifications of others has been declining more and more. This increases the illusion that everyone could be replaceable. Just ask your family if they see it that way in relation to you; the illusion of replaceability definitely ends here.

[throwaway29303]

  The job might not get done as well, or done in a different way than we'd do it, but it'll still get done.

If the job isn't done as well, then no one isn't as replaceable as you put it.

Excellence can't be replaced as easily. Maybe for certain kinds of jobs yes, but for all jobs? No. If that were the case then we'd be inundated with Einsteins, etc. And we aren't.

[marcus_holmes]

How many people have the opportunity to be Einstein?

How many people have the right brain, and the right interest, and write the right paper at the right time?

How many are starving in an underdeveloped country and no access to education, for that matter.

Einstein wasn't necessarily a unique genius standing at the pinnacle of an intellectual mountain. He was a beneficiary of survivor bias. We don't know how many other "Einsteins" there have been, or could have been, because we only tell success stories.

[throwaway29303]

  How many people have the opportunity to be Einstein?

Everyone who has access to (public) education, probably. And of those whomever has a relentless will for achievement. And/or is, by nature, curious about stuff. There's a reason why the lines between genius and mental illness get blurred sometimes. Remember John Nash, Jr.?

  How many people have the right brain, and the right interest, and write the right paper at the right time?

  How many are starving in an underdeveloped country and no access to education, for that matter.

I wouldn't know but I'd estimate millions.

  Einstein wasn't necessarily a unique genius standing at the pinnacle of an intellectual mountain.

Whether you like it or not, he was a genius, and unique in his own way (like everyone else is - even you), along with various other well-known peers of his time and lots of other people before them.

Now, obviously, they, as well as any "proper" scientist, are well aware that none of their work would mean anything if they didn't stand on the shoulders of giants. Science is a branching tree of giant people.

  He was a beneficiary of survivor bias. We don't know how many other "Einsteins" there have been, or could have been, because we only tell success stories.

Following your train of thought then no one's achievements - even those who you claim don't have the "right brain," "right interest," don't "write the right paper at the right time," are "starving in an underdeveloped country" and "without access to education" - would mean anything.

So, to get back to the subject: replaceability depends on the kind of job. It may be simpler to replace a fast food worker, but a Richard Feynman? an Albert Einstein? or <a name of a scientist whose name isn't publicly known but has made a difference in their field>? I doubt it. Those people made a difference in their respective fields and no one can take that from them. And I'd say the same if it were someone else from other countries, ethnicities, etc.

[auggierose]

That's maybe true for YOUR job. The more a job has a well-defined description, the truer your statement is.

[marcus_holmes]

My job title is "technical chap". I have no job description apart from "make all the things work". I could be replaced very easily ;)

[bartimus]

People are somewhere on the scale of greatness. At some point it becomes harder and harder to find replacements that will be able to get that job done. People are very capable to steer projects into failure.

[belval]

It's not, at least not in ML for a lab as prestigious as Google AI. They probably have several hundred researchers with excellent publications that would be willing to drop everything and get a FANG salary.

[sdevonoes]

Alright. 99.999% of us are replaceable.

[Rochus]

Also this is a management illusion. There is no evidence for this assumption. You don't even know the probability distribution. There is no reason to assume that the percentage is equally distributed across all firms or countries. And anyway, the article is about something else.

[Applejinx]

No, it's an axiom. It defines a way to make collective/collaborative entities hopefully bigger than the sum of their parts. I think of these things (corporations, groups, movements) as aggregate people, and that's very much what Google is about.

Google deals almost entirely with aggregate people: statistics, algorithms, collective behaviors, machine learning, implementation that's never about individuals but is about larger population trends. Aggregates, not special unique snowflakes.

As such this is not an illusion but an axiom. Google and entities like it (themselves humongous aggregate 'people') MAKE individuals replaceable, the better to be dealing with other entities like themselves. This is only going to accelerate the more they get to bring AI and machine learning into the mix… which by now is long established, nowhere more than at Google.

[Rochus]

> it's an axiom

An axiom which only applies to a certain percentage of cases?

[haakonhr]

Maybe an axiom as in being something we assume (because we can't/won't figure out whether it is actually true) this and base our decisions on this axiom.

[karmasimida]

Then what is your distribution then?

Those exceptional individuals are incredibly rare, like one or two in a generation. So you need to be Shannon-likes to be not replaced by some middle manager in a big corporate? Emm, if someone were this accomplished, why would they care about one employment? That is the wrong question to ask.

Truth is, if Google thought they were not replaceable, it would not fire them this easily.

[Rochus]

Much more people than you expect have at least one exceptional skill; from my observations I would say at least 20 to 30%; the more extraordinary skills per person, the rarer of course. And if indeed the human workforce were really such a generic, easily replaceable commodity, why do most companies, including Google, go to such great lengths in recruiting, with assessment centers and so on? And why are there so many unemployed IT specialists, for example in Germany, when at the same time the industry associations claim that jobs cannot be filled?

[ctrlp]

Brings to mind De Gaulle saying "the graveyards are filled with indispensable men."

[Rochus]

And yet so many people consider themselves important enough e.g. to post comments here. It just seems that it is always the others who are dispensable. For people who make it into management, this tendency even seems to intensify (or it was the prerequisite why they wanted to be in management).

[fractionalhare]

Okay, approximately all of us are replaceable. We can agree there is an epsilon of people who are clearly beyond others. However for almost all the work that has to get done, the actual bar is "can you write decent Python?", not "can you design and implement a novel algorithm for computing Pi?"

[Rochus]

> approximately all of us are replaceable

I guess it depends on the purpose for which we are all supposed to be replaceable. Nature probably doesn't care which individuals reproduce or are eaten, as long as the numbers are right. Human society with its elaborate specializations and long training periods has added a few more dimensions.

[avereveard]

Shannon built on Hartley, as much as Einstein built on Lorentz.

That's not to say these weren't great minds, but the concepts where in the air and the race to formalize them was on; most of the "second places" are today forgotten or their contribution diminished from the modern "winner takes all" mentality, but none of them existed in a vacuum.

The history of science is fraught with independent discoveries, from calculus to the the telephone, up and including mass energy relation and the basis that later became quantum mechanics.

[jessriedel]

If A and B made the same discovery independently, that is evidence that A was replaceable, but that C built on D is not evidence that C was replaceable.