[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.

[marcus_holmes]

I think we're violently agreeing then, as I said "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"