[rektide]

Not gonna watch a stupid youtube video- write a blog post- but it really depends a lot, primarily, on where in the product development lifecycle we are.

I tend to think there's a necessity of both. Some big bold new ideas have to be there, a real reassessmemt that is often personal, is from brilliant blinding jncut insight. But for that idea to really make it's way out we need the more prosaic simple grind that a thick slow wide viewed multi-perspectives that only a diverse set of views can test & sound out & explore to fruition.

[dan-gittik]

Thanks for the contribution, and the assumption that one afterthought by you would probably be more valuable than a stupid video. If you'd actually watch it, you'll see it addresses exactly what you said, and why it's wrong: the good parts come from collaboration, happen simultaneously in different places by different people, and the "success" you see certain "brilliant" people achieving is mostly in stomping out the competition for an idea that was never really theirs (not to belittle them or anything, simply because almost all of it relies on accumulating human knowledge). And if you think competition is the only way, there's a stupid video about that as well.

Essays are coming, by the way, they just require some formatting and references. Believe it or not, many people prefer to see a person talk to them than to skin through long texts on the internet.

[rektide]

I look forward to reading something structured, that we can argue with better than you-say/I-say.

> the good parts come from collaboration, happen simultaneously in different places by different people

Particularly looking to see what arguments back this claim. Again, not interested in spending 25 minutes milking it out of this video. But my apologies for calling it stupid. That was uncalled for & based only on my personal preference of text over video/audio argumentation.

I was pretty polarizing last night. I can think of a number of anecdotes as counter-example to my own claim, where a rough general idea, not anything particularly insightful, was slowly worked by the group into excellence. But I also still think there's a ton of ideas that spring from the mind that change things radically, that reshape the scene, and these are not community wins.

All ideas ultimately must make it through the long gauntlet of development & refinement, which is typically more collective. Although we have counterexamples here too: Jobs, as the Chief "No" officer, with unrelenting tastes where most companies would accept what they'd done.

I guess mostly I think it's a futile attempt to argue one way or the other. It really depends. I think we overrate the likelihood/impact/probability of great men, but on the other hand, I absolutely think some individuals have times & places & roles & really are responsible for vast things. I've seen so many small examples where an individual's push for excellence makes such a significant difference in the world, and to try to argue definitively that only the collective matters seems bunk. I think we have to start by admitting a spectrum, & rejecting absolutes.

[dan-gittik]

Until there's something more refined, you're welcome to read it here, if you'd like (it's actually quite structured and dense to begin with, but I understand the aversion to video): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j1tWbud0srE8YJHFAqtgdGNk...

Would love to hear your thoughts, since it does address a lot of the things you talk about.

[eternityforest]

People usually forget the second part. Innovation by itself usually has no real application. Products people actually want usually only have a few innovative elements added per year, paired with millions of lines of utterly boring code.

[dan-gittik]

How can you possibly claim something like that? Which innovation, from fire, gardening and clay, to algebra, vaccines and the internet, had no real application in and of itself? It's only recently that we've started commodifying everything in "products"; there are other ways to live and do things.

I generally feel that people here comment without checking out the source. Could it be the case? And if so, isn't it a bit of a weird thing to do? Like, are we here to share and discuss useful information, or throw around general opinions about abstract subjects?

[eternityforest]

There were, in the distant past, more inventions with immediate uses than today, but most of them also had some pretty horrendous effects that took generations to refine.

I wouldn't be surprised if the transition to farming and the use of fire and all the rest had lots of things we would prefer to avoid if we had present day values and information.

Some things had some immediate use but nowhere near what they have now. The internet was an amazing innovation. But it would just be some military research lab experiments without users, and most webmasters just followed a "How to set up apache" tutorial. Some created something new via their content. Others told stories grounded in heavy academic research.

Drugs and medical products have killed amazing numbers of people, and require massive amounts of tests and calculations to show safety. We even STILL get it wrong sometimes, which means we probably need even more boring tedious data analysis, and probably eventually AI support for doctors.

My favorite example is the industrial revolution. It hurt a lot of people, made a lot of pollution, and there's not much from that era I'd want to use. But over time, the things they invented were refined and recombined, along with some new stuff too, into things that are hundreds of times cheaper, lighter, and smaller.

Light bulbs had a lot of uses. They also were used to mess with work schedules and add more hours. They used a ton of energy. We fixed that with automation and a better understanding of benefits of shorter hours, along with tech like LEDs.

So many inventions seem to initially be used to create new needs that didn't exist before, and add new demands on people, and to make use of new resources that were originally idle for things that we were mostly fine without. Eventually they get refined into something that doesn't really impose any extra burden, and then finally they can be refined to something that minimizes pollution. Eventually we can even replace them entirely with newer tech that has the same benefits.

I can't argue with the problem of people not really reading the article though. Sometimes it seema like 99% of threads on all sites are tangentially related philosophy discussions that only loosely referenced the original article.

[dan-gittik]

We actually have a video about very similar topics, would love to hear your thoughts about it (I feel comfortable sharing it since everything we're doing is actively anti-commercial and not about us at all, so it's not so much self promotion as looking for feedback): https://studio.youtube.com/video/Z44MoKURvXw/edit?c=UCs1NsN7...

If you also prefer text, I can link a Google doc.