The article was arguing against individualistic innovation through disruption, in favour of a collectivist innovation through collaboration. So Elizabeth Holmes was the perfect example to feed into that argument.
I had to swipe back and check the comments so unless their intention is to filter for people who already think all three are evil it's a huge distraction. I think it was a poor choice for the author because Musk and Bezos might under-deliver or deliver late sometimes, but they are not outright convicted frauds with a tendency to lie pathologically, and using that name kind of poisons the well that Bezos and Musk are in no? Holmes can't really be considered an innovator or inventor of any kind.
> Even worse, all three built large companies. Companies being collections of people, that is collectivist.
No disrespect but this is the sort of argument one makes when they’re trying to “win on a technicality” rather than actually convince anyone of their perspective.
It seems to me that if an ant is ripped apart limb from limb after being found to be a part of a different ant colony this is not the perfect feed for an argument that ant colonies ought to have pheromones which never evaporate. The actual perfect argument would be proving that the word is stationary such that all past pheromone trails are still highly informative of the true utilities. Worse is that I find the entire structure to be suspect - so what if an at lays a new trail - this is not less collectivist for all that an individual ant laid it. The species was social and the nature of the collectivism is largely a product of the individual pheromone trails being interacted with locally.
I like this model because ants exhibit much of the mathematical structure of a reinforcement learning solution to the explore exploit dynamic in a non-stationary environment, but are simple enough that I can play the rollout in my head in real space and see the consequences.
> “If You Want To Run Fast, Run Alone. If You Want To Run Far, Run Together.”
With all dichotomies like this, we’re never actually aiming for the extremes of far or fast but somewhere in between. There must be some ants finding new trails and there must be most ants travelling them. A hybrid approach is always the goal. Arguments for purity are fantasy, but can be fun.
Could be from The Fountainhead. As an article written by Ellsworth Toohey.
It’s also a game of mere words. The author claims that Tesla, the company, was about “disruption“. Then, he contrasts this to true innovation, which, according to the author, is collective in nature. This is already a questionable claim (Lilienthal was laughed at when he built his first flying machines). But it also completely misses the purpose of the founding of Tesla. Which is the acceleration of the advent of sustainable energy consumption and production. How much more focused on the good of humanity as a collective can you get? (Let’s not even talk about SpaceX.)
That the author lists Elon Musk in the same sentence as Elizabeth Holmes, and does so without any qualification, to me, is testament to the fact that the author isn’t really seeking to understand anything and is merely going for clicks. Which is a pity, because the question of vanishing trust in institutions would have been a worthwhile topic.
Innovation is inherently disruptive - it changes the way the world runs.
Now that's not to say you need disruption to be successful (Buffett seems to have gotten to where he is by being extremely canny and fastidious), or that buzz-wordy disruption leads to innovation (and not just badly spent VC money).
> They are iconoclasts who break with tradition and replace old rules with new ones of their own making — mold-breaking innovators such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Elizabeth Holmes, who succeed precisely because they refuse to follow convention.
Elizabeth Holes was successful? At what?
I think they were successful because they build companies that were successful.
> They’re a way of reminding everyone of who he is — that his capacity to transgress is the measure of his capacity to innovate profitably.
> Why has the idea that the best innovators are disruptive gained such traction over the past decade or so
I don't understand this, innovators were always disruptive. Usually its just not well document because it might be within a company and to the outside looks like incremental change.
> the end of the Cold War broke those connections.
Long before the Cold War ended, Ford/GM, IBM were long past their innovative glory days. Ford/GM were being crushed by Japan. And in other news, things like Vietnam had already broken much of that as well, if it ever existed.
> In the United States, about three-fourths of postsecondary faculty members are white.
This article seems to put a lot in racial terms. But it seems to me that the people who are most anti-science are bunch of white right wing people. They should be happy all those white professors are there and believe them.
Seems to me race really fails as an explanation here. Having more diverse professors will hardly get the alt-right and science back together. And for that matter far left wing considers the whole concept of race as a capitlaist distraction from class war.
The reality is that for the most part people never really believed these expert in a deep way, there was just very little way people could make that clear. Today every group/organization is pushing its own narrative of the world. In the past you needed a real ground movement to do that, the communists could do it (partly with state support) but other groups couldn't really do it.
Bottom-up Religious movements also clearly indicate this to me. These movement believe the most random absurd nonsense that is clearly not even anti-science but anti-basic reality and basic logic and still the often find huge amounts of support. And given my study of history, such movement are common all threw history.
> Innovation needs to come out of such communities, rather than imposed on them.
That is such a narrow demand. Innovations come from a place or company. There are 100000s of communities that could profit from GMO and in no future will every community ever figure out its own science and technology.
Other nations always had a difficult time to adopt technology and there was often debate, but most of the time technology won. As Stephan Kotkin says, modernisation is not a cultural but a geo-political process. Technology is adopted by other government and forced on their communities if they want them or not, because if they don't, their country will fall behind.
It's unfortunate that the author mentions Elizabeth Holmes in the same sentence as Musk and Bezos.
Never mind that, Tesla is more revered than Edison because Edison had an army of men [1] working for him and often took credit for their work. Afaik, Tesla invented on his own from the fruits of his amazing brain.
[1] Even Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous was offered a job by Edison:
"It also led to his first brush with fame when he was featured in a New York Times article discussing a test given by Thomas Edison to prospective employees. Bill Wilson was one of the few applicants to be offered a position with Edison, but for reasons known only to Wilson he opted against taking it"
Musk didn't even create Tesla. Or PayPal. Or SpaceX. He just dumped daddy's apartheid-diamond-mine money into them, and then sued the founders to get an injunction against the founders being able to claim that they were the founders instead of Musk.
Edison is a spot-on reference point for Musk.
(Okay, PayPal actually bailed him out, so I guess he didn't put money into them, they put money into him).
Zip2 was founded by him. PayPal was a merger of two companies doing the same thing, Musk founded one of them. SpaceX was founded by Musk.
Tesla was fully financed by Musk and before Musk took over as CEO Tesla was essentially a disaster that was heading straight into the trash heap. He didn't found Tesla and wasn't CEO during the time when Tesla did really, really badly and Tesla blew around 80M he gave them. He then stepped in as CEO invest more of his own money and turned Tesla from a literal trash-fire into an amazing success story. So he took over a trash-fire and turned it into a success, that is harder to do then found a new company.
And all this apartheid-diamond-mine is so much nonsense. His father was a successful engineer, his family was pretty wealthy sure, but people act like his father was the CEO of GE and his mother was president of Harvard business school. And of course he had a really bad relationship with his father and his father cut him off when he went to Canada.
Pretending its not a lot to overcome because his family was upper middle class is just an insane bar for earning credit. Like, ok, so you have to be a crack baby found in a trashcan outside of church in the congo, otherwise nothing you do is worth anything.
But I guess he is a billionaire, so we just need to hate him. And Edison btw was also a pretty damn smart guy. Not investing in Tesla idiotic scheme was actually the correct thing to do, as we all know, there are no towers shooting electricity threw the earth.