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.