| > Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do They objectively wouldnt. The science and engineering history of late 19th century is filled with people like Brin and Page getting 'MBAified' out of their inventions. Tesla and Westinghouse is a good example of such stories. > Christopher Coloumbus A genocidal profiteer is the last person who you would want to invoke as an example of such people. He didnt invent or innovate anything, he didnt want to change anything, he didnt bring about any new paradigm. > because of less risks being taken Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species (likely more than one) by adopting them gradually through observation from nature and learning from each other. Likewise agriculture. If anything, risk-taking was not something that early human ancestors or their close relatives would risk themselves. > The only difference between my stance and yours is that you only analyze the last 10 years and identify a bogeyman in the MBAs Sorry, but its otherwise. Thinking that fire or wheel were invented by singular people shows the lack of insight into science of history, leaving aside the history of this species. |
Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.
Innovation happens when risks are taken (eg. Montgolfier brothers, Wright Brothers, the guy who discovered testosterone by self injected blood taken from the testicular veins of horses...) and given that risk and confidence are a state of mind much less a business practice, you cannot conflate it just to science and technology but said risk and confidence will be visible all around society. So wars, genocides, violence and genearlly stuff considered bad.
The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior. Or as kids say: 'Less fucking around, means less finding out'
Standard deviation of human behavior goes both ways, people rejoice that we eliminated the negatives but we have also eliminated the positives. No Einsteins without Hitlers, no Archimedes without Alexanders etc.
So even if the guy who personally discovered fire or the wheel didn't take risks personally (I doubt it) he operated in an environment where the standard deviation of human behavior was much larger. For sure there were people jumping off trees with wooden wings, wars, genocides, much more violence. And that is statistically enough to make sure that at least one unit in the sample stumbles into something great like fire or the wheel.