
Lone Geniuses Are Overrated - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/lone-geniuses-are-overrated/381340/
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Hermel
The article itself does not seem to support the headline. It is about lots of
individual geniuses, but not about whether they are overrated or not. In fact,
the words "overrated" and "lone" do not even appear in the whole article,
except for the title. "Genius" appears once.

~~~
jasode
The headline is Jeffrey Goldberg's (provocative) restatement of Walter
Isaacson's themes in the book (and also Walter's answers from the interview at
the end of the article). I assume the journalist took liberties to write "lone
geniuses are overrated" because Isaacson highlighted:

1) teams

2) lesser known individuals who didn't have celebrity status of Steve Jobs,
Bill Gates, etc

I guess one would have to read the entire book instead of an excerpt to judge
if the journalist's " _lone geniuses overrated_ " is a fair TLDR of Isaacson's
book.

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robmccoll
Lone geniuses or simply those with the best marketing and ability to exploit
the efforts of others and the general technology landscape? I guess you could
argue that many of these innovators are not technical geniuses but in fact
business geniuses operating in technology.

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hawkice
So, the obvious question is, overrated by whom?

Certainly not Isaacson, that's the whole point of the article. But us, the
reader? I would think not, the hypermajority of the progress we see is clearly
the result of teams. Sole founders of no-employee companies are slightly
unusual, but no where near the extremely unusual sight of a purely independent
solo researcher. Governments, industry and research, all dominated by group
work.

A lot of people are saying the title is clickbait. I certainly agree it fails
to even allege Lone Geniuses are Overrated -- and so it massively fails to
live up to it's promise.

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thewarrior
Why clickbait titles are Overrated.

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tim333
A shorter article on the same topic (900 words vs 3000 odd)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewcave/2014/10/13/whats-
best...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewcave/2014/10/13/whats-best-
individual-or-team-leadership-lessons-from-intel-microsoft-apple-and-google-
in-walter-isaacsons-new-book/)

tl;dr “Throughout history, the best leadership has come from teams that that
combined people who had complementary talents”

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david927
In answer to, "Is it possible that the U.S. could cease being the world leader
in digital innovation?" Isaacson is optimistic and I think rightly so.

But the important question is, "Could the U.S. cease being the world leader in
digital _invention_?"

All these people, save Jobs, were about invention, not innovation. And they're
not being replaced -- at least not in the US, not in Silicon Valley.

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erikb
I've read about 80% of the first page and scrolled the rest of it. Nowhere it
seemed as if anything in the article talks about lone geniuses being
overrated. Why choose such a title?

~~~
nanoscopic
100 times this. I excitedly read the article expecting a clear concise
explanation ( albeit one with bad premises ) explaining how lone geniuses only
accomplish things through others, and that they can be done without. The
article fails to deliver on this title entirely.

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contingencies
Single page version
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/lone-g...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/lone-
geniuses-are-overrated/381340/?single_page=true)

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emt
It has been said, time and time again, that no great man ever got there alone.

~~~
computerjunkie
Agreed, [1]Issac Newton quote always reminds me about this.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants)

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godzilla82
> _One of the surprising features of Isaacson’s latest book, coming, as it
> does, after his biography of Steve Jobs—who is generally, though not
> entirely correctly, understood to be the model of the radical (and
> congenitally irascible) American —is that it is a paean to cooperation, to
> the idea of force-multiplication through collective effort and, in
> particular, to the transformative power of the diamond triangle of industry,
> academia and government._

I read the article till I encountered this. I guess some people may be able to
parse this in one pass. So just wanted to ask: does anyone feel any enjoyment
when he/she encounters such a statement?

~~~
cantrevealname
> Does anyone feel any enjoyment when he/she encounters such a statement?

It's impossible to read in a leisurely manner for me as well. But I do have
good news: Far fewer writers do this than in the past.

Here's a sentence from the first page of "David Copperfield" by Charles
Dickens:

 _In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the
nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively
interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming
personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and
secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts
inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either
gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night._

A wordy tedious style was common in the past -- at least from what I've read.
I think that most people write way more clearly and simply these days than
they did 100-200 years ago. This applies to news reports, novels,
advertisements, and even academic papers.

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evgen
It is not that modern writing is more clear or in any way better than the
styles of the past, it is more often the case that the audience for a modern
author is a barely educated simpleton who has a hard time keeping track of a
sentence with more than one subordinate clause. The problem is not with
Dickens...

~~~
jerf
"Barely educated simpleton" is unnecessarily harsh. Historically speaking,
living in an era with majority literacy is unusual (so as to dodge questions
about the "true" level of modern literacy), as is living in an era with large
numbers of people with the free time to read anything.

It is true that Dickens could assume a somewhat higher level of IQ in his
readers of the time than we can today in books targeted for the "average"
reader, but I think most of us would consider that an unfortunate thing if we
really thought about it, rather than a virtue of the age.

If you want challenging books, there's no shortage of them today. You just
need to know where to look.

~~~
Swizec
Also, distraction. It doesn't matter how smart your readers are, if they only
read your books 5 minutes at a time while on the shitter, you have better
written simply.

