I always find it interesting when a contemporary argument boils down to old ones. (This isn't a criticism). Your argument against the Great Man Theory is best expressed in War and Peace, where Tolstoy goes on long discussions on the imaginary significance of great men, including obviously Napoleon. Or, as Isaiah Berlin says in the "Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life: ...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors…
This seems like an overly-complex derivation of Isaiah Berlin's concept of The Hedgehog and the Fox: Berlin...divides writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante Alighieri, Blaise Pascal, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle,…
This seems like a good spot to link to one of my favorite essays on the theme you've raised here - the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (of the hedgehog and the fox fame) on "The Concept of Scientific History." (Short version: he argues that there's no such thing). By the way, I'm happy to see such an interesting discussion of my favorite historical topic on HN - thanks. http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf
1. It is very interesting to note that Freeman Dyson considers Von Neumann to be a frog rather than a bird. Considering Neumann's wide ranging, and prodigious work, I always thought of him as a superman who could survey the entire landscape of mathematics. Dyson does give some persuasive reasons why this may not be true. 2. Dyson reminds me of Isaiah Berlin's THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX essay: https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/crag/files/2016/06/the_hedgeh...
i appreciate the sentiment to a certain extent - its not going away, skate to where the puck is if you care to do so. but the writing is repetitive and theres an entire repeated paragraph (bullet to paragraph form). there are also lots of things to be worried about even for the most seasoned individuals in terms of half decade increments conservatively. assuming large parts of swe become commoditized in the form of paying a handful of frontier model providers more and more of the share of what was once swe wages, the high end is what survives. high context fox-like (a la terrence tao's foxes…
> high context fox-like (a la terrence tao's foxes and hedgehogs) Pedantically, I think you mean Isaiah Berlin's foxes and hedgehogs[0]. > assuming we dont have some incredibly unlikely massive mobilization towards post-work post-scarcity thinking with active social safety nets The problem being that we're not actually heading toward post-work or post-scarcity. We're heading towards post-knowledge-work. Any chance of UBI or similar will be summarily shot down by the Epstein class, most likely by using their ownership of 90+% of the media to drive a class war between the ascendant blue…
Some of the comments make me remind of an Isaiah Berlin’s best known essay in which he distinguishes between two archetypes: the hedgehog and the fox. “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows but one.” To paraphrase him in his 1953 essay— The Hedgehog and the Fox: "There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'…[T]aken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in…
This is a discussion that always happens, in just about every context. It also depends massively on perspective. Take somebody who codes java and haskell, does database admin and web design, and hacks the linux Kernel: I'd call her a generalist. But from a wider perspective she might be a specialist: concentrating on hacking rather than literature, or business, or physics. It's all relative. [Incidentally, I'll mention that Isaiah Berlin's essay 'the hedgehog and the fox' is a classic of the 'generalists vs. specialists' genre, applying the division to writers and philosophers. I'm not a…
I posted a link to this in a comment earlier today [0] but after reading it over again I thought it might merit a standalone HN post. Berlin is probably most famous today for his short book "The Hedgehog and the Fox" but his essays are really spectacular examples of the form in my opinion - intellectually demanding but always concrete and straightforward; learned but not pretentious. He's arguing here that historical reasoning is basically a form of advanced common sense rather than something which can be founded on scientific principles; there's also a digression about "electronic brains"…
There is an Isaiah Berlin essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox. In it he divides artists/philosophers into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. It is inspired by a fragment of ancient Greek poetry which reads, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." In other words, some great thinkers looked at the world through the lens of one big idea, and others can't be easily reduced. Two major caveats. The first is that Berlin never wanted the essay to be taken all that seriously. To him, it was an intellectually parlor game. But if TvTropes is any indication, people are…