[ExI] Rejecting Socrates

[Ben Zaiboc]

David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:

> Anders wrote:
> 
> >My own recipe for cultural immortality: find a new important
> >problem, make a stab at solving it. Even if you fail you will be a
> >seminal character.
> 
> I know several people who have solved important problems, including
> myself, who are completely unknown for having done so. The solution
> is used pervasively but the creator is forgotten.


Well, if I'm inclined to, I can claim to have invented digital music synthesis.  Except I didn't.  Someone else, at about the same time, had the same idea, but they actually did something about it, whereas I didn't.  Ideas and solutions seem to emerge at the right time, in many places simultaneously.  Certain things just become obvious to many people at a certain point in time.  I don't think it makes a great deal of sense to give all the credit to one person who happens to have been the one that was able to commercialise or popularise it.  We all stand on the shoulders of not giants, but of other people standing on the shoulders of other people, standing on...

If Einstein had never been born, would we have General Relativity now?  Of course we would.  It would be associated with someone else's name, that's all.  Ditto the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the Fairlight synthesiser and the lightbulb.

Ben Zaiboc