This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).
The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.
Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.
> People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion.
If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them.
In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.
I like live music. I've seen plenty of famous bands play before.
But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware).
I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.
We had once an awesome unknown band from Belgium coming to play in our local club. I was the only person that came to the concert. For an hour they didn't start to wait for more listeners and they invited me to their table. No one showed up so they played for me and my brother whom I have summoned in the meantime. The best concert I have ever attended.
Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month
There’s an incredible amount of luck involved in making it big in the arts. Some of it is talent. Some of it is hard work. But a lot is luck. Almost certainly compared to professions where reasonable competence and work mostly guarantee a decent living.
I want to believe that but I've never seen any compelling concrete examples. Got any music that's way better than its popularity/recognition would indicate?
I gotta say expected the usual type of "good musicians that can't catch a break," talented but can't write a song with any sincerity or personality. Instead I loved all three! I regret my cynicism and I'm glad I took a listen. I went and bought a couple albums on bandcamp. Thanks!
There are a number of singer/songwriters/folk who I’ve really liked who were pretty obscure like Heather Alexander, Kathy Mar, etc. may not be to your taste but I’ve liked and certainly not well known.
it depends entirely on your taste but there are some genres that actively avoid broad recognition which include some of my favorite bands (many metal and punk subgenres for example).
My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain
invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.
Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the
Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the
radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band
name or whatever.
I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX
plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters,
and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.
So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of
our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who
design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public
information. They're hardly household names.
If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has
taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive
success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.
And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire
lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing
but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage
computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a
dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a
narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps
the show running.
We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom
part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often
whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of
this blindside.
As someone who has played a fair amount of music with different people in different places, and who has attended quite a few odd little gigs and band practices and playing-in-your-friend's-house type things, as well as other types of mad musical moments, this is to be expected.
The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.
The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.
The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.
I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.
It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.
Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.
Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.
What you are talking about is also the difference between "spectator sports" and playing sports. (Or, for more poignancy, spectator vs participatory sex.)
There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... I feel like the "mid-tier creative who's famous on socials" phenomenon is similar, although I couldn't exactly say how.
> There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice...
That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
I learned recently that Tony Robbins set out to be a motivational speaker in his teens. I was connected to someone on LinkedIn who listed himself as a "thought leader" one year into his career!
How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt?
But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.
The comments consistently describe the victory of self-promotion over real greatness. I had a strange thought: what if that applies to da Vinci too, and we don't know who the real greats of the Renaissance are. You might say, "What about the Mona Lisa?" It turns out that the Mona Lisa wasn't especially famous until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911.
At least in my personal experience, the combination of doing interesting things and talking about them in a somewhat public setting is something almost all really successful people do, and what few don't have a friend who is a hype man for them.
While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not.
Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.
I don't see it as particularly social media related. That's just the cheapest way to get attention these days. I recall Benjamin Franklin famously pushing paper around town in a wheelbarrow to seem like a hard working young printer:
> I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom
He went out of his way to get positive attention, and it worked.
The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) came out in the same year my dad was born. But my parents still read it to me.
I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
> This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).
Attention comes mainly from understanding. And all people are in the mid to low-tier of understanding things outside their own specialization, and too often even within their own specialization.
So to understand something great, you have to have enough insight into that area to see the greatness. And on the other side, there is also the false perception of thinking something is great, while you are just too low in your understanding, to see why it's just mid. Isn't this also basically what Dunning-Kruger-effect is about?
This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria.
I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
Honestly some of the best content I have been seeing is MIT application videos (both accepted and rejected), it is high school level but it leads to a lot of interesting discussions
As a designer, I know some absolutely amazing artists who just hunker down and produce phenomenal art/designs and I am not fluffing here. As a climber, I also know of climbers who are at the best in the world level, but don’t post sends on IG or muck about in socially promoting themselves. It’s great to know that there are extremely talented people doing their thing and it’s not driven by leaderboards or social clout.
I had a similar train of thought like the author has, but it happened while I was playing Expedition 33, which is a game made by former Ubisoft developers who decided to go indie, and made something that is really cool.
It made me realize that there's an innumerable amount of talented people out there, who are most definitely capable enough or willing to grow enough, that can produce something that makes you think that Ubisoft could have made it, because those people were always right there!
And if they weren't motivated enough to risk it all, because you're only starting from a mere idea, we would never have seen the fruits of their labor.
I'm not claiming that they're comparable with the greatest artists of our time but, the probability of someone out there becoming great will be silenced and squashed before it even has a chance to show up, either because they must conform to the job market to survive day to day, or because of office politics, or out of their own temperament avoiding risks. Especially if that risk is unemployment and homelessness.
As a fan of John Carmack, for example, I have to wonder if he would've ever hit the status he achieved if Doom wasn't this fun to play, or if he kept shipping monthly video games by mail instead. I'm not talking about whether he would be this intelligent or not, but whether he would be known.
This is well written. It also seems to describe society at large, especially our current society. So many things work so well, they become invisible. After time, people dont even realize how much is working behind the scenes to make everything work well and they assume we dont need those things.
One of the reasons I love listening to 99% Invisible podcast[1]. Not just a great designer is unknown, but the hallmark of a great design is that its almost invisible unless you look for it.
I read an interesting thread about this in relation to game dev. Development is ugly, so a lot of audience building and investor potential comes from creating visually appealing gameplay demos and mechanics. Often they are made separate from the core of the game. All that time spent making engaging content ends up compromising the development process and turning it into more of a show reel, rather than a fully functioning holistic game.
That is fine if you're doing it for yourself, but rather unhelpful if you hope to make a living out of doing the thing. The people I know who make a living off their art are those who sink a lot of time into selling their art (and themselves). Those who sit and home and just make (often much better) art languish in obscurity.
Uhh... having a LinkedIn takes like 10 minutes spent once. For most industries it's a pretty obvious investment to make yourself reachable by anyone who might be looking for you and to have an added data point of legitimacy (as in simply "is this a real human being emailing me")
In fact, part of the reason for the current cacophony is that everyone has discovered this fact. Better to invest your time being seen than being good.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Instead of our attention being taken up by creatives who are mostly competent, it is taken up by everyone who wants to short circuit the system. (This would be even more interesting if I could find that article that suggests our taste in music is actually created by exposure.)
There used to be editors of various sorts, whether it be in writing, art, or music, who would be the arbiters of taste. You could indeed take issue with who they decided to elevate, but they definitely provided a useful function.
They probably did recognize diamonds in the rough. I’ll also say that the one time I did a book through a publisher it was because I happened to be seated next to the managing director and followed up with the acquisitions editor over coffee in London. Would probably never have happened had I sent in a proposal cold. Didn’t make me much money but was a nice addition to the resume.
I love this line in the post: "The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible."
There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.
It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.
This was my experience in the "maker movement" in the 2010s. You may know me from OpenRov, RobotsAnywhere/CellBots, and the NAVCOM AI autopilot. But you probably don't.
Who got attention? People who spent 20% of their time making and 80% self-promoting.
People just don't know the difference between popularity and merit. Similarly, they don't know the difference between someone who is successful or good at what they do versus one who makes a lot of money.
Butler's piece is spot on. It reminds me of those core open-source tools we all depend on daily but rarely think about the people behind them. Like, who actually knows the name of the person who maintains requests in Python? Probably very few, yet their work is fundamental. That quiet contribution feels like the real definition of impactful design, way beyond the noise of social media.
I’ll go a step further. If someone is well known it’s more likely than not that they’re a charlatan. Not always of course. But if someone gives 6+ conference talks a year it’s like 80%+ chance they’re a dingleberry.
The world is full of amazingly talented and hard working people. Almost all of them are not on social media.
This is why I hate the end of project awards. Someone always get great credit for staying late to save the project - but if they had done their job right in the first place the project wouldn't have needed saving.
This is a life fact, I realized this early on. I grew up in part of India which is close to the famous Ajanta caves. There are several local artists there, who literally carve a stone into an absolutely beautiful images of Buddha. A lot of times the tools they used were so crude, imagine what they would do if they had access to modern tools. Similarly, when we look at some of the most beautiful ancient artifacts we can hardly say with confidence who actually built them and whether they were truly the greatest of their times. Personally, I find this very satisfying, there is no need of recognition, all one needs is to enjoy what they do.
if I'm understanding correctly the implications of Emily Noether's work, its an absolute travesty that she isn't famous in the same breath as Einstein and Feynman. Yet this video was the first time I had even heard of her.
There are many great scientists you've never heard about. Soviet side of the world was almost as big as western. Yet they got only a very few nobel prices. It was absurd when western derivative got, but not the original work.
Do you have any recommendations for where we could read more about the soviet originals/western derivatives? I’ve never heard that before (born after the collapse) and that sounds like a fascinating story.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/73052/technomagica-progres... - it is a fiction story so it might or might not be to your taste. The story is a soviet (or just after the fall) scientists it reborn in a fantasy/magic world - like most such stories there is constant comparisons to the old world, but the old world is the soviet one not the western one. It probably isn't a comprehensive list, but it is a good overview of who the soviets saw as important.
Einstein's discovery explained a centuries old mystery that people, including every major mind of the time, were completely and fundamentally on the wrong track towards. All without being able to find any academic position that would have him - he was working as a low ranking patent inspector at the time. And that discovery completely reshaped physics, which many at the time thought had been mostly 'solved' and was down to a measuring game.
I think a parallel would be if some random guy, outside of academia, completely and cleanly solved the dark energy/matter mystery in his spare time, with a revolutionary way of thinking, and it completely reshaped our understanding of not only the cosmos but of physics itself.
Becoming well known for advanced works in science requires a once in many centuries type level of achievement - which is what Einstein was. Feynman is a great example of this. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of all time and made many important contributions to science, yet he would probably be relatively unknown if not for his excessive public outreach and his exceptional ability to explain complex concepts in an extremely intuitive and clear fashion. A talent which he put to extensive use.
Noether was one of a kind communicator and scientist and she should be more widely known because she is a role model for everyone.
Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia".
Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model.
Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope.
I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things.
She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be.
You are mistaken on Einstein's past. He went from taking a 4 year teaching program to searching for an academic position for [literally] years. Nobody wanted him. He'd independently published one paper that he himself would describe was rubbish, and that was the extent of his academic experience. Even with his position at the patent office - he only managed to get that job through a friend, and even there was passed up for promotion due to apparent lack of competence. If you were to rank people who were likely to influence, let alone revolutionize science, he absolutely would not have been on the list.
And you can't really compare Einstein's achievement to anybody else, literally. The reason is not even because of the science itself, which really isn't that complex in hindsight, but a mixture of him solving such a pressing question that nobody else had "seen" as a possibility, alongside with its impact expanding far outside the academic world. Before Einstein our understanding of the universe was one of relative normality. He made it clear that the universe is unimaginably weird.
I do think the comparison with dark energy/matter is appropriate. Imagine a complete unknown, outside of academia, came out with something that not only completely cleanly explained these mysteries, but did so in a way that essentially required discarding everything we thought we knew about the universe. And by we I don't mean some people working in an abstract esoteric field that 99.999% of people have no idea even exists, but humanity. That is literally the level of what Einstein achieved, and it may not even be possible again - because it's sort of a 'right time, right place' type combination.
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And this gets back to the point. Science, so far as persisting in the public mind, isn't about pushing some esoteric field forward, but about advancing humanity. If Einstein instead lived today, it's entirely possible he'd be just another competent academic making some advances, mostly of academic value, in some abstract and esoteric field. And people in 100 years would be none the wiser he even existed. The only way to escape this fate is to engage extensively in outreach. E.g. - Carl Sagan lives on not because of his achievements, but because of his public outreach. To a lesser degree the same is true of Feynman.
I don't think this is at all true. The reason you've heard of Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace is precisely because they're women. No man who achieved similar levels of significant work is remembered outside of some niche publications.
> subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things
It just seems unlikely that Noether has several times done what Newton and Einstein did and she's so unknown. Why do I know about much less prolific women and not her, if sexism is the actual reason, and not just a thought-terminating word?
Could it be that her work in pure, abstract mathematics, while important and foundational for some fields, remains too unrelatable for a wide audience?
Maybe the same could be argued for Einstein's work, but knowledgeable people, recognizing its importance, have found ways of explaining it in a relatable way... ?
It's easy. You just compare your thing to everything similar and keep at it until you are convinced yours is miles ahead. Other opinions are irrelevant.
I think that greatness of mind needs to be coupled with ambition, a certain level of arrogance and self-absorbtion, and a personality that doesn't make you a pariah.
I suspect that combinations like that, are, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.
Many great talents probably couldn't be arsed to play the rat race game, and keep their domain humble, or they piss off other people so much, that they never get a break.
It certainly can be (I'm obviously not the expert on the traits), but arrogance (think Steve Jobs) means that there's less self-doubt, and less openness to outside counsel, which is normally a Very Bad Thing, but, if your own counsel [vision?] is very good, then maybe not so bad.
In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.
Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.
I worked for a CEO once and I really disagreed with a decision—admittedly probably too late to take another path. He talked about it with me. Obviously neither was going to change the other’s mind. So we agreed to disagree and moved on.
Sounds like a good manager. It's the manager's decision, but also, their Accountability.
One thing that I've learned, over the years, is that folks don't take me seriously. I'm pretty sure that it's my affect. I come across as a bit "goofy," and open, which is often interpreted as "naive," or "stupid." Used to really bug me, but I've learned to deal with it.
Anyway, I'm pretty good at "playing the tape through to the end," and anticipating long-term ramifications. These are often unwelcome observations, in the planning phase of things.
I've learned to start quietly preparing remediations, for when the wheels inevitably come off. I guess that it's nice to be a "hero of the day," but it would have been even better, if we hadn't gotten to this point in the first place. Remediation is not as good as Prevention or Mitigation.
Yeah, he was basically the guy who hired me. They had been small clients in the past and we liked each other. Part of me was saying what’s done is done but I felt I had to give it a shot so I emailed him and we had a cordial phone call. Which is more than a lot of CEOs of moderately large companies would do. And it says a lot about the company culture that I never felt I was risking being fired.
> And it says a lot about the company culture that I never felt I was risking being fired.
Yes. I feel that insecure upper managers are a pox on the tech industry (probably other industries, as well). They create a really toxic culture.
I used to work for a Japanese company. My manager didn't speak English, and was 7,000 miles away, but was willing to listen to me. However, I had to deal with the way my interaction developed. Sometimes, the Japanese can be quite ... strident ... when they feel as if they are not being approached with respect.
They had a consensus-based style, which welcomed input from all levels, but would also be pretty brutal, to bad input.
Helped me to develop a habit of making sure all my ducks were in a row, before opening my mouth.
Relationships also matter. I worked directly for people who really feared this senior person for reasons I never really understood. But I knew how far I could push things and tell the exec they were just wrong. Which is probably one of the reasons they hired me. To be honest, I was probably in a position where if I pushed a bit too far I’d probably have been ok.
There is a very fine line between all of these. When you look at famous people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk or Gates they have all these attributes. Another example would be Michael Jordan in basketball or Michael Schumacher in racing.
about the lack of AppleTV marketing support for one of its shows, called La Maison).
That opens an interesting discussion: the role of their influencers. Their choices can either bless or curse anyone’s work just by manipulating the word of mouth.
works for SWEs too - I've had the pleasure working with a bunch of amazing SWEs in my almost 3 decades in the industry, 9 out of top 10 if I rank them do not have a Github account or blog or post sht on "X" or wherever... Just do amazing sht at work and go home to their families :)
Absolutely. And there are plenty of occupations where even a Michael Jordan level talent would go totally unknown and unappreciated. Accountant. Plumber. Chemist. Many more.
And contrarywise fairly mid-level professional athletes in a lot of sports are known at some level by a lot of people. Likely actors too. I assume if you look at Wikipedia you’ll find a lot more articles about journeyman actors than you’ll find about CEOs of major companies.
you can be a great <insert w/e here> and be completely unknown. there are a lot of niche opportunities out there. you could be helping michelin star restaurant owners with a new booking website that just charges customers on their reservation and literally be set for life after that interaction.
the last anecdote is a true story. one of the original owners of Alinea (Chicago) did just that and the guy who developed the site is quite literally set for life if he doesn't do anything else but also has this incredible in within the fine dining world now.
I feel like the people in key roles at Tock were generally pretty high profile to begin with. Last time we talked in depth about Tock here on HN, Kokonas showed up.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
"the correlation between quality and fame is weak at best, and that we should be suspicious of any definition of design excellence that depends on visibility."
everyone needs to internalize this. its similar to the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect) if someone in your domain is famous but their "quality" is weak, assume by default this is true for all other type of famous.
For some real examples of this, check out if your local university has a graduate music program. If so there will be at least one free concert per year where people's compositions are played.
This is almost too obvious to write a blog post, no?
Many great artists died in complete obscurity (eg van Gogh). Some have found their fame posthumously (eg van Gogh). I'm sure many who were even more ahead of their time remain in obscurity.
to me designers are the real architects of history, however, the cybertruck example as brash i disagree with for specific reasons.
it is a perfect example of what it does without any deference to other design languages. instead of po-mo symbolism, it really is just the sufficient metal and glass to do the thing.
an essential truck is unsentimental working capital. its not a duck, its an undecorated shed.
i think the design will age very well because there's nothing to add to it.
The design shows a fundamental misunderstanding of sheet metal. Flat sheet metal is weak. Only curved sheet metal can be strong. Designs that lack mechanical sympathy with the materials in use don't tend to age well.
I don't disagree with you about its utilitarian aesthetics, even if it seems ugly to me. But an amusing irony is that most customers probably won't ever use it as a truck.
But at least it's not boring. I'd even call it audacious. Most of today's SUVs, you wouldn't be able to guess the brand/model if you took the badges away.
Kei trucks are unsentimental working capital. Cybertrucks have been designed to look this way because someone thinks it sells. The panels come unglued and fly off because they glued panels on because they needed the truck to look that way because they thought that attracted customers.
Cybertruck looks that way because of compromises. They didn't think the shape would sell, they thought stainless steel would sell. The shape is a function of how hard it is to shape stainless steel. Likewise gluing panels on is required because stainless steel can't be welded. Because they refused to compromise on stainless steel they were forced to compromise elsewhere.
> Cybertrucks have been designed to look this way because someone thinks it sells
No, I think it's to get the cost of an electric truck down. I've never heard anyone from Tesla say it looks that way because it'll sell better. It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.
Obviously it's subjective, but no ... the model 3 does not look really nice. The new generation with the facelift just crosses the borderline of acceptable, as does the newly face-lifted model Y. But the countless prior generation 3 and Y that litter our streets surely must be a marginal drag on the Tesla brand ... they're aging terribly. Which isn't hard considering my initial impression of them.
The model S is literally the only car they got right.
Let's not even talk about the CT. I can't even bring myself to utter that horizontal fridges name ...
You know what's better at getting the cost down better? Not adding extra parts for aesthetics. Gluing on extra panels costs more than not gluing on extra panels. Also, making them smaller makes them cheaper. They're actually too big to fit in standard European parking spaces, so clearly they have no need to be as big as they are.
Their design is all about aesthetics, but a type of aesthetics that is non-conventional in the car industry.
Hot take but you can be a terrible designer and be completely unknown too. I've been getting into music and there are a lot of wannabes and very few "gems hidden in the dirt" or whatever - if your music is good you'll at least be able to get some decent bookings.
This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).
The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.
Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.
[1] https://xtian.design/
> People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion.
If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them.
In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.
I like live music. I've seen plenty of famous bands play before.
But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware).
I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.
We had once an awesome unknown band from Belgium coming to play in our local club. I was the only person that came to the concert. For an hour they didn't start to wait for more listeners and they invited me to their table. No one showed up so they played for me and my brother whom I have summoned in the meantime. The best concert I have ever attended.
The band was L.T.D.M.S. (https://thomasturine.com/bands/ltdms/)
They have oceansize vibes. Must have been a great evening!
Music is subjective, of course, but I know a lot of people who dedicated an extreme amount of their lives to it. Went to conservatory, practiced for literally hours a day since they were young children into their now late 30s, write music constantly for decades, etc. Some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life has come from these people and they’re all unknown. They teach music, they gig, they work in other career paths, some still do part time stuff hoping it will eventually pan out, but none of them have any kind of fanbase or recognition really. I think the biggest one has like 800 streams a month on Spotify with 2k listeners? It’s nothing, like a few dollars a month
There’s an incredible amount of luck involved in making it big in the arts. Some of it is talent. Some of it is hard work. But a lot is luck. Almost certainly compared to professions where reasonable competence and work mostly guarantee a decent living.
I want to believe that but I've never seen any compelling concrete examples. Got any music that's way better than its popularity/recognition would indicate?
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2aO9679RPKtDZhaVAOvIWZ?si=iN...
https://open.spotify.com/artist/4pD0TDma5JQSsb8aVN4Orb?si=Fv...
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Mp29qv5usMDjpbCc5E33w?si=p3...
I gotta say expected the usual type of "good musicians that can't catch a break," talented but can't write a song with any sincerity or personality. Instead I loved all three! I regret my cynicism and I'm glad I took a listen. I went and bought a couple albums on bandcamp. Thanks!
You're welcome! ... and, ahem, if you value sincerity/personality over talent then you might also like my own band :)
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3O9y7KvDkmr9eRZ1i9IQXZ?si=AA...
There are a number of singer/songwriters/folk who I’ve really liked who were pretty obscure like Heather Alexander, Kathy Mar, etc. may not be to your taste but I’ve liked and certainly not well known.
it depends entirely on your taste but there are some genres that actively avoid broad recognition which include some of my favorite bands (many metal and punk subgenres for example).
beyond luck, lots of famous artists have 'non-famous' composers arranging/composing after their demo stuff
The world is filled with brilliant people.
My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.
Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.
I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.
So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.
If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.
And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.
We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.
> and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank
Which search engine was better than Google when Google came out?
As someone who has played a fair amount of music with different people in different places, and who has attended quite a few odd little gigs and band practices and playing-in-your-friend's-house type things, as well as other types of mad musical moments, this is to be expected.
The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.
The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.
The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.
I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.
It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.
Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.
Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.
What you are talking about is also the difference between "spectator sports" and playing sports. (Or, for more poignancy, spectator vs participatory sex.)
Fred Armisen wrote the forward to Jason Lamb’s “NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion: An Oral History” (PM Press 2024)
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1505
There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice... I feel like the "mid-tier creative who's famous on socials" phenomenon is similar, although I couldn't exactly say how.
> There's the old paradox about self-help gurus and how they're rarely successful because they take their own advice, but because they get paid to share their advice...
That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
I learned recently that Tony Robbins set out to be a motivational speaker in his teens. I was connected to someone on LinkedIn who listed himself as a "thought leader" one year into his career!
How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt?
But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.
The comments consistently describe the victory of self-promotion over real greatness. I had a strange thought: what if that applies to da Vinci too, and we don't know who the real greats of the Renaissance are. You might say, "What about the Mona Lisa?" It turns out that the Mona Lisa wasn't especially famous until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911.
Make Something People Want. Have the poster framed on the wall in my office. It's part of the ethos I've lived my life by.
Changed an industry, made a lot of money, and pretty much nobody knows who I am (which I'm completely fine with). Not looking for fame, don't want it.
At least in my personal experience, the combination of doing interesting things and talking about them in a somewhat public setting is something almost all really successful people do, and what few don't have a friend who is a hype man for them.
While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not.
Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.
Maybe you have it backwards. The social media post isn't about the work, rather the work is the social media post.
In that context, doing the work would refer to creating social media posts and the subject of those posts is secondary.
I don't see it as particularly social media related. That's just the cheapest way to get attention these days. I recall Benjamin Franklin famously pushing paper around town in a wheelbarrow to seem like a hard working young printer:
> I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom
He went out of his way to get positive attention, and it worked.
It's not hard work or talent that brings fame, recognition or promotion at any workplace of any industry.
It happens, but it's rare.
Surely completely by mistake
The majority has exceedingly bad taste, that's why mediocrity and bad taste always seem to win.
The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstein) came out in the same year my dad was born. But my parents still read it to me.
I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
> This is the paradox of the post social media world. I see a lot of mid-tier talent—in all sorts of disciplines/industries—being elevated, while what I personally consider the "greats" get a fraction of the attention (e.g., this designer who I love and have bought stuff from but seems to be a relative unknown [1]).
Attention comes mainly from understanding. And all people are in the mid to low-tier of understanding things outside their own specialization, and too often even within their own specialization.
So to understand something great, you have to have enough insight into that area to see the greatness. And on the other side, there is also the false perception of thinking something is great, while you are just too low in your understanding, to see why it's just mid. Isn't this also basically what Dunning-Kruger-effect is about?
Bell curve meme
Neanderthal: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"
Midwit: "If I tweet enough I'll get well known and become great"
Monk: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"
I mean advertising is advertising. You could have the best program in the world but if no one knows about it chances are you're not going to get rich.
Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.
This is more true for indie hackers or solo team founders i guess, if you're just a designer in a big corp, you don't usually handle marketing beyond trying to build/design a marketeable product, devrel and other positions are more marketing like
> you're not going to get rich
which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.
Honestly, that seems like a solvable problem. Certainly not easy, certainly tremendously difficult, but I'm not sure it is impossible nor that we can't make strides in that direction. We're fundamentally talking about a search algorithm, with specific criteria.
I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
Advertising is easy, making the best program is hard. If you have the best program already, solving the advertising problem is a non issue.
Honestly some of the best content I have been seeing is MIT application videos (both accepted and rejected), it is high school level but it leads to a lot of interesting discussions
As a designer, I know some absolutely amazing artists who just hunker down and produce phenomenal art/designs and I am not fluffing here. As a climber, I also know of climbers who are at the best in the world level, but don’t post sends on IG or muck about in socially promoting themselves. It’s great to know that there are extremely talented people doing their thing and it’s not driven by leaderboards or social clout.
I had a similar train of thought like the author has, but it happened while I was playing Expedition 33, which is a game made by former Ubisoft developers who decided to go indie, and made something that is really cool.
It made me realize that there's an innumerable amount of talented people out there, who are most definitely capable enough or willing to grow enough, that can produce something that makes you think that Ubisoft could have made it, because those people were always right there!
And if they weren't motivated enough to risk it all, because you're only starting from a mere idea, we would never have seen the fruits of their labor.
I'm not claiming that they're comparable with the greatest artists of our time but, the probability of someone out there becoming great will be silenced and squashed before it even has a chance to show up, either because they must conform to the job market to survive day to day, or because of office politics, or out of their own temperament avoiding risks. Especially if that risk is unemployment and homelessness.
As a fan of John Carmack, for example, I have to wonder if he would've ever hit the status he achieved if Doom wasn't this fun to play, or if he kept shipping monthly video games by mail instead. I'm not talking about whether he would be this intelligent or not, but whether he would be known.
This is well written. It also seems to describe society at large, especially our current society. So many things work so well, they become invisible. After time, people dont even realize how much is working behind the scenes to make everything work well and they assume we dont need those things.
It's the same logic that's behind the declining vaccination rates unfortunately. Things could get pretty bad if that trend doesn't reverse.
One of the reasons I love listening to 99% Invisible podcast[1]. Not just a great designer is unknown, but the hallmark of a great design is that its almost invisible unless you look for it.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/
In fact, becoming known takes an enormous amount of energy dedicated toward that purpose.
Yes. And time is zero sum. So you end up with people who see no issue with sinking lots of time into audience building.
I’d rather do the thing than talk about it. Or, frankly, watch/listen/read others.
I read an interesting thread about this in relation to game dev. Development is ugly, so a lot of audience building and investor potential comes from creating visually appealing gameplay demos and mechanics. Often they are made separate from the core of the game. All that time spent making engaging content ends up compromising the development process and turning it into more of a show reel, rather than a fully functioning holistic game.
I’d rather do the thing than talk about it.
That is fine if you're doing it for yourself, but rather unhelpful if you hope to make a living out of doing the thing. The people I know who make a living off their art are those who sink a lot of time into selling their art (and themselves). Those who sit and home and just make (often much better) art languish in obscurity.
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Of course you'd have to pay 700k if you're basically rejecting anyone who's ever been online. The candidate pool is, like, three people.
Uhh... having a LinkedIn takes like 10 minutes spent once. For most industries it's a pretty obvious investment to make yourself reachable by anyone who might be looking for you and to have an added data point of legitimacy (as in simply "is this a real human being emailing me")
Your heuristic is extremely bad.
I use LinkedIn to find jobs; and to troll the self applauding, back patting influencer crowd for fun.
In fact, part of the reason for the current cacophony is that everyone has discovered this fact. Better to invest your time being seen than being good.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Instead of our attention being taken up by creatives who are mostly competent, it is taken up by everyone who wants to short circuit the system. (This would be even more interesting if I could find that article that suggests our taste in music is actually created by exposure.)
There used to be editors of various sorts, whether it be in writing, art, or music, who would be the arbiters of taste. You could indeed take issue with who they decided to elevate, but they definitely provided a useful function.
They probably did recognize diamonds in the rough. I’ll also say that the one time I did a book through a publisher it was because I happened to be seated next to the managing director and followed up with the acquisitions editor over coffee in London. Would probably never have happened had I sent in a proposal cold. Didn’t make me much money but was a nice addition to the resume.
I love this line in the post: "The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible."
There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.
It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.
Great post.
This was my experience in the "maker movement" in the 2010s. You may know me from OpenRov, RobotsAnywhere/CellBots, and the NAVCOM AI autopilot. But you probably don't.
Who got attention? People who spent 20% of their time making and 80% self-promoting.
People just don't know the difference between popularity and merit. Similarly, they don't know the difference between someone who is successful or good at what they do versus one who makes a lot of money.
Butler's piece is spot on. It reminds me of those core open-source tools we all depend on daily but rarely think about the people behind them. Like, who actually knows the name of the person who maintains requests in Python? Probably very few, yet their work is fundamental. That quiet contribution feels like the real definition of impactful design, way beyond the noise of social media.
I’ll go a step further. If someone is well known it’s more likely than not that they’re a charlatan. Not always of course. But if someone gives 6+ conference talks a year it’s like 80%+ chance they’re a dingleberry.
The world is full of amazingly talented and hard working people. Almost all of them are not on social media.
Remind me of the statement (I’m paraphrasing) ‘No one gets the credit for solving a problem that never happened’
This is why I hate the end of project awards. Someone always get great credit for staying late to save the project - but if they had done their job right in the first place the project wouldn't have needed saving.
The right way is never the shortest path. So the right way will still make people stay late.
This is a life fact, I realized this early on. I grew up in part of India which is close to the famous Ajanta caves. There are several local artists there, who literally carve a stone into an absolutely beautiful images of Buddha. A lot of times the tools they used were so crude, imagine what they would do if they had access to modern tools. Similarly, when we look at some of the most beautiful ancient artifacts we can hardly say with confidence who actually built them and whether they were truly the greatest of their times. Personally, I find this very satisfying, there is no need of recognition, all one needs is to enjoy what they do.
reminds me of this video I found the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcjdwSY2AzM&ab_channel=Verit...
if I'm understanding correctly the implications of Emily Noether's work, its an absolute travesty that she isn't famous in the same breath as Einstein and Feynman. Yet this video was the first time I had even heard of her.
There are many great scientists you've never heard about. Soviet side of the world was almost as big as western. Yet they got only a very few nobel prices. It was absurd when western derivative got, but not the original work.
Do you have any recommendations for where we could read more about the soviet originals/western derivatives? I’ve never heard that before (born after the collapse) and that sounds like a fascinating story.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/73052/technomagica-progres... - it is a fiction story so it might or might not be to your taste. The story is a soviet (or just after the fall) scientists it reborn in a fantasy/magic world - like most such stories there is constant comparisons to the old world, but the old world is the soviet one not the western one. It probably isn't a comprehensive list, but it is a good overview of who the soviets saw as important.
Einstein's discovery explained a centuries old mystery that people, including every major mind of the time, were completely and fundamentally on the wrong track towards. All without being able to find any academic position that would have him - he was working as a low ranking patent inspector at the time. And that discovery completely reshaped physics, which many at the time thought had been mostly 'solved' and was down to a measuring game.
I think a parallel would be if some random guy, outside of academia, completely and cleanly solved the dark energy/matter mystery in his spare time, with a revolutionary way of thinking, and it completely reshaped our understanding of not only the cosmos but of physics itself.
Becoming well known for advanced works in science requires a once in many centuries type level of achievement - which is what Einstein was. Feynman is a great example of this. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of all time and made many important contributions to science, yet he would probably be relatively unknown if not for his excessive public outreach and his exceptional ability to explain complex concepts in an extremely intuitive and clear fashion. A talent which he put to extensive use.
Noether was one of a kind communicator and scientist and she should be more widely known because she is a role model for everyone.
Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia".
Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model.
Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope.
I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things.
She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be.
You are mistaken on Einstein's past. He went from taking a 4 year teaching program to searching for an academic position for [literally] years. Nobody wanted him. He'd independently published one paper that he himself would describe was rubbish, and that was the extent of his academic experience. Even with his position at the patent office - he only managed to get that job through a friend, and even there was passed up for promotion due to apparent lack of competence. If you were to rank people who were likely to influence, let alone revolutionize science, he absolutely would not have been on the list.
And you can't really compare Einstein's achievement to anybody else, literally. The reason is not even because of the science itself, which really isn't that complex in hindsight, but a mixture of him solving such a pressing question that nobody else had "seen" as a possibility, alongside with its impact expanding far outside the academic world. Before Einstein our understanding of the universe was one of relative normality. He made it clear that the universe is unimaginably weird.
I do think the comparison with dark energy/matter is appropriate. Imagine a complete unknown, outside of academia, came out with something that not only completely cleanly explained these mysteries, but did so in a way that essentially required discarding everything we thought we knew about the universe. And by we I don't mean some people working in an abstract esoteric field that 99.999% of people have no idea even exists, but humanity. That is literally the level of what Einstein achieved, and it may not even be possible again - because it's sort of a 'right time, right place' type combination.
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And this gets back to the point. Science, so far as persisting in the public mind, isn't about pushing some esoteric field forward, but about advancing humanity. If Einstein instead lived today, it's entirely possible he'd be just another competent academic making some advances, mostly of academic value, in some abstract and esoteric field. And people in 100 years would be none the wiser he even existed. The only way to escape this fate is to engage extensively in outreach. E.g. - Carl Sagan lives on not because of his achievements, but because of his public outreach. To a lesser degree the same is true of Feynman.
> because, let's face it, she was a woman
I don't think this is at all true. The reason you've heard of Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace is precisely because they're women. No man who achieved similar levels of significant work is remembered outside of some niche publications.
> subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things
It just seems unlikely that Noether has several times done what Newton and Einstein did and she's so unknown. Why do I know about much less prolific women and not her, if sexism is the actual reason, and not just a thought-terminating word?
Could it be that her work in pure, abstract mathematics, while important and foundational for some fields, remains too unrelatable for a wide audience?
Maybe the same could be argued for Einstein's work, but knowledgeable people, recognizing its importance, have found ways of explaining it in a relatable way... ?
Maybe the people who decide which woman to hype haven't heard of her yet?
I'd say that's a lot more likely, yes.
Physicists know her. Einstein was a public intellectual, Noether was not.
It's easy. You just compare your thing to everything similar and keep at it until you are convinced yours is miles ahead. Other opinions are irrelevant.
I think that greatness of mind needs to be coupled with ambition, a certain level of arrogance and self-absorbtion, and a personality that doesn't make you a pariah.
I suspect that combinations like that, are, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.
Many great talents probably couldn't be arsed to play the rat race game, and keep their domain humble, or they piss off other people so much, that they never get a break.
Why does it have to be arrogance and self absorption? Why not simply confidence and vision?
It certainly can be (I'm obviously not the expert on the traits), but arrogance (think Steve Jobs) means that there's less self-doubt, and less openness to outside counsel, which is normally a Very Bad Thing, but, if your own counsel [vision?] is very good, then maybe not so bad.
In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.
Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.
I preferred the rude ones.
> I preferred the rude ones.
Seeking social cues to describe greatness is exactly what the grift preys on.
Depends.
I’d rather know, up front, that someone isn’t open to my PoV, so I don’t waste time, trying to give help, where it is not wanted.
I worked for a CEO once and I really disagreed with a decision—admittedly probably too late to take another path. He talked about it with me. Obviously neither was going to change the other’s mind. So we agreed to disagree and moved on.
Sounds like a good manager. It's the manager's decision, but also, their Accountability.
One thing that I've learned, over the years, is that folks don't take me seriously. I'm pretty sure that it's my affect. I come across as a bit "goofy," and open, which is often interpreted as "naive," or "stupid." Used to really bug me, but I've learned to deal with it.
Anyway, I'm pretty good at "playing the tape through to the end," and anticipating long-term ramifications. These are often unwelcome observations, in the planning phase of things.
I've learned to start quietly preparing remediations, for when the wheels inevitably come off. I guess that it's nice to be a "hero of the day," but it would have been even better, if we hadn't gotten to this point in the first place. Remediation is not as good as Prevention or Mitigation.
Yeah, he was basically the guy who hired me. They had been small clients in the past and we liked each other. Part of me was saying what’s done is done but I felt I had to give it a shot so I emailed him and we had a cordial phone call. Which is more than a lot of CEOs of moderately large companies would do. And it says a lot about the company culture that I never felt I was risking being fired.
> And it says a lot about the company culture that I never felt I was risking being fired.
Yes. I feel that insecure upper managers are a pox on the tech industry (probably other industries, as well). They create a really toxic culture.
I used to work for a Japanese company. My manager didn't speak English, and was 7,000 miles away, but was willing to listen to me. However, I had to deal with the way my interaction developed. Sometimes, the Japanese can be quite ... strident ... when they feel as if they are not being approached with respect.
They had a consensus-based style, which welcomed input from all levels, but would also be pretty brutal, to bad input.
Helped me to develop a habit of making sure all my ducks were in a row, before opening my mouth.
Relationships also matter. I worked directly for people who really feared this senior person for reasons I never really understood. But I knew how far I could push things and tell the exec they were just wrong. Which is probably one of the reasons they hired me. To be honest, I was probably in a position where if I pushed a bit too far I’d probably have been ok.
There is a very fine line between all of these. When you look at famous people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Musk or Gates they have all these attributes. Another example would be Michael Jordan in basketball or Michael Schumacher in racing.
There is this discussion going on on Slashdot right now: https://alterslash.org/#article-23675569
about the lack of AppleTV marketing support for one of its shows, called La Maison).
That opens an interesting discussion: the role of their influencers. Their choices can either bless or curse anyone’s work just by manipulating the word of mouth.
[which reminds me of that absolutely brilliant speech by Alan Moore, on « magic » : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1qACd0wHd0]
You can be a great X and be completely unknown
Where X is any vocation, skill, talent, etc…
works for SWEs too - I've had the pleasure working with a bunch of amazing SWEs in my almost 3 decades in the industry, 9 out of top 10 if I rank them do not have a Github account or blog or post sht on "X" or wherever... Just do amazing sht at work and go home to their families :)
Absolutely. And there are plenty of occupations where even a Michael Jordan level talent would go totally unknown and unappreciated. Accountant. Plumber. Chemist. Many more.
And contrarywise fairly mid-level professional athletes in a lot of sports are known at some level by a lot of people. Likely actors too. I assume if you look at Wikipedia you’ll find a lot more articles about journeyman actors than you’ll find about CEOs of major companies.
Fame quickly becomes an obstacle to progress, it's the last thing I need in my life.
you can be a great <insert w/e here> and be completely unknown. there are a lot of niche opportunities out there. you could be helping michelin star restaurant owners with a new booking website that just charges customers on their reservation and literally be set for life after that interaction.
the last anecdote is a true story. one of the original owners of Alinea (Chicago) did just that and the guy who developed the site is quite literally set for life if he doesn't do anything else but also has this incredible in within the fine dining world now.
I feel like the people in key roles at Tock were generally pretty high profile to begin with. Last time we talked in depth about Tock here on HN, Kokonas showed up.
I don't think it's just about doing vs talking.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
Of course they'll never get credit for this.
"the correlation between quality and fame is weak at best, and that we should be suspicious of any definition of design excellence that depends on visibility."
everyone needs to internalize this. its similar to the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect) if someone in your domain is famous but their "quality" is weak, assume by default this is true for all other type of famous.
For some real examples of this, check out if your local university has a graduate music program. If so there will be at least one free concert per year where people's compositions are played.
This is almost too obvious to write a blog post, no?
Many great artists died in complete obscurity (eg van Gogh). Some have found their fame posthumously (eg van Gogh). I'm sure many who were even more ahead of their time remain in obscurity.
to me designers are the real architects of history, however, the cybertruck example as brash i disagree with for specific reasons.
it is a perfect example of what it does without any deference to other design languages. instead of po-mo symbolism, it really is just the sufficient metal and glass to do the thing. an essential truck is unsentimental working capital. its not a duck, its an undecorated shed.
i think the design will age very well because there's nothing to add to it.
The design shows a fundamental misunderstanding of sheet metal. Flat sheet metal is weak. Only curved sheet metal can be strong. Designs that lack mechanical sympathy with the materials in use don't tend to age well.
I don't disagree with you about its utilitarian aesthetics, even if it seems ugly to me. But an amusing irony is that most customers probably won't ever use it as a truck.
It's hands down the ugliest thing I've ever seen.
But at least it's not boring. I'd even call it audacious. Most of today's SUVs, you wouldn't be able to guess the brand/model if you took the badges away.
True, the same mindset that lead Microsoft to create the Metro UI, which has similar appeal.
It's true - they are all looking more and more similar.
I call it the trash compactor
Kei trucks are unsentimental working capital. Cybertrucks have been designed to look this way because someone thinks it sells. The panels come unglued and fly off because they glued panels on because they needed the truck to look that way because they thought that attracted customers.
Cybertruck looks that way because of compromises. They didn't think the shape would sell, they thought stainless steel would sell. The shape is a function of how hard it is to shape stainless steel. Likewise gluing panels on is required because stainless steel can't be welded. Because they refused to compromise on stainless steel they were forced to compromise elsewhere.
Stainless steel can be welded... just not easily and cheaply.
> Cybertrucks have been designed to look this way because someone thinks it sells
No, I think it's to get the cost of an electric truck down. I've never heard anyone from Tesla say it looks that way because it'll sell better. It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.
Obviously it's subjective, but no ... the model 3 does not look really nice. The new generation with the facelift just crosses the borderline of acceptable, as does the newly face-lifted model Y. But the countless prior generation 3 and Y that litter our streets surely must be a marginal drag on the Tesla brand ... they're aging terribly. Which isn't hard considering my initial impression of them.
The model S is literally the only car they got right.
Let's not even talk about the CT. I can't even bring myself to utter that horizontal fridges name ...
> It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.
No, they're not. The price of a Cybertruck is in line with the price for a Model S or Model X, and significantly higher than a Model 3.
You know what's better at getting the cost down better? Not adding extra parts for aesthetics. Gluing on extra panels costs more than not gluing on extra panels. Also, making them smaller makes them cheaper. They're actually too big to fit in standard European parking spaces, so clearly they have no need to be as big as they are.
Their design is all about aesthetics, but a type of aesthetics that is non-conventional in the car industry.
"What, so young and already unknown?"
-- Wolfgang Pauli
You can be a great X and be completely unknown. The history is full of people who only got famous after they were dead.
If people did not give credit where credit is due.
Hot take but you can be a terrible designer and be completely unknown too. I've been getting into music and there are a lot of wannabes and very few "gems hidden in the dirt" or whatever - if your music is good you'll at least be able to get some decent bookings.
so who would be the great unknown artists of today ?
I 100% agree. e.g. https://hipfolio.co
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