Consider the agricultural revolution of the early 1700s, Charles Townshend, walking around after his cows, noting every poop, taking detailed notes about every poop, and then a year later, what grew where that poop was, and what were the cows eating when they created that poop? His neighbors certainly regarded him as eccentric, having such a fascination with poop. And yet the whole modern world is indebted to him for his odd obsession. And likewise, Jethro Tull's obsession with designing a machine that could replace the workers his father and grandfather had worked with.
<side note> If I remember how the band Jethro Tull got its name, it is because they had to change the band's name after every gig. The band was that unpopular, and would be told to never come back. Until one day they got lucky, and that day's name was Jethro Tull.
Do you understand what the 4 crop rotation system is? The key thing is what he did with animals on the fields that were fallow. He brought in animals and had them poop on the fields that were fallow, so in future years they'd be more productive. The poop is a key part of the 4 crop rotation system.
Townsend did not invent the use of animal poop as fertilizer, or the use of specific animal poops to fertilize specific crops, or rotating crops, or the even combination of the two, unless we completely ignore agricultural practices outside of Europe and pretend that all agriculture was invented in Europe.
He was basically the Elon Musk of post-medieval agriculture: taking credit for the work of others because he marketed it (and himself) better than they did.
Your original statement focused on fertilizer and didn't mention the rotation system. This person pointing out that he didn't invent fertilizer is correct. It's not a big deal.
No, I was being light-hearted, but "taking detailed notes about every poop" is the essence of what made the 4 crop system different. His focus on different kinds of poop lead to his focus on turnips, which is what made his system unique. Turnips, poop, crops: a revolution. I didn't think any level of detail was necessary since it was a light-hearted but good example of what the title mentions: "New industries come from crazy people."
Yet it isn't explained anywhere in his comments what this "particular way" exactly is. I guess it's supposed to be common knowledge, but I'm as clueless on that matter as the downvoted commentators in this thread are. Neither does Wikipedia on "Norfolk four-course system" (which it claims Townshend popularized, not invented) mention anything about the fertilizer, simply claiming that inclusion of a turnip as the fodder crop allowed livestock to be bred year-round.
As always, seeking lessons by studying only the successful suffers from nasty selection bias. Maybe most new industries come from crazy people, but you're probably not one of them. Most crazy people just lose everything being crazy.
Agreed and there's a big difference between having a weird idea and mental illness, and it's strange to see them conflated.
Most people who end up like Kanye, for example, don't become insanely rich, they end up alienating everyone in their lives if they don't take care of themselves, and eventually end up in prison, institutionalized, homeless or dead.
This is an important thing to keep in mind when engaging with institutions which make most of their money from outliers. Their incentives are not aligned with the stability of your mental health.
(Though they don’t follow their incentives perfectly because institutions are still made of humans who care about people)
And as usually the case when people brought up selection bias, or survivor bias, you made the assumption that he only studied the successful. He never said he did.
I agreed that most attempts to invent new industries ended up in failure, by either crazy or regular people. That's because it's insanely hard to do so in the face of competition by the incumbents, not to mention going against the opinion of logical and well reasoning smart people, who are of course right 99.9 % of the time. For those who succeeded however, they are crazy -- as defined by the author -- most of the time. I think that's what the author intends to convey. If you can think of any new industry that invented by "normal" people who work within the system, I'd love to hear.
"Having a different opinion than the consensus" isn't the same thing as "crazy". The article does this for many of its examples. It's tautological that people who start new industries do so by questioning the status quo. But simply having a different point of view doesn't make you a crazy person.
Crazy is the knee-jerk word when you need to describe heterodoxy. If you spend more than a second to think about it, you might come up with different words. But not "crazy", which is effectively a placeholder
"Crazy" is informally used to mean acting outside the norm - e.g. "i had a crazy idea" when people say things like that, they do not (neccesarily) mean crazy as in have a mental health problem.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Ah, the Serenity Prayer is so confident. No process of trying or stumbling. Never doubting the wisdom you learned. Asking god to grant it, just like that. Well, you can pray.
And 'crazy' is the non-pc word for that umbrella of non-standard neurotypes that are just-barely normal-ish. Crazy is a fine word. Let's not hop on the euphemism treadmill.
"Crazy" here is just a euphemism for: Well out of the ordinary. Should it be surprising that the ordinary, the mundane, the average, the rock-no-boats, never accomplish great things? Why would they? Those who're complacent about the world as it is - or worse, sneeringly nasty at anyone stepping beyond the status quo - have no ability to be a Henry Ford or a Nikola Tesla or an Elon Musk. Why would such minds be limited to just building a business? Of course they aren't ordinary.
Yeah, but people definitely thought variolation (for smallpox) was crazy initially.
I think the idea is crazy people make the proof-of-concept, non-crazy people perfect the idea.
With the important note that things getting moved forward by crazy people is not the same thing as saying most crazy people move things forward. Most do nothing of note.
I think you are conflating things here. The gentleman who came up with the polio vaccine is the "crazy" person who decided not to accept the status quo. That polio should be literally a death sentence. I am not saying the hard working people who administered the vaccine should not be acknowledged, they should be but we cannot equate administering the vaccine to inventing the vaccine.
I agree that most things aren't invented by one person. We stand on the shoulders of giants. I am okay with recognising all 20 or 100 people who contribute to an invention. Heck even the 1000 people. I am just having a hard time with notion that those administering the vaccine are the same as those who invented the vaccine. I use Linux promote Linux to those in my circles. I certainly do not view myself as an equal to Linus.
Exactly, most things are acconplished by scaling an existing solution to billions of people.
Danitation was created by digging thousands miles of pipes, nanufacturing billuons of toilets, designing facilities to produce billions of bars of soap.
Peolle is sillicon valley run in circles chasing innovation in transport, but more than half of high speed rail in the world eas built over the past 9 years in china. 90% of eorld electric busses run in china. India has probided toilets for 600 million people. All of that required soneone to pick up a shovel, and political will to organise shoveling.
I don’t think they mean ‘crazy’ in the mentally ill sense because nothing could be a bigger detriment to leadership than the irrational outbursts associated with manic episodes and the crushing inability to function associated with depressions.
Although Elon Musk likes his LSD or so I’ve heard, and a ‘trip’ is basically a self induced euphoric psychosis which can be compared to a schizophrenic episode.
> Although Elon Musk likes his LSD or so I’ve heard, and a ‘trip’ is basically a self induced euphoric psychosis which can be compared to a schizophrenic episode.
You might want to revisit the literature. That idea, known as pychotomimetism, is an old one, and was disproved in the case of LSD many decades ago.
However, you are not solely to blame as the mainstream drug literature continues to promote this error (much of it is bunk), and even the Wikipedia page on pychotomimetism continues to list LSD (without a source, of course).
Although it’s been a while since I took a gander, I’m fairly certain that the leading researchers stopped treating LSD as a psychotomimetic in the late 1970s to early 1980s. The idea you are defending came out of the 1950s. A lot has changed in our understanding since that time.
The more current paradigm for LSD borders on its therapeutic and entheogenic properties, which are admittedly difficult to categorize and verbalize beyond certain metaphors, analogies, and mythological symbols. As an atheist, it interests me, because when you take LSD, you realize that this experience is the root of religion.
And if you’re someone who considers themselves religious and you’ve never had a psychedelic experience, well, you’re missing out on an opportunity to truly understand what religion is and what it’s all about, and how it works in the human mind.
The experience itself goes far beyond that oddity, of course. In addition to that insight, you will also receive a new perspective on the arts, as every imaginable design, pattern, and image will appear during your trip.
There are, of course, many other highlights one could discuss. For me, I’m convinced it helped me recover memories from my childhood, and some people will tell you it can lead to closure on things in your life by promoting acceptance and peace of mind. Obviously, it’s not for everyone, and should be used wisely and with caution, just like anything else.
are you really sure you understand what religion is about by taking LSD-25?
seriously, religion is so broad that claiming that you understand it and resume it on a simple feeling because you took a psychedelic, makes my stomach whirl... even after a sense deprived room psychodelic experience as well many other introspective trips in easier environments, as an atheist since children days
Not sure if it’s just me, but I can’t reply to your comment because it doesn’t seem to make any sense in English. Please revise or rewrite it if you want a reply. Apologies if English is your second language.
Edit: I would encourage you to read up on religious archetypes. They are not as broad as you seem to suggest, and are quite limited in scope and shared by most religions. Interestingly, these archetypes are all found in the psychedelic experience, indicating to some researchers that ancient religious practices in the past may have once had a psychoactive ritual sacrament. Over time, these rituals were either lost or abandoned, and replaced with symbolic sacraments. There’s an enormous amount of literature on this, so it would be difficult to briefly summarize it here, but suffice it to say, the leading religious archetypes are all found in the LSD experience. In a nutshell, the entheogenic theory suggests that modern religious beliefs and practices come from and originate from these experiences. This doesn’t mean these ideas are real or that god is real or that the Buddha was right, or that Christ was literally resurrected—it means that religion arises out of some kind of strange interaction with psychoactive substances and human brains. Obviously, this is highly controversial and disputed, but it does have some evidence in history, in practices such as the soma in the Vedic religions of India and the use of the kykeon during the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece, as only two notable examples. In more recent years, researchers have tried to link these substances to religions like Judaism, finding solid, demonstrable evidence of cannabis use (as a psychoactive incense, high doses of cannabis are classified on a spectrum in the psychedelic category) in ancient Israeli shrines, and in Christianity, noting the strange, out of place imagery of fungi in the 12th-century Plaincourault Chapel, as just one example, besides the claims of John M. Allegro, who has been widely dismissed for brazenly claiming, from his scholarly interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jesus was a metaphor for the mushroom itself, and was never intended to be taken literally as a real person. I can imagine how disturbing these ideas might be to sincere religious believers who are heavily emotionally invested in their archetypes as real, literal, living and breathing ideas, but the psychedelic experience shows us otherwise—it’s all in our mind.
yeah sure english is not my primary language, but what i found when asking people what religion means to them, i always find deep interpretation holes, even if they motif is something broadly common... like Christian interpretations etc.
but yeah, psychodelics always invoke a sense of unity in higher doses, and maybe that is a spectrum of feeling a 'holy' experience in a religious context.
but what i perceive is; every person has an unique idea of it! even if they all say the same thing, my inner interpretation always perceive as a new thing or at least an addition to what i define as a religious interpretation of what life is or why we are here etc.
I understand what you are saying in this comment. I agree with you, unity and interconnectedness is the sine qua non of the psychedelic experience, along with a description of what is called nonduality. I’ve also found that when you talk with religious people, they describe this very thing, but know it using other words and concepts, like for example, god. The only person I’ve ever heard that addresses this shared experience within the gulf between atheists and believers is the author Brian Muraresku, but I’m not all that certain of his credibility or expertise. All I can say is that he at least got this right. In other words, when you give LSD to an atheist and a believer, it isn’t that they both come away believing in the idea or concept of god, it’s that they both experience a unitary experience of nonduality but interpret it differently. The atheist might say that they now understand the cosmic perspective that Carl Sagan always talks about. The believer might say that they have experienced what it is like to understand the mind of god. The atheist and the believer are talking about the same thing but are using different concepts and ideas to describe it, much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It should also be said that in the eastern tradition, atheism is historically more accepted as a legitimate path to wisdom than it is in the west, for example in the Rig Veda. I think it would be great for Christianity and Islam to moderate and liberalize enough to accept that atheism is a legitimate POV within their own traditions, but that might be asking and hoping for too much, too soon.
i do not think an atheist perception of unity is about the same theme of a religious person. as far my empirical experience goes, atheists vary a lot how they felt it.
(mine for example was in a dark room with P. cubensis that i could only hear my heartbeat, then i accessed, in my perception, unity; which was a white slightly blue orb of energy [something that all organic life can access or have in it perception])
religious people most of the time believe in the same thing.
and considering the hypothetical (and not theoretical) state of explaining how life appeared or was formed, is at least curious that a vast majority of people interpret these questions the same way.
but as an atheist myself, you probably know my repulse towards a belief in a god, specially if it mimics or mirror itself in humans...
off topic: i am reading a book about elements on periodic table and the author mentions at some point about people observing that a mass extinction happens after 20 million years or so... and if we can prove it, it makes the existence of life way more interesting. as nowadays, i think the more we get closer to god, or a divine, unity thing, more i believe we should trust the scientific method, and go look for a sustainable way to get out of this solar system, secure, and maybe find some relatable life that maybe believe in something closer of what we have today: a god or entity that made this all possible
edit: i am drunk and it is new year eve... take it with a dose of compassion :P
That’s a fair assessment. To paraphrase Haldane, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine. Religion and religious people have a tendency to narrow this perception of majestic strangeness because they tend to be wary of uncertainty. Atheists on the other hand tend towards embracing uncertainty and like to revel in the strangeness. In my opinion, of course.
I get a large distaste in my mouth when reading pieces like this. Supposed "crazy" people can be found everywhere if you expand your definition enough. Passionate, would work as well. Somehow contriving that the "crazy" ones are the ones that successfully expand and create industries feels way too selection biased. Especially since there is nothing learnable from the examples that are picked.
Worse, it ends with:
America was not always the only country that permitted breakthrough industrialists to build unproven new industries and upend the economic order, but it is today.
Which is at sharp odds with every story of how expensive construction is in the US compared to what we call developing nations. Or nations that typically give wider authority to the government builders than the US does.
Construction costs are only one aspect of the US economy.
Silicon Valley would not have happened elsewhere. Neither would the dot-com era, or a viable electric car industry (proved out by Tesla). Every FAANG is American and their only viable competition is in China.
I don’t know what the next transformative industry is going to be, but I’d be shocked if it came from a risk-averse place like Western Europe.
> Silicon Valley could not have happened elsewhere
I’ve discussed this here before, I think, but SV could have happened in the UK, as they were well ahead of everyone else in some areas. The reason it didn’t, as I’ve been repeatedly told by people who live there, is because at that time they had an entrenched culture that was "anti-anorak", or against hacker culture. The funding wasn’t there because proto-hackers were looked down upon by the establishment as powerless nerds incapable of furthering societal progress. On the other hand, SV happened in the US because these so-called anoraks were given a chance that bore fruit with a large defense budget to further the post-WWII era of technological development.
You are correct in almost everything here, but missing something
that's maybe relevant.
> could have happened in the UK, as they were well ahead of everyone
else in some areas.... large defense budget to further the post-WWII
era of technological development.
It kind of _did_ happen in the UK, but earlier, for the same reasons
of defence funding, but during the WWII era. Characters like Turing
and Cockrell (inventor of the hovercraft), Tommy Flowers (Colossus)
were all "off center wheels" so to speak. They did their work in sheds
using makeshift tools. They got a shot out of necessity. What happened
in Britain between about 1935 and 1955 was an enormous technological
push.
> The reason it didn’t, as I’ve been repeatedly told by people who
live there, is because at that time they had an entrenched culture
that was "anti-anorak"
We still have. Geek never really became cool here. That's an American
thing. But the truth is, after the war we were flat broke. Very few
smart people had the leisure time and capital to risk as in the
US. And then successive governments mismanaged our fledgling computer
industry like ICL and Ferranti.
Today the dominant job prospects for a geek in Britain are working for
Google, Apple, Microsodt, IBM... it's embarrasing, humiliating given
our history, and the disgraceful legacy of successive bad governments.
> SV happened in the US because these so-called anoraks were given a
chance that bore fruit
I think that's the nub of it. But we haven't really learned in the UK.
Our class system and fear of "outsider" innovation is still
entrenched.
I’m so crazy I think Silicon Valley is more a Wall Street phenomenon then a technical one and that Intel gets way too much credit for the microprocessor.
The success of FAANG in America is, in large part, due to a lack of regulation of the software industry.
For example, I don't need a license to write software, or sell it. I don't need any signoff from regulators. Nor is there a cottage industry of suing software developers. There are no laws specifying how the software is written.
> For example, I don't need a license to write software, or sell it. I don't need any signoff from regulators. Nor is there a cottage industry of suing software developers. There are no laws specifying how the software is written.
The US in general is more business friendly, which leads to people wanting to invest their dollars in US business.
I recall some German friends of mine being quite surprised at how easy it is to start a business in the US. Though some businesses the government is very hostile to, like being a landlord.
I'm sure some of the oddity of how the US regulates interstate commerce is related, too. Consider how the regulation of insurance and car sales have basically stalled all similar attempts to enter that market.
> Ut happened because of cheap and plenty of VC money.
Ok, so why didn't other countries have "cheap and plenty of VC money" at the same time? Why not the UK, or Germany, or Japan?
Of all the rich countries that existed in the world at the time, why did only the US develop a Silicon Valley type of situation?
It was never about money -- plenty of other countries had rich investors. It was about willingness to take risk. US venture capital was unique in the world at that time, and it was because of their culture.
I just watched a 3 episodes serie documentary about US space program from the first satelite in space (USSR) to the landing on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin...
It seems part of Silicon Valley culture and technological breakthrough came from people coming from industries involved in the space program.
Space program has been the real kick-starter of SV. No other countries (except USSR) had such program.
Most of the money came from defense spending to create sophisticated weapons. They just followed the development of ideas that were successfully employed during WW 2. The USA’s isolation from the devastation of the war and capture of the opposing sides best minds laid the ground work for the USA’s Great Leap Forward.
Silicone valley would probably also not be possible with modern regulations. But... That has a name. Regulatory capture is far from new. And doesn't require crazy people.
Looking at tech and ignoring how much brain and money power was thrown at nuclear technology is doing a disservice to why the US was so far ahead in many fields for a long while.
* some kinds of unproven new industries (excluding construction/housing)
As someone who has a US passport, loves cities, and lives half the year in the US, this is particularly frustrating to me. It seems that no matter how wealthy or powerful you become, it's still basically illegal to build innovative things on land you own in the US (anywhere near other people).
Interesting. In my home country in Africa building in the cities and towns is also quite difficult. There are all sorts of regulations along with corruption you have to deal with. From as far back as I can remember most people still wanted to own a house in the town or city. It was seen as more prestigious. We would bear with it and eventually build your home. However in the last 10 years or so with availability of solar panels and drilling boreholes being cheaper I have noticed a shift. People now migrating back to the villages. Two main reasons, the land is free and there are no building regulations. The village headman allocates you your land and you good to go. There are some rules to follow with how deep your pit latrine needs to be but that's about it. There has been an explosion of all sorts of building designs in the villages, some good and some not so. But lack of regulation has been good. Oh final note another "disadvantage" with building in village is that there are no title deeds. Homes are passed down to kids or other relatives
That’s true in most countries, you need to pay off government officials/protection. That can either be done legally or illegally but it has to be done.
We're in a pit of success. Our workers cost a lot, and that's generally a good thing.
We could lighten regulations and import immigrant workers, but the real turnaround will be when automation finally teaches construction. AGI or robotics or whatever. Give it 50 years and costs will come right back down.
Sorta? My understanding is most of the cost is in regulatory compliance, combined with less exercise of imminent domain.
That is, construction was cheaper back when we had no regard for the people that owned or had interest in the land we were constructing on. The so called "spite mounds" of the Seattle regrade are a good example. Some were literally for an owner that was out of town. Not sure that kind of crap should fly.
As individuals we need some reassurance that our actions matter and there is no better way to achieve that than to identify "great men" (somehow these characters are always male) and posit that they somehow managed to single handedly change history.
Thinking is systems, discontinuous, non-linear collective phenomena precipitate social changes like a breaking wave. Invariably somebody will be at the cusp and a smaller number might even have the energy, ruthlessnes and thick skin to survive there for a longer period.
This makes them no more "responsible" for a new industry than a molecule is responsible for the existence of the wave. But paint that well placed molecule with a fluerescent marker and it does a good job identifying the location of the discontinuity.
This is really the main role of the "crazy people". To signal to the silent "normie" multitudes the existence of a shock front.
Nonsense, there are plenty of circumstances where a lone person or small group was responsible for great change. The thing that’s missing from people’s attention is that usually this change was ripe and if not one person, another would have come along in a short time. The many occurrences of scientific discoveries happening completely independently at almost the same time demonstrates this.
And there certainly have been great women, too often somebody else got credit for far too long, but there have been plenty.
Khun, summarized, said that (in science but really applicable anywhere) development tends to happen with long periods of many people making incremental changes interspersed with short bursts of paradigm shifts where the basic assumptions change… often led by small groups or individual outsiders.
> The thing that’s missing from people’s attention is that usually this change was ripe and if not one person, another would have come along in a short time
This is more or less what i am saying. When conditions are ripe for change, change happens, irrespective of whether there is a "crazy person" around or not. Individuals mostly make a small difference in timing.
To the contrary, I think the Roman Empire was a few inspired people short of an Industrial Revolution a thousand years early.
Things can be prepared but also waiting for the right spark. There are also lots of circumstances of similarly prepared places where the revolution only happens in one place.
Quantifying the relative importance of "sparks" versus prevailing conditions needs an objective theory of how social and technological evolution happens and we are nowhere close to having that insight.
It would probably have a strong dependence on the size of the system (the number of people alive) and the degree of interconnectedness in terms of information and resource flow. The smaller and more disconnected, the more the actual relevance of individual behavior. That is just a guess, though.
But perpetuating in the 21st century the myth that "new industries come from crazy people" feels more of an Ayn Randian agenda than a path towards harnessing human creativity.
Why quantify? Do we need to come up with a rigorous method for assigning how much fame a person ought to have based on their accomplishments?
Yes, fame can be quite silly and doled out unfairly but the pushback trying to claim individuals who did trigger these paradigm shifts aren’t all that valuable is likewise silly. There is plenty of room between the extremes.
Contribution is an exponential distribution, you don’t get by by cutting out the few who contribute a lot or the many who contribute a little.
Why do you say they are always male? That just sounds like leftist propaganda as well. I’m not sure yet the rest means other than I think you deny the reality of this phenomena described.
The Great Man theory of history refers to men in the same sense as the American constitution - persons, people not necessarily males. Queen Elizabeth (I) or Cleopatra would have probably been recognized as examples of Great Men shaping history by the authors.
Something often said: 'We don't use the word crazy around here'. I'm sorry but bandying around that word is vague and misleading. Authors really need to be more specific. This is why we have distinct terms like ADHD, Neurodiverse, Eccentricity, etc.
Disagree. Seems like a useful word and the article title conveys its meaning quite well. The multiple interpretations of 'crazy' are exactly what makes the title interesting. Crazy looney or crazy like a fox?
I think the gist is that people who think differently are often thought insane, but are also disproportionately the ones who will stumble upon new and useful ways of doing things.
Neurodiverse, that’s just leftist propaganda. It’s like calling someone “vertically challenged” or something equally silly. People use the word “crazy” in this context and we all know what it means unless we are very pedantic or completely unaware of words having meanings other than the most literal, dry definitions. But if you read English in that way then articles like this are not for you, really, which is not an attack. It’s just there for most people, we want to read more engaging content that something that reads like a 1970s instruction manual.
