Editing Blog/2025-02-24/Lost Science (section)

== Overall ==

I set myself an hour to research and write this and sadly I've spent two so the time is out before I could get properly into the main concept of whether or not a good test for the Great Man Theory is ideas that are discovered, then lost, then discovered again. I'm somewhat of the opinion that it's a decent pointer to the fact that we occasionally do need innovative brilliance in idea generation to come up with things and that it's not just that the wisdom of the masses gets you to results given prerequisites are solved.

Cultural diffusion seems crucial to humanity learning, though often invention occurs in isolated areas first before going somewhere else. It brings to mind a Psychology paper I read a long time ago about intermittent interactions vs. no interactions vs. constant interactions<ref name=collab-solo/>. As expected, mean(NT) was worse than mean(IT) ~= mean(CT) but optimal(NT)~=optimal(IT) which were both better than optimal(CT).

I think this interaction is self-similar down to single humans (and perhaps further down than that). The mass of life is a swirling vortex of thought and pattern and occasionally it throws off outliers that think in a different way or act in a different way. In Nature, the process is random mutation and the thing that keeps it in line is natural selection through environmental and peer pressures. In Mankind, the process is both the genetic and memetic mutation that results in individuals (the Great Men) who come up with particularly novel and useful things to humanity. So it's less that it's Great Men vs. History From Below and more that the system of interaction of large numbers of independently varying people creates outliers of some kind that, when placed at inflection points in the environment, find themselves particularly able to be adapted to it.