There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-size cardboard cutout of a bear. But behind the cutout is a real bear. Is the philosopher speaking the truth when he points and says there's a bear there?
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
I think most philosophers would be fine with treating "there is no bear there" and "the amplitude of the probability density function of a bear is negligibly low there" as the same statement for this discussion :)
An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
Don’t confuse the event with the distribution. An event always either has or hasn’t occurred, no further statement can be made. It’s only in bulk that one can talk about distributions. But in this contrived anecdote, there is only one observation, one event.
Some distributions are definitely relatively stable over time, so you can absolutely make predictive statements about the future given past observations.
That's true for both biological bear population dynamics and movement patterns and for quantum tunneling bears :)
I’m not sure “underrated” is exactly the best term here. He’s pretty much lauded as the greatest “visionary for design and innovation in the technology industry”, ever.
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
Maybe not "underrated" but "Jobs only did marketing, Woz did all the technical work" is a very persistent comment I see on the internet when he's brought up.
Not to discount Jobs as a person, but the narrative in 100 years could easily be "Jobs was in the right place at the right time when technology reached a miniaturization threshold such that a computer could be in every person's pocket, the first time in human history; and Jobs led the first company to be there at the right time and capitalize."
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
Success like he had is a filter. To be there you have to go through a lot of “sure you’ve done well so far, but you’ll never make it to the next level” conversations in your life. By the time you’re Steve Jobs, you’ve been right in the face of doubt thousands of times. Type of thing that makes someone think they can cure easily treatable pancreatic cancer with crystals or whatever.
He was a genius that had that flaw of being a narcissist.
The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.
I will not define Jobs as narcissistic (thinking on himself). Quite the opposite, Jobs was focussing on what people needed, and he was right: People needed rounded corners way more than ovals.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
> This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse, had to present something to him), you never knew if you were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve would thank you for your work and politely inform you of changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager and peers.
He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.
Yup, agreed. On my sub, most people agree with the blackout. But there's a huge swell of people who are 100% on his side, and he's done a great job of pitting users against mods and framing mods as power-hungry jerks who are anti-democracy (in order to distract from the fact that he makes decisions with no accountability).
And he’s not totally wrong in my opinion. Some of the subreddits i often browse (regional ones) are often moderated in a questionable way. But the mods have been in there for literally more than a decade, which makes them similar to landed gentry.
Can I please recommend w/ no ill intent that you take news courses of action if you've unable to achieve raising a relatively low amount of capital after 10 year?
I already met many investors and millionaire founders. I even met 2 founders who are now billionaires and many others who went on to become multimillionaires. Nowadays most of them won't even answer my emails. One of the founders I met before they were successful (and who sold their startup for millions) won't even give me a $2000 per year support contract though they continue to use my open source project and ask me questions. I'm thinking I've been blacklisted. It doesn't make sense right?
Does it make sense that someone I met 10 years ago, was using my open source project as part of their startup and was having conversations with me every couple of months throughout the whole 10 years (they even let me log into their production system with 30K concurrent users to help fix a bug) and then went on to make millions won't even support my project with a $2000 a year contract?
Probably something weird going on. This is not just about one example, it's every now-successful founder I've ever met. Nobody talks to me and I did nothing wrong except build some products that work really well.
Don't try to blame others, see what works for you and where you can improve. Some people can make other run for them and send donations without even trying. It's not about them or cruel word. Your problems are about you, and you need to either solve them or to switch to something that works for you, or you will be suffering the rest of life.
I find that hard to believe. I tried a lot of things. I switched between many companies, changed industries, moved to many different countries around the world to find opportunities, I tried playing the patient nice guy for years, I also played more assertive in later years, changed my entire personality to act like an extrovert, started blogs, pursued investors (attending events), started open source projects (one which became popular in its industry), got involved in blockchain space built my own unique projects from scratch... Nothing delivered financial results. I feel like I tried essentially everything so I know it's not something I can control.
When I study people who succeeded, the main difference I can see is that they got very lucky because they knew people who helped them get attention.
Most successful people seem to have this rosy perception of how things work; unfortunately, I cannot go back to that point. Once you've seen nasty stuff, you cannot un-see.
readwise is so good that even though I LOVE physical books, I don’t buy them anymore. They wouldn’t get into my Readwise notes, which is now a crucial part of my daily workflow.
Would you mind sharing what device(s) you use, along with any other software / services / etc you're using.
I've been reading books, mostly fiction, on my phone as I don't presently have a tablet / ereader. I'd like to move away from reading mostly fiction again, highlighting and note taking and all that, but don't have the gumption to launch a research project in to what's available and what works.
Thanks. And where do your notes and highlights end up?
I have a flat text file that's nearly 1MB in size, that I started 17 years ago! But it's just stored on Dropbox, which is cumbersome to use to search in the file while mobile.
