Caltrops - The Elder Scrolls - Re: But I'm part of your group, faggort.

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by Zseni 08/10/2004, 4:31pm PDT

Ormus wrote:

jeep wrote:

I need clarification wrote:

Ormus, you just bumped whydurst off the Caltrops' Stupidest list!

Laudable, if you can find someone like this guy, you're next. :)

I'm agreeing with a bunch of people I never agree with.

1. When Steinbeck wrote it, it was hard to believe great things come from more than one person working on something.

2. Zseni has a SB-like addiction to emergent social behaviors, but is probably on to something now that we know great things can come from groups of people.

3. Inc had it nailed, Ormus = fool.

/jeep/

As are many more like me. I am not the exception but the rule.

Yes, and like all the other totally average and largely unoriginal minds that are the rule and not the exception, your individual effort is totally replaceable by someone else's average and largely unoriginal mind. Maybe you would like to quote someone else to defend yourself against your averageness or unoriginality?

Here is a little challenge for your average mind, and you can accomplish it - if it is accomplishable, and you have already established that you think it is! - using nothing more advanced than Google.

Part the first:
Find me a "great" contribution to the field of any hard science of your choice authored in the last, say, 25 years, by a single mind working alone. We except from this challenge the Giles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem for reasons both obvious and sensible (Giles did not invent the theorem, and depended on many many years of research and education provided by other people) as well as esoteric and mathematic (the proof is only "great" insofar as it ties together two areas of mathematics thought previously unrelated, and, of course, it is a proof that has yet to be fully verified.)

Be prepared to defend your selection as both "great" and "the work of a single mind working alone."

Part the second:
Find a poem - these are usually written by single authors! - which is great. I will even extend your time limit - we will call it, say, 400 years.

Be prepared to defend your selection as "great" and "the work of a single mind working alone." I allow you to select from any language whatsoever! I will happily undertake the argument to the best of my ability regardless of your selection.

The lone genius producing works of staggering brilliance alone in his garret is not only dead, he never existed. All genius is either authorless or built on the genius before it and the civilization which sustains it and gives it meaning. Now, more than ever, genius is a team project. Science depends on it. Mathematics belongs to it. Literature, some might argue, is treading water without it. Civilization itself and the advancement of our species above all others is teamwork.

Steinbeck had a romantic dream. Why you elect to pit that dream against the crushing weight of the truth is lost to me, but it's a cruel thing to do to an old dead man. Now why not go help work out the bugs in the wiki? Whereas the object of your effort is completely replaceable, I, personally, want to see what you, personally, do.

ps to jeep: I'm cut off from my email for a few weeks. If you sent anything to me in the last couple of days, could you resend it to moonlitforge`at`hotmail.com?