The 'One Great Man' problem, or 'Tony Stark Syndrome'
This post is being written stand on its own, but also for referencing in other posts, to save covering the topic repeatedly.
In our culture, we regularly encounter everything from popular culture figures, to fictional characters, to public figures and political leaders, where vast and extreme levels of skill and competence are ascribed to them with no evidence to support it. We accept this in every area of life from politics to business and science. I'm going to break that down, and show how I see this as a logical fallacy that we don't recognize, and are duped by day to day. Hopefully, we can start to look past this, and recognize that human beings aren't up to many of the expectations we have of them, and to respect the time and effort it takes to become skilled in any endeavor.
We'll begin with Tony Stark (aka Iron Man in the Iron Man and Avenger movies). Tony is one of the most extreme cases, so he'll be the archetype for our discussion. In the Iron Man movies you see Tony casually chatting with the J.A.R.V.I.S artificial intelligence/personal assistant (hereafter just Jarvis). Watching the movie, we tend toaccept this since we're already suspending disbelief since it's based on a comic book. Let's stop at Jarvis and take a look at this.
Tony's use of voice and natural language to control and make sophisticated requests of Jarvis requires a quality and precision of voice and natural language recognition that far surpasses the best AI's available today. Products developed by teams of specialists aren't as good as what Tony does casually, just to make Jarvis up to his standards.
Jarvis is, of course, voiced by Paul Bettany, a respected actor. This, by itself shows that voice synthesis is not capable of the level of quality required by the movie. Again, this is an area where Tony's casual programming is better than the state of the art that the best teams of specialists can produce. As an example, this blog post from Google's Deepmind team shows that even the best speech synthesis possible at this time (years after the first movie with Jarvis) is still awkward and clearly robotic at times.
https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/
That's not mentioning the quality of the AI that Tony has created in Jarvis itself. Jarvis is probably several decades ahead of current AI capability, if not more. It's difficult to state what a massive achievement Jarvis would be! Here's the catch: Jarvis was not the point of Tony's work. It was an aside...a footnote...in the pursuit of other goals.
Then, when you add in what it would take to make the Iron Man suit itself, there are a myriad of specialized disciplines involved in the type of robotic suit manufacturing that Tony seems to do just casually in his lab. Metallurgy, robotics, electronics, circuit board design, mechanical engineering, heads-up-display design, user interface design...the list goes on and on. All of these are disciplines where individuals normally reach graduate and post graduate specializations and work with large teams to accomplish technical project goals. That Tony supposedly does all of this himself is not plausible when you scratch the surface and look even a layer deep into the matter.
The 'One Great Man' trope also applies to a great number of fictional characters, for example; even the 'mad scientist' concept is much like this. We assume that because we're not scientists, that anything in science is open to a 'great mind'. The reality is that scientists these days are often specialists in a very narrow area of their field. An astronomer might specialize in studying icy bodies in the Kuiper belt; a physicist might study how to manipulate individual atoms. These are both specialties of real people (not named since this isn't about them specifically).
Movies and fiction often ascribe near mythical capabilities to computer specialists. There's a well known scene from the CSI television show where the nerdy Goth girl isn't able to keep up with the hackers, so she shares her keyboard with someone else and they type simultaneously (isn't she also the forensics person?).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msX4oAXpvUE
People in the IT industry consider the above video one of the worst Hollywood abuses of public ignorance of computers (there are plenty more). Since most folks don't understand how computers work, they can't know where the boundaries of possibility are, and essentially ascribe magical qualities to it. I worked helpdesk for a number of years, and it was normal for people to expect that I could see everything on their screen, even though their computer wasn't booting properly, or wasn't connected to the Internet, among other ailments.
Possibly my favorite example in fiction is from Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged'. While John Galt qualifies, so much of the story focuses on worshipping (in my opinion) Hank Rearden. This video from the 'Atlas Society' paints a picture of a man who bootstraps himself into owning the company, though it excludes discussion of how a miner could accomplish this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiXiCr-UIO0
The video states that he was digging, hauling and smelting the metal, and somehow also learned the business. It makes a radical jump from someone who works in the mine at various jobs to all of a sudden owning it. This is our first clue that something is wrong. Following this, he is a man besieged by the government, by his wife and family, etc. somehow struggling onward against the pressure of everything in his life. The author is clearly setting us up for the 'Great Man' to achieve against the odds.
In the book, this is mostly background and setup for the character, and already strains credibility. The push off the deep end comes from 'Rearden Metal'. When he creates this super-alloy, to prove it's greatness, he not only produces the metal, but various products from it. The center piece is the bridge he designs out of Rearden Metal to save Dagny's rail line. Somehow, he also learned engineering, architecture, manufacturing, and contracting to put it all together. No credit is given to the effort required to do this, or the years of study that would be required. And many of the protagonist characters in the story exhibit similar breadth of skillset, simply through sheer will, as far as one can tell.
The rest of the book amplifies this concept and caps it off with a perpetual motion machine. The lesson of the book seems to be that without the few 'Great Men' in the world, society would collapse and we would all suffer. Therefore, we should worship the 'Great Men' and loose them to do all that they are capable of, and presently unable to because of regulation and law.
Enough about 'Atlas Shrugged' for now. Ayn Rand, and her band of 'Objectivist' followers deserves it's own post. (I'll link it here later, if I write that article.)
A key point in this concept is the disdain and lack of respect that exists for anyone who isn't a 'Great Man'. This applies to Ayn Rand, Tony Stark, and any scenario where we prize the single person's greatness over everything else. Maybe a strong dose of Mike Rowe and a marathon of Dirty Jobs is in order?
Where do we see this in real life? CEO worship, for one. A study of CEO pay ratios released July 20, 2017, pegs the typical rate at 271-to-1. Even as recently as 1989, they state it was only 59-to-1.
The following 2015 article from Investopedia attempts to justify the gap, and states:
"CEOs are at the helm of public companies and the role needs to be adequately rewarded so as to attract suitable candidates who will steer their companies well."
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/073015/justifications-high-ceo-pay.asp
If this is true, and CEOs are magical unicorns that justify a massive pay gap, we should be able to see how this works with real world examples. One of the companies that should exemplify this is Microsoft. When we look at this, Bill Gates should be the unicorn CEO in this scenario, yet when he left, things didn't fall apart. You can say that Ballmer was in a position to keep things going for a while, but how long? When Satya took over, the company really should have failed, right? Under Satya, the stock price of MSFT has almost doubled. The direction he's taking the company, and the results he's getting are counter to the idea of the 'One Great Man'.
A counter example might be Sears. Sears, is at the moment trading near it's all time low at $8.72. It's CEO is worth $2.2Bn apparently, while his company is falling apart. What strikes me about the failure of Sears is that it seems like a capable CEO should have engineered Sears into a massive powerhouse. Retail is dominated by either online entities (e.g. Amazon), or brick and mortar retailers who became massively efficient with their supply chains (e.g. Target and Walmart). Sears should have had a massive strategic and tactical advantage at the start of the Internet era. For decades Sears had maintained the catalog sales business model. Your grandparents probably looked at Sears catalogs decades ago.
From what I can tell, the decline of Sears came from a failure of leadership. They doubled down on the brick and mortar business model just as it was failing. And doing so by joining forces with failing businesses like Kmart. With a history of fulfilling product orders from a catalog, the move to online should have been immediately obvious. At this point, they are down from 3500 physical stores in 2010, to under 700 with plans to close another batch of stores before the year's end. Where were the CEO geniuses here?
Obviously, the above is anecdotal, and doesn't prove things outright. If someone can come up with information that shows that high CEO pay correlates with improving corporate returns more than with failures, that would be worth looking at. For now, Yahoo shows that a CEO can make an exorbitant amount of money while shedding jobs and shedding volume in their core business (advertising). And where does Steve Jobs and Apple fit into this?
We experience 'One Great Man' syndrome in fiction, mythology, and every day life. If we can learn to spot it, we can prevent ourselves from getting caught up in it. If you're thinking about it through a Bayesian lens, then we should be updating our priors, so that we are more accurate in our predictions and expectations.
If you think I'm failing to make the point, or would like to discuss details, just follow up in the comments section.