Oleg Sobchuk
1 min readJul 4, 2018

--

The “inevitability of inventions” argument is a good addition here, thanks Rafał.
And you are right: “genius” and the “(most) prestigious” aren’t exactly the same. But they seem to frequently overlap: the society tends to attribute the features of a genius to the most prestigious figures in a field, who don’t necessarily have those features. This doesn’t mean, of course, that some people don’t deserve higher praise than others — but this praise tends to quickly escalate into religion-like cults… or at least into an unrealistically skewed picture of what really happened.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

Oleg Sobchuk
Oleg Sobchuk

Written by Oleg Sobchuk

I write about the evolution of art. Graphs, long-term trends, and speculative ideas are included. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena.

No responses yet

Write a response