Nadia Asparouhova: evaluation

Transcript context

…The idea is that they weren't just one person, it was just a whole bunch of people throughout a bunch of centuries who composed different parts of each story or composed different stories. The Nicolas Bourbaki model. Same concept of a single mathematician who's actually comprised of lots of different people. I think my conclusion would actually be the opposite. We think of open source as this very collective volunteer effort and use that as an excuse to not really contribute back to open source or not really think about how open source projects are maintained. Because we have this bystander effect where someone's taking care of it, it's volunteer oriented. But in reality, it actually turns out it is just one person. Maybe it's a little bit more of a Wizard of Oz type model. It's actually just one person behind the curtain that's doing everything and you see this huge grandeur and you think there must be so many people that are behind it. It's one person. I think that's undervalued. I think a lot of the rhetoric that we have about open source is rooted in the early 2000s starry eyed idea about the power of the internet, and the idea of crowdsourcing, and Wikipedia and all this stuff. And then in reality, we see this convergence from very broad based collaborative volunteer efforts to narrowing down to single creators. And I think a lot of single creators are the people that are really driving a lot of the internet and a lot of cultural production today. Oh, that's super fascinating. Does that in general make you more sympathetic towards the lone genius view of accomplishments in history? Not just in literature but just when you think back to — How likely is it that Newton came up with all that stuff on his own versus how much was fed into him by others around him?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.