12.15.11
Where didth all the innovathion go?
More of the magazine writer’s fascination with asking wealthy people who used to be big deals for wisdom on solving the world’s problems. It’s the presentation of symptoms of a spectacularly America-centric disease — hubris: The witchdoctor-like related beliefs that great money means wisdom and that if you were once great in one thing, you’re stupendous in all endeavors thereafter.
In this case, it’s Jacob Weisberg speaking with Nathan Myhrvold, who many years ago was a big name at Microsoft.
I’m not sure what it is with the lithping speakers this week(odd coincidence, mainly) but if you go onto the videotaped interview at this link, you’ll notice Weisberg has one. If you can endure the entire segment, you’ll hear him actually say “yeth” at one point.
As an aside, I have no idea why anyone would think someone with a lisp is a good choice as an interlocutor for video interviews.
Myrhvold is not particularly interesting. He’s focused only on innovation in computer science. The first thing out of his mouth is Apple, all fine and good. But it’s no unusual observation and there’s a case to be made that iKit, illustratively, has had little power in getting the country out of the morass.
We will not be iTuning and iPhoning ourselves to national prosperity. And the Egyptians are not free of dictatorship yet, despite the existence of Facebook.
Surprisingly, Myrhvold doesn’t get anywhere near discussion of the hard
sciences, excellence in which has been dominating for most of my life. And which underlying achievement and discovery in provides the bedrock upon which all technology is built. Funding big science post WWII has been a government job. It is not about venture capitalists and wealthy benefactors rewarding big thinkers.
So this Myrhvold segment, you may guess, is nothing about that. Instead it is all talk about venture capital and bankrolling start-up entrepreneurs. It’s banal. And it’s also a threadbare cliche. This is all anyone ever talks about in these types of things — how to harness or gather means in bringing wealth to the funding of small businessmen with big ideas.
F—— wow!
Perhaps promised later segments will improve. However, I’d be willing to bet most readers won’t hang around for them, since this one’s so crap.
Plus, there’s the … lithp. (Can you see me rolling the eyes?)
Jesus H. Christ on a stick, one really can’t be supercilious enough!
It’s one thing to be sensitive to an obvious handicap, quite another when the handicap is passed off in this manner. It’s like asking people to entertain the notion that someone with an artificial hand could be a hot passer in the National Football League.
Anyway, here’s another excerpt from the Slate interview, taken only as a demonstration that if you let the wealthy computer geek talk enough, sooner or later he’ll spout the fatuous, believing it to be gnomic:
When he isn’t patent-hunting or contemplating how to slow global warming, Myhrvold loves to cook. Perhaps not surprisingly, he applies scientific principles in the kitchen, which are at the heart of his six-volume, 2,400-page cookbook, Modernist Cuisine: The Art of Science and Cooking, published this year. According to Myhrvold, food is at the center of a lot of our social issues. “If you can make food that’s good for you and delicious, that solves some pretty major societal problems.???
Forty five million people on foodstamps in this country, now, Nathan.
And not one of them served or much interested in a six volume 2,400-page cookbook from an ex-Microsoft guy, I bet.