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Comment by alexwolfe | Hacker News Reader

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution."

Malcom fails to realize by his definition everyone would be a tweaker. Henry Ford - tweaker, Einstein - tweaker, Jobs - tweaker...

I think its clear who the tweaker is and it isn't Einstein, Ford, or Jobs.

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Those people took existing concepts and rearranged them in a way not previously done before. It is up to you to call that tweaking or inventing.

I don't think Einstein was a tweaker. His theories came completely out of left field.

Not completely left field. Relativity, Lorentz and Michelson knew there were problems with the standard formulation. FitzGerald had a go at resolving the issues, and the Maxwell group suspected there could not be an absolute reference frame. Quanta: Planck, the dialogue of Mach/Helmholz. There was a context and a problem situation that Einstein was able to resolve to some extent in a brilliant way.

Everyone in any field has had help or inspiration from others. I'm just not a fan fo Malcom calling this tweaking, its is demeaning to everyone who's ever done anything. If Steve Jobs just "tweaked" things and wasn't and inventor than what does that say about everyone else in the world?

Its easy to take shots at someone after the fact, the reality is that maybe he wasn't everything people thought he was. He might not have been a sweetheart to work with, in fact he may have been a jerk. But, lets not kid ourselves into believing he didn't do that much and was just some tweaker at Apple, I call BS. Apple was basically dead when he returned, dead. It must have been a little more than tweaking to make it the most successful company in the world.

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