Comment by assemblyman

A few people mentioned Meta burning through people like LeCun, Carmack and Luckey. We give a lot of credit to individuals in our society. At the same time, there's a frequent pattern of very successful people changing fields, organizations or general environments and suddenly looking very ordinary. In a way, this is a very strong argument to let people settle into a place they can be happiest in. A few examples:

* This is seen very often in Formula One. Schumacher when he went from Ferrari to Mercedes (after a short sabbatical), Vettel from Red Bull to Ferrari, Raikkonen from Lotus to Ferrari (his second stint), Hamilton from Mercedes to Ferrari, Perez at McLaren. There's a lot of Ferrari here so maybe that's the confounding factor.

* This also happens when physicists changed fields. They generally can't replicate their earlier success. Dirac, Feynman, Schwinger, Einstein all went through a transition like this. One explanation is that their early success was precisely so unusual (for anyone) that it would be hard to replicate in general.

* In my experience, this happens at companies too. Whenever we hired a "rockstar" from another company, they would generally struggle (across multiple companies I have been at). This could partly be a result of sabotage from a few vested interests at the new company. But often, it's hard to adjust to a new environment in a short amount of time.

The converse also happens. Sometimes a person considered ordinary goes to a different environment and flourishes. Palmer Luckey has been very successful at Anduril. Stephen Smale was almost failing out of his math PhD program but suddenly started flourishing in his third year IIRC and eventually got a fields medal. Ed Witten experimented with economics, history, linguistics, applied math before switching to physics in his second year and suddenly started making rapid progress.

This is not a very rigorous observation and I am missing many confounding factors.