Comment by mannykannot

You are describing hiking in the mountains, which doesn’t generalize to mountaineering and rock-climbing when it gets difficult, and the difficulties this view is abstracting away are real.

Your second and third paragraphs are entirely consistent with the original point I was trying to make, which was not that it took Einstein specifically to come up with relativity, but that it took someone with uncommon skills, as evidenced by the fact that it blindsided even a good many of the people who were qualified to be contenders for being the one to figure it out first. It does not amount to proof, but one does not expect people who are closing in on the solution to be blindsided by it.

I am well aware of the problems with “great man” hagiography, but dismissing individual contributions, which is what the person I was replying to seemed to be doing, is a distortion in its own way.