Comment by doginasuit
11 hours ago
Well said. Attribution is important, for obvious human reasons and to direct people to valuable context. But our names will fade fast from history, what matters is the journey of human knowledge.
> It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
--Harry S. Truman
> It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Me, 2026
Jokes aside, this is a thought provoking quote. I do think it's easy to say as a well known figurehead, when the quote and other actions below you may easily be attributed to you, at least partially. But I do agree somewhat, and I think the context around Truman's time (WWII) is a good example of what humanity can accomplish when the stakes at hand supersede the considerations of workers' rights or credit/ownership. Of course this is also a very favorable phrasing for a period of enormous human suffering. I think there is an arms race analogy to be drawn here, though the current situation and stakes are much different.
I remember reading an account of a number of intelligencia taking over a factory shortly after the Soviet revolution after it was nationalized and they got super dialed in an productivity shot up. The factory ran like a swiss watch.
It took nearly a year for things to regress. Bad actors started taking plum positions and the actual intellectuals didn't really want to be working in a factory long term and then there was the question of who got the benefits of this success.
It was fascinating though how heady it was for that first year when everybody was highly aligned and working smartly and in unison.
Funnily enough, there’s a good chance Truman never said those words; the earliest known attribution of the quote to him is from a Time magazine article written in 1988. It’s not in any of his personal writing or speeches.
> Attribution is important
Amazing how quickly people forget how these AI companies gained their fortune. The whole existence of modern LLM's is due to taking (stealing) other peoples work without attribution.
> what matters is the journey of human knowledge
This is probably a lot easier to accept when you haven't dedicated your entire life to a specific field of research, and then are made significantly less relevant by a machine.
It’s not just about credit. Mortgages require money and money comes from working a job.
R&D and its practitioners are already under mighty pressure to justify their existence, if credit is taken off the table it’s the end of it as a means to survive (let alone comfortably).
Society has already settled the question of whether it's ok to render someone's job obsolete.
Yeah, and it’s amazing that we chose to build our society around maximizing the benefits of taking credit regardless.
(From [0])
'A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.'
"QI hypothesizes that a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland deserves primary credit for this family of sayings. This claim is based on the diary entry dated September 21, 1863 written by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff and multiple attributions thereafter. However, similar maxims may have been developed independently."
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless
Isn't this ironically completely against the idea of not caring who gets the credit
Well, Father Strickland seems to have kept his name off it.
[dead]
> It is amazing how far you can get by taking credit for accomplishments you didn't do by talking those who do accomplish things into not caring about the credit. --$clever
Feel free to replace $clever with any name of your convenience.
Indeed! If it is true, and it works, it is true and it works. These side dishes of major discoveries outpacing experts' complaints of slop are very satisfying as I do not care who gets imaginary existential points for discovering them.
> If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best
--Albert Einstein (Director, Los Alamos Laboratory)
Surely that was Oppenheimer.
"Any famous quote is eventually attributed to Albert Einstein"
-- Albert Einstein
1 reply →
Attribution is a fascinating topic.
For example, one generally don’t name cells in their body, and cells works generally pretty well to sustain a whole self.
On societal level, obviously no one is aware of who authored the biggest mass of benefit that is granted by the mere fact of living in society. No specific individual have credits for example regarding the language they use daily¹. For the most recent ones, it’s now often possible to attach some name to invention of some cultural/technological artifact, but of course Zeitgeist-wise perspective tend to consider it’s rarely a single punctual individual that should be considered the critical pivot point.
On the other hand, even Marx that was so critical of individual alienation couldn’t refrain to make the intellectual equivalent of pissing territory and attach a name referring to its own ego within all of his works. Ego is a masterpiece of illusion: it will bring the foundational leveraging to build every possible societal hegemony under the sun while convincing the deluded that serving the ego is the indispensable first step of everything to best serve every individual selfs.
¹ Even for constructed languages, such as Esperanto that I practice myself, whoever construct them obviously don’t start from cultural blank slate.
Attribution is a way to pay knowledge workers in ego boost rather than currency. It's a kind of exploitation.
Some recognize this.
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." — Samuel Johnson
Your comment made me think of Daffy Duck numbering his feathers, in case they ever got blown off his body by explosion.
Maybe Wolverine should consider naming his cells...?