the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life
I think we need a lot of local heroism. We have a few billions people on this planet, but we also have a few billion problems—even if we perhaps have only a few thousand repeating patterns of problems.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”. Sometimes we need a smart person to invent a solution to the problem. Sometimes we need thousands of people to implement that solution, and also to solve the unexpected problems with the solution, because in real life the solution is never perfect.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”.
That’s a good distinction and I would also throw in the third kind—“heroism within a generally disfunctional pattern which continues to exist because regular heroics keep it afloat”. This is related to the well-known management concept of the “firefighting mode”.
I think we need a lot of local heroism. We have a few billions people on this planet, but we also have a few billion problems—even if we perhaps have only a few thousand repeating patterns of problems.
Maybe it would be good to distinguish between “heroism within a generally functional pattern which happened to have an exception” and a “pattern-changing heroism”. Sometimes we need a smart person to invent a solution to the problem. Sometimes we need thousands of people to implement that solution, and also to solve the unexpected problems with the solution, because in real life the solution is never perfect.
That’s a good distinction and I would also throw in the third kind—“heroism within a generally disfunctional pattern which continues to exist because regular heroics keep it afloat”. This is related to the well-known management concept of the “firefighting mode”.