Some examples: the late Marvin Minsky's utterly extraordinary list of students and collaborators: https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/people.html … (from Ivan Sutherland to Terry Winograd to Eric Drexler to...)
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Who in the world has super taste, a feel for and way of picking subjects that, decades in the future, will seem prescient, as though they had a line on the future?
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Murray Gell-Mann's extraordinary list of proteges include Ken Wilson, John Schwartz, Jim Hartle, and, in a way, the whole Santa Fe Institute.
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Stewart Brand saw so much early: Engelbart & human augmentation; the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey; the population bomb (he worked with Ehrlich); Xerox PARC; the Well (one of the first online communities); the Whole Earth Catalog; and so much else: http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html …
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More people: I can make a case for George Church, Jane Jacobs, Eric Drexler, and many others. In each case they saw multiple things, often in (supposedly) unconnected disciplines, decades ahead of the mainstream.
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Who else can you think of? What did they see, decades before almost everyone else?
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More good examples: John Wheeler, Hal Abelson (suggested by
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Just a clarification: I mean people who are right over and over again. Not just that they founded a field, but rather that they were a key enabler in the early days of many, many fields. Eg, Minsky's proteges helped found perhaps a dozen or more distinct fields or subfields.
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To reiterate: lots of people are mentioning field founders. Which is great, but not the question. The question is: who helped enable new fields to emerge, over & over & over & over again. Eg, I can name a dozen fields or subfields for Minsky.
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A related question that I sometimes wonder: if you crash landed on an alien planet, with an art form you had no clue how to interpret, would you still be able to identify people with good taste in this art form? It seems like you could & understanding how feels like a cool puzzle
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I presume you mean: identify aliens with good taste in this art form? Seems a very PageRank-esque question!
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