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A mild counterexample would be something like Terence Tao using his public stature to coordinate a large-scale assault on a math problem (refining Yitang Zhang's bounds on the twin primes conjecture), but even there...James Maynard made a big leap on his own private track
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If you do want to shape the course of events but lack the public-figure capital to do so, backstage influence is still a mechanism of course, but there you're essentially supporting someone else's public maneuvering.
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The only way to "become" a public figure is to either represent old power, OR create _and_ control a new source of power.
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It can, but only by way of activating new actors in public life or deactivating existing ones. Everything that's directly about public figures influences public life through this mechanism of gatekeeping who "counts" in public.
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Replying to @vgr
This implies that discovering/communicating information that isn't about allies, or engaging in actions not about such allies, cannot shape the course of events. An even stronger claim.
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For eg. if you invent a time travel machine, and manage to hold on to the political capital that entails instead of ceding it to Putin or Thiel or AOC, you're now a public figure, congrats.
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Again, referring back to Arendt, she claimed that this sort of thing happened only thrice in history before modernity: 1. Galileo turning telescope to heavens 2. Martin Luther doing his theses 3. Columbus discovering America These introduced "new information" into public life
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I am personally not sure about the second one. New *information* entering the public sphere via new actors who represent it politically is really, really rare. Most of the time, entries and exits of actors does not introduce or remove information from play.
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Arguably, blockchain is potentially the first new thing to enter the public since Galilean science via genuinely new actors who cannot be co-opted by existing interests. Even nukes did not really meet the bar (they were just very big bombs). Nor did Apollo (that was Galileo+++++)
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Arendt's criteria are very demanding. Random discoveries don't qualify. Basically, the "new information" has to create a materially new perspective from which to view the the human condition (space and America respectively for 1 and 3).
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Replying to @vgr
#2 isn’t information and surely there are more things like #1 and #3
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