Steve wanted to become chairman of the board and teach at Stanford. Given how much he trusted Tim, I’m not so sure the company would have taken a dramatically different path had he been around longer.
But this sounds like an ideal setup, doesn't it? Tim is fantastic at execution, but he does need a shot of big-picture vision every now and then. Tim as CEO with Steve as Chairman, steering the broader direction, feels like it could have been a perfect pairing. The issue with how things actually turned out is that Tim ended up on his own - all execution, no vision.
How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Steve was so effective precisely because he was able to get deeply involved in the day to day details in ways no other CEO has (whether on product matters, or personnel matters). That's not what you do as chairman of the board.
> How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Jobs in that role would likely take a much more occasionally-active role w.r.t. future product direction since that was kind of his bread-and-butter and the company was his long-time passion project. Not because that's the regular purpose of that role, but because that's what he'd probably want to keep doing.
If he hadn't tried to self-treat his cancer with acupuncture, fruit juice and herbs, he'd probably be around now to do that. The man was clearly a lucky idiot, and shouldn't be revered, but used as a cautionary tale of unbridled arrogance.
I'd consider myself a Steve Jobs hater (and I think his treatment choices were bad) but the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is in the 10-15% range.
"Probably", he'd not be around today. Even with his money, it'd be improbable.
He had a much more treatable and slowly growing variety of pancreatic cancer - it was a neuroendocrine cancer in his pancreas (an islet cell tumor). The 5-yr survival rate for stage 1/2 is something like 95%, and even stage 4 is still around a 25%. The more common and deadly pancreatic cancer you’re thinking of has a 5yr survival rate of under 15% and under 3% if it’s advanced to stage 4.
If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.
Right - but he only lived 8 more years because by the time he’d had surgery, the cancer had metastasized to his liver which is much more difficult to treat.
Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.
Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
He should perhaps be a cautionary tale against thinking that being really good at building consumer tech products makes you good at everything. But if this is your standard for "lucky idiot", I wonder who of note you wouldn't consider a lucky idiot. You can dig up something like this for everyone from Newton to Salk.
My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)
To be fair, tons of scientists and technical people believed at that time that telepathy might be real. For example if you go back and read science fiction from the 40s, 50s, even 60s, there is a ton of telepathy and mental powers. This reflects both the authors’ efforts to predict future scientific advancement, and their audience’s willingness to believe it.
No it represents the editor's (John W. Campbell) passions - he would suggest using those ideas to authours and was more likely to accept stories with those ideas.
He had an overwhelming presence in SF until the New Wave of the 1960s
It’s more accurate to say that Campbell became a huge presence in science fiction by publishing the stories he did. Their popular success reflected a desire in the culture to read what was being published. Larry Niven is one example of an author who did not go through Campbell but yet had many mental powers in his stories and found huge success.
Many universities had depts to study “parapsychology.” The end of that era is the basis for the opening of Ghostbusters. I’m using popular media as shorthand for how wide-spread these ideas were, but military and intelligence operations seriously studied this stuff too, and in many countries, not just the U.S.
This is the way science goes; people can only work with what is known at the time. Newton was doing alchemy while inventing the basis for modern physics. It’s tempting to look back and condemn people by the standards of what we know today, which is based on additional evidence and theory developed over decades or centuries since. But I think it inhibits understanding of how such knowledge is created over time.
Especially when it comes to life threatening illnesses like cancer. I've seen more than one entirely normal, rational person start grasping at off the wall solutions when faced with the imminent end of their life.
People get sick and they die. Nobody should have to go through any treatments they dont want to. And to blame someone for that is like blaming them for the disease.
That lecture is by a doctor who had widely discredited views on cancer, often cited as an example of quack, pseudoscientific claims on the topic.
His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.
I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.
