> In a sentence: I think we should read history for concept instantiations, not lessons.<p>By this, the author seems to mean reading for patterns instead of rote facts. And if you go to anyone teaching history in any college anywhere, they'll tell you something similar.<p>If only this autodidact had studied history . . .
Lousy article. For example, the author complains about a supposed 'lesson learned' that says (shortened) "If so-and-so happens it may be because of A, or it may be because of B". His complaint is "except that it may be because of C or D".<p>But the 'lesson' he presented never claimed to be an exclusive either-or.
It just says "here are two possible explanations for something".<p>There's sloppy thinking like this throughout. Thumbs down for me.
When I read this type of stories I cannot help but think that the world would be better off if we banned that type of predator-like behavior, those super aggressive strategies that aim at getting the concurrence out of business by lowering the price more and more until you get a monopoly.<p>No-one can deny that what he did was a huge innovation, the fact that it is still being used 60 years later is a testament of that, but how much innovation was killed in the egg when competitors were forced out of the market?
When I go back to the top list like "1. Good managers cannot ‘manage anything’. Specialisation counts", it seems like this is the sort of conclusion you can also draw if you have multiple "prototypes" in your head, which come from reading more history. (Whether they're actually true or not, it seems.) So, the conclusion here is "don't extrapolate from a dataset of 1". It seems like this was an awfully roundabout way of getting there.