It seems that you are gesturing toward the supporting roles that enabled or allowed Alec to save those lives. I find it both true (in this hypothetical scenario) that those lives were saved because of Alec’s choices, and also that AleC’s choices are in turn dependent on other things. This seems to echo some aspects of the ideas of dependent origination. If we really want to give “credit,” then maybe we would have to use something vaguely analogous to exponential smoothing: Alec get’s 80% of the credit, and the person before that gets 80%^2 of the remaining credit, the person before that gets 80%^3 of the remaining credit, etc.
Also vaguely related, the book The Innovation Delusion has a section relating to this idea of giving credit and the idea of the enabling and supporting people that don’t get credit for their contributions, describing it as a “cult of the inventor.” Here is a small excerpt:
Edison—widely celebrated as the inventor of the lightbulb, among many other things—is a good example. Edison did not toil alone in his Menlo Park laboratory; rather, he employed a staff of several dozen men who worked as machinists, ran experiments, researched patents, sketched designs, and kept careful records in notebooks. Teams of Irish and African American servants maintained their homes and boardinghouses. Menlo Park also had a boardinghouse for the workers, where Mrs. Sarah Jordan, her daughter Ida, and a domestic servant named Kate Williams cooked for the inventors and provided a clean and comfortable dwelling. But you won’t see any of those people in the iconic images of Edison posing with his lightbulb.
It seems that you are gesturing toward the supporting roles that enabled or allowed Alec to save those lives. I find it both true (in this hypothetical scenario) that those lives were saved because of Alec’s choices, and also that AleC’s choices are in turn dependent on other things. This seems to echo some aspects of the ideas of dependent origination. If we really want to give “credit,” then maybe we would have to use something vaguely analogous to exponential smoothing: Alec get’s 80% of the credit, and the person before that gets 80%^2 of the remaining credit, the person before that gets 80%^3 of the remaining credit, etc.
Also vaguely related, the book The Innovation Delusion has a section relating to this idea of giving credit and the idea of the enabling and supporting people that don’t get credit for their contributions, describing it as a “cult of the inventor.” Here is a small excerpt: