Excellent. I may have a bit of a different take on the reason for near-simultaneous inventions or discoveries; then again, maybe you were just terse and meant to say the same thing as this: if a prior attention agenda is shared by many and suddenly intersects (coincides) with the advent of a new, perhaps quite small discovery or technology that can address that agenda; a lot of people are pre-primed to pluck from the new stimulus and will also encounter it. They will draw new conclusions simultaneously, even though some have never invented or discovered anything before. There's a striking example in the book "Music of the Primes" of a discovery that immediately led to all-nighter instant races to a new math advance (a further discovery re a known problem) that's now clearly inevitable. Just a matter of time, and not much time. Those races waste a lot of critically valuable resources, and advance the march of human progress by maybe a week, or just a few days no more. Exciting but pointlessly inefficient as well. And then we heap enormous prestige on whoever won what was really a pointless contest, a contest that had no significant consequence, changing humanity's history almost not at all.
In contrast other equally "obvious" (in retrospect) inventions go begging for decades or centuries. In part this is because our minds are associative; and that makes some jumps in logic very easy, and others quite difficult, sometimes for rather absurd reasons; but a lack of importance in the attention economy of that moment is a big factor too, as you say. Deep learning was bitterly scorned in academia for decades, delaying the advent of effective AI, to name just one example. ("The AI winter".) A badly misinterpreted result by Marvin and Minsky set us a long way back. I built a neural net that played tictactoe way back then, using evolution but not back propagation, but was unable to get any attention to that advance.
It follows that the most important discoveries are those that have been overlooked already, for some time. Since there's no telling how much longer it might be before those discoveries are made (if ever) this is where a great deal of our funding and emphasis as a culture ought to be going. But the opposite is true. Our academic institutions are not focused on the likely fruitless attempt to look for past errors or omissions; to the contrary everything is done to discourage revisiting "known" territory. It's a fatal flaw in our society.
It's important to convince society as a whole that even though many, many kinds of discoveries are indeed made simultaneously and in parallel; it's also true at the same time that other very important discoveries remain very low hanging fruit for long periods of time (or forever.) The individuals capable of making those discoveries, are extraordinarily valuable; but also extraordinarily scorned. Case in point: the elderly Einstein who discovered the logic consequence of quantum mechanics we now refer to as Entanglement "spooky action at a distance," but the academic herd so scorned that paper, and the author, re quantum mechanics, that his calculation was merely gainsaid until finally someone tested it, decades later, and found it was so.
Thanks Russell - I was being terse, as I squeezed the idea in as something of an aside, but your comment has helped me think through how to discuss it.
I suspect you're right about many of the more recent cases of near-simultaneous discovery, because the world has many people with shared attention agendas of all kinds. As such, lately the main constraint to such cases has perhaps become the small discoveries. But my belief with many of the older cases (let's say, pre-1850) is that the constraint was that so few people had similar attention agendas at all. As such, cases of near-simultaneous discovery could occur just by a handful of inventors' attention agendas happening to coincide.
I very much agree with a lot of the rest of your comment. The point about revisiting known territory rings especially true to me, as I've more or less built this substack on it! (e.g. my recent series on the steam engine)
I read a book called: What technology wants. In that book there was a discussion about how we grow technology by standing on the shoulders of those who came before, and since there are so many examples of simultaneous discovery of new invention, it's much less our minds that are creating the invention and much more technology progressing itself through us... Obviously a little philosophical but it was an interesting discussion none the less.
Fascinating history. I did not know about the involvement of Galileo (coming here from Bryne Hobart's The Diff).
Excellent. I may have a bit of a different take on the reason for near-simultaneous inventions or discoveries; then again, maybe you were just terse and meant to say the same thing as this: if a prior attention agenda is shared by many and suddenly intersects (coincides) with the advent of a new, perhaps quite small discovery or technology that can address that agenda; a lot of people are pre-primed to pluck from the new stimulus and will also encounter it. They will draw new conclusions simultaneously, even though some have never invented or discovered anything before. There's a striking example in the book "Music of the Primes" of a discovery that immediately led to all-nighter instant races to a new math advance (a further discovery re a known problem) that's now clearly inevitable. Just a matter of time, and not much time. Those races waste a lot of critically valuable resources, and advance the march of human progress by maybe a week, or just a few days no more. Exciting but pointlessly inefficient as well. And then we heap enormous prestige on whoever won what was really a pointless contest, a contest that had no significant consequence, changing humanity's history almost not at all.
In contrast other equally "obvious" (in retrospect) inventions go begging for decades or centuries. In part this is because our minds are associative; and that makes some jumps in logic very easy, and others quite difficult, sometimes for rather absurd reasons; but a lack of importance in the attention economy of that moment is a big factor too, as you say. Deep learning was bitterly scorned in academia for decades, delaying the advent of effective AI, to name just one example. ("The AI winter".) A badly misinterpreted result by Marvin and Minsky set us a long way back. I built a neural net that played tictactoe way back then, using evolution but not back propagation, but was unable to get any attention to that advance.
It follows that the most important discoveries are those that have been overlooked already, for some time. Since there's no telling how much longer it might be before those discoveries are made (if ever) this is where a great deal of our funding and emphasis as a culture ought to be going. But the opposite is true. Our academic institutions are not focused on the likely fruitless attempt to look for past errors or omissions; to the contrary everything is done to discourage revisiting "known" territory. It's a fatal flaw in our society.
It's important to convince society as a whole that even though many, many kinds of discoveries are indeed made simultaneously and in parallel; it's also true at the same time that other very important discoveries remain very low hanging fruit for long periods of time (or forever.) The individuals capable of making those discoveries, are extraordinarily valuable; but also extraordinarily scorned. Case in point: the elderly Einstein who discovered the logic consequence of quantum mechanics we now refer to as Entanglement "spooky action at a distance," but the academic herd so scorned that paper, and the author, re quantum mechanics, that his calculation was merely gainsaid until finally someone tested it, decades later, and found it was so.
Thanks Russell - I was being terse, as I squeezed the idea in as something of an aside, but your comment has helped me think through how to discuss it.
I suspect you're right about many of the more recent cases of near-simultaneous discovery, because the world has many people with shared attention agendas of all kinds. As such, lately the main constraint to such cases has perhaps become the small discoveries. But my belief with many of the older cases (let's say, pre-1850) is that the constraint was that so few people had similar attention agendas at all. As such, cases of near-simultaneous discovery could occur just by a handful of inventors' attention agendas happening to coincide.
I very much agree with a lot of the rest of your comment. The point about revisiting known territory rings especially true to me, as I've more or less built this substack on it! (e.g. my recent series on the steam engine)
"the ancient experiment was simply to heating the base" might need a rewrite...
Thanks for spotting that. It’s amazing what can get missed when you rewrite a sentence a couple of times! And nobody else pointed it out.
I read a book called: What technology wants. In that book there was a discussion about how we grow technology by standing on the shoulders of those who came before, and since there are so many examples of simultaneous discovery of new invention, it's much less our minds that are creating the invention and much more technology progressing itself through us... Obviously a little philosophical but it was an interesting discussion none the less.
That's a fun way of looking at it - the pull of the possible being realised, dragging us along with it. Will check the book out thank you.