"Multiple discovery and invention: Zeitgeist, genius, or chance?"

"The occurrence of independent contributions by 2 or more scientists can be interpreted in terms of zeitgeist, genius, or chance. The relative adequacy of these 3 theories was examined by examining the general and intradisciplinary probability distribution of multiples and the relationship of individual eminence with multiple production and priority. An analysis of 579 multiples and of 789 scientists and inventors gave the most support to the chance theory, followed by the zeitgeist theory. Results are integrated into a single probabilistic perspective that incorporates some of the major features of all 3 theories. A small group of highly productive individuals is most likely to participate in multiples, including independent rediscoveries. These same persons are also unusually intimate with the 'technoscientific' zeitgeist and perhaps equally gifted with an inordinate amount of good luck."

Three Mini Book Reviews

How's Your Drink (3/5)

"By portraying himself as a man who enjoyed drinks in abstemious moderation, T.R. managed a straddle of Clintonian sophistication: He may have sipped the occasional Mint Julep, but he didn't inhale them.

Roosevelt testified that in the years since he left the White House he had put only two Mint Juleps to his lips. One of those, he said, was at the St. Louis Country Club, where he only took a couple of sips. The St. Louis Post Dispatch teasingly accused T.R. of perjury. After all, the Mint Juleps made by the country club's bartender, Tom Bullock, were just too good for anyone to taste and put aside. 'To believe that a red-blooded man, and a true Colonel at that, ever stopped with just a part of one of those refreshments,' the Post Dispatch editorialized, 'is to strain credulity too far.'"

Prohibition (1920-1933) is so far in the past that it is hard to fathom. Remember that Prohibition ruined fine dining for decades in the U.S.; especially French cuisine with wine parings and wine-based sauces that were illegal, and that per capita alcohol consumption did not regain pre-prohibition levels until 1973! What federal government nonsense today will seem equally absurd in 2097?

The Sociopath Next Door (3.5/5)

"Our normal affinity for the occasional thrill can make the risk-taking sociopath seem all the more charming - at first. Initially, it can be exciting to be invited into the risky scheme, to be associated with the person who is making choices outside of our ordinary boundaries.

Let us take your credit card and fly to Paris tonight. Let us take your savings and start the business that sounds so foolish but, with two minds like ours, could really take off. Let us go down to the beach and watch the hurricane. Let us get married right now. Let us lose these boring friends of yours and go off somewhere by ourselves. Let us have sex in the elevator. Let us invest your money in this hot tip I just got. Let us laugh at the rules. Let us walk into this restaurant dressed in our T-shirts and jeans. Let us see how fast your car can go. Let us live a little."

Wall Street and finance are full of sociopaths. They are incompetent investors, and it is a shame that the sociopaths who gambled their firms and lost were bailed out and allowed to continue to direct production.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (3/5)

"We usually imagine that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place–perhaps all three–require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then–sometimes–a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious. When Niels Bohr–along with Einstein, the world’s greatest physicist–heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he slapped his head and said, 'Oh, what idiots we have all been!'"

Simultaneous invention. This book is a history of Bell Labs and the many important inventions of the scientists there: transistor, solar cells, telephone switching, cell phones, etc. See also the socionomic perspective from Prechter on the timing of the antitrust lawsuit against AT&T in 1974 (following major bear market) and the breakup into Baby Bells in 1982 (following another bear market).

Great Point By Donald Campbell On Simultaneous Invention

I've written about simultaneous invention before. This is from Donald Campbell in the book Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Society of Knowledge (p71, 1987):

"A major empirical achievement of the sociology of science is the evidence of the ubiquity of simultaneous invention. If many scientists are trying variations on the same corpus of current scientific knowledge, and if their trials are being edited by the same stable external reality, then the selected variants are apt to be similar, the same discovery encountered independently by numerous workers. This process is no more mysterious than that all of a set of blind rats, each starting with quite different patterns of initial responses, learn the same maze pattern, under the maze's common editorship of the varied response repertoires. Their learning is actually their independent invention or discovery of the same response pattern. In doubly reflexively appropriateness, the theory of natural selection was itself multiply independently invented, not only by Wallace but by many others. Moreover, the ubiquity of independent invention in science has itself been independently discovered."

Here's a piece that Campbell wrote wrote for Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Emerging Cognitive Science [sample PDF]:

"Rather than praying, 'May I be a competent and well-read X-ologist, may I keep up with the literature in my field,' a scholar will pray, 'Make me a novel fish-scale. Let my pattern of inevitably incomplete competence cover areas neglected by others.' Each scholar would then try to have a pattern of journal subscriptions unique to his or her department, university, or profession. Noting that the scholar and a colleague were reading the same set of journals, the scholar would feel guilty and vow to drop one of these in favor of some other. Recognizing that the interdisciplinary links in the collaborative web of knowledge are the weakest, the scholar would give up some in-group journal in favor of an out-group one. The scholar would feel guilty if he or she did not cut attendance at in-group conventions to attend relevant out-group ones, and so forth."

It's good to read widely.

Baiju: "Unearthing China’s Ancient Terroir in Maotai" and Simultaneous Invention

About baiju, this article is more evidence that the "Chinese" are as different as different Europeans:

"In the centuries that followed, baijiu spread to all corners of the empire and became a fantastically diverse category of sprits. Because overland travel into the hinterland was often treacherous—if not impossible—each backwater hamlet developed production techniques in near total isolation. Some baijius are fermented in stone pots, others in vast subterranean pits of stone or mud. Most of them are distilled from sorghum but they can also be made from rice, wheat, corn, millet and even Job’s tears, or a combination thereof."

Also evidence of simultaneous invention.

Was Zuckerberg a Genius or Just Lucky?

Interesting blog post at the NY Times:

So can you be considered a genius, a visionary, if the globally dominant network you built wasn’t the fruit of far-reaching vision — if, indeed, the network’s internal momentum was such that it was almost destined to build itself, and the question was only which driven and capable entrepreneur would happen to be standing at the right place at the right time when it started to unfold?

My own view of technological history is that this is often the way big leaps happen. The people we call visionaries and geniuses, like Bill Gates, typically weren’t any more prescient than some of their rivals. They were mainly just in the right place at the right time.

Sure, they were really smart, and they had some other key features. Gates and Zuckerberg shared an instinct that helped them exploit network externalities: they were always willing to sacrifice short-term profit in exchange for growing market share.

The Facebook invention disputes are an example of simultaneous invention.