Writing to get smarter, the power of connections

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This is something that traditional thinkers of the pre-Internet age—particularly print and broadcast journalists — have trouble grasping. For them, an audience doesn’t mean anything unless it’s massive. If you’re writing specifically to make money, you need to draw a large crowd. This is part of the thinking that causes traditional media executives to scoff at the spectacle of the “guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks.” But for the rest of the people in the world, who probably never did much non work writing in the first place—and who almost never did it for an audience—even a handful of readers can have a vertiginous, catalytic impact.

Once thinking is public, connections take over. Anyone who’s Googled a favorite hobby, food, or political subject has discovered some teeming site devoted to servicing the infinitesimal fraction of the public that shares their otherwise wildly obscure obsession. (Mine: guitar pedals, modular origami, and the 1970s anime show Battle of the Planets.)

 

Propelled by the hyperlink, the Internet is a connection-making machine.

And making connections is a big deal in the history of thought—and its future. That’s because of a curious fact: If you look at the world’s biggest breakthrough ideas, they often occur simultaneously to different people.

 

This is known as the theory of multiples, and it was famously documented in 1922 by sociologists William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas. When they surveyed the history of major modern inventions and scientific discoveries, they found that many of the big ones had been hit upon by different people, usually within a few years of each other and sometimes within a few weeks. They cataloged 148 examples: Oxygen was discovered in 1774 by Joseph Priestley in England and Carl Wilhelm Scheele in Sweden. In 1610 and 1611, at least four different astronomers—including Galileo—independently discovered sunspots. John Napier and Henry Briggs developed logarithms in Britain, while Joost Bürgi did it independently in Germany. The law of the conservation of energy was laid claim to by four separate people in 1847. Ogburn and Thomas didn’t mention another multiple: Radio was invented around 1900 by two different engineers, working independently—Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla.

Why would the same ideas have occurred to different people at the same time? Ogburn and Thomas argued that it was because our ideas are, in a crucial way, partly products of our environment. They’re “inevitable.” When they’re ready to emerge, they do. This is because we do not work in a sealed-off, Rodin Thinker fashion.

The things we think about are deeply influenced by the state of the art around us: the conversations taking place among educated folk, the shared information, tools, and technologies at hand. If four astronomers discovered sunspots at the same time, it’s partly because the quality of lenses in telescopes in 1611 had matured to the point where it was finally possible to pick out small details on the sun and partly because the question of the sun’s role in the universe had become newly interesting in the wake of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory. If radio was developed at the same time by two people, that’s because the basic principles that underpin the technology were also becoming known to disparate thinkers. Inventors knew that electricity moved through wires, that electrical currents created fields, and that these seemed to be able to jump distances through the air. With that base of knowledge, curious minds were liable to start wondering: How could you use those signals to communicate? And as Ogburn and Thomas note, there are a lot of curious minds. Even if you assume the occurrence of true genius is pretty low (they estimate that one person in 100 is on the “upper tenth” of the scale for smarts), when you multiply it across the entirety of humanity, that’s still a heck of a lot of geniuses.

When you think of it that way, what’s strange is not that big ideas occurred to different people in different places. What’s strange is that this didn’t happen all the time, constantly.

But maybe it did—and the thinkers just weren’t yet in contact.

 

Thirty-nine years after Ogburn and Thomas, sociologist Robert Merton took up the question of multiples. Merton hints at an interesting corollary, which is that when inventive people aren’t aware of what others are working on, the pace of innovation slows. One survey of mathematicians, for example, found that 31 percent of the most productive complained that the slow pace of publication led to duplicated work. If they had better visibility into one another’s work, one suspects, they could collaborate more effectively or work more quickly or with greater insight.

As an example, there’s the tragic story of Ernest Duchesne, the earliest documented discoverer of penicillin. As legend has it, Duchesne was a student at a French military medical school in the 1890s when he noticed that the hospital’s stable boys who tended the horses did something peculiar: They stored their saddles in a damp, dark room so that mold would grow on their undersurfaces. They did this, they explained, because the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. Duchesne was fascinated and conducted an experiment in which he treated sick guinea pigs with a solution made from mold—a rough form of what we’d now call penicillin. The guinea pigs healed completely. Duchesne wrote up his findings in a thesis, but because he was unknown and young—only 23 at the time—the French Institut Pasteur wouldn’t acknowledge it. His research vanished, and Duchesne died 15 years later of tuberculosis (a disease that would someday be treatable with antibiotics). It would take 31 years for the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming to rediscover penicillin, independently and with no idea that Duchesne had already done it. In those three decades, untold millions of people died of diseases that could have been cured.

 

Failed networks kill ideas.

 

When you can resolve multiples and connect people with similar obsessions, ideas flourish and multiply. Scientists have for centuries intuited the power of resolving multiples, and it’s part of the reason that in the 17th century, they began publishing scientific journals and eventually setting standards for citing the work of other scientists. Scientific journals and citation were a successful attempt to create a worldwide network, a mechanism for not just thinking in public but doing so in a connected way.

Today we have something that works in the same way but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together.

 

Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.