On thinkers and doers
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Highlights
- For science to progress means you need the great imaginative leaps to take you from one paradigm to the next. And whether you believe ideas are finite fruits to be consumed, great man/woman theory of idea capture, the belief that genius is a tutelary deity that came to you, or continuous error correction being our glorious future, you still want the feeling that the theory of relativity, the discovery of DNA or the theory of evolution gave us, of having finally cracked open the door to a new part of our universe.
- The technologist on the other hand looks around and sees what exists around him, and uses that to create the future, taking the tools to their logical conclusion.
- It takes uncommon skill and ability to push that we’ve made to its extremes. The mental clarity to see where we are and how far we can go. The rare courage to actually do what others only talk about.
- And what we’ve lost in the post Manhattan Project world is little science, the actual home of the thinker. Little science is science as practiced by pretty much every major scientist a child studies in school - Einstein, Newton, Maxwell, even Tesla and Edison. Little science is the science of artisanal tinkering, of interdisciplinary exploration with no agenda, of following your curiosity without needing to get permission, of small experiments done in a garage.
- We have systematically discouraged ambition just as we have institutionalised it. We try to have grand goals and attempt to reach them through institutional heaviness. We try and force work onto problems that seem important rather than working on problems where we have a chance of making a difference.
- It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.
- The historic method that all the folks we talked about got their leisure through was a combination of secure social stature and sufficient income to devote to their thoughts.
- The single biggest commonality that every thinker you’d consider as a generational genius has had is room to think. Sometimes enforced, like with Newton and the plague years, sometimes chosen, like Darwin and his extended voyages, and sometimes through creative work life balance, like Einstein during his patent clerk years. Regarding Darwin in particular, looking at his daily habits, we find: his days don’t seem very busy to us. The times we would classify as “work” consist of three 90-minute periods. If he had been a professor in a university today, he would have been denied tenure. If he’d been working in a company, he would have been fired within a week.
- As we have increasingly favoured the doer part of the spectrum over the past half century or more, we’ve pushed ourselves to do things ever bigger and grander. And our estimation of those who manage to do this is also greater, our modern geniuses. But in doing so we forget that the other end of the spectrum doesn’t function under the same pressures. It needs space and leisure to let ideas bloom, and for people to spend time in exploration. We need to find a way to give this space, with enough cachet and prestige that it encourages people to dream. To think!