Thanks for posting this! I was wondering if you might share more about your “isolation-induced unusual internal information cascades” hypothesis/musings! Really interested in how you think this might relate to low-chance occurrences of breakthroughs/productivity.
So, I think Thomas Kuhn can be controversial to talk about, but I feel like maybe “science” isn’t even “really recognizable science” maybe until AFTER it becomes riddled with prestige-related information cascades?
Kuhn noticed, descriptively, that when you look at actual people trying to make progress in various now-well-defined “scientific fields” all the way back at the beginnings, you find heterogeneity of vocabulary, re-invention of wheels, arguments about epistemology, and so on. This is “pre-science” in some sense. The books are aimed at a general audience. Everyone starts from scratch. There is no community that considers itself able to ignore the wider world and just geek out together but instead there is just a bunch of boring argumentative Tesla-caliber geniuses doing weird stuff that isn’t much copied or understood by others.
THEN, a Classic arises. Historically almost always a book. Perhaps a mere monograph. There have been TWO of them named PrincipiaMathematica already!
It sweeps through a large body of people and everyone who reads it can’t help but feel like conversations with people who haven’t read it are boring retreads of old ideas. The classic lays out a few key ideas, a few key experiments, and a general approach that implies a bunch of almost-certainly-tractable open problems. Then people solve those almost-certainly-tractable problems like puzzles, one after another, and write to each other about it, thereby “making progress” with durable logs of the progress in the form of the publications. That “puzzle and publish” dynamic is “science as usual”.
Subtract the classic, and you don’t have a science… and it isn’t that you don’t necessarily have something fun or interesting or geeky or gadgety or mechanistic or relevant to the effecting of all things possible… its just that it lacks that central organizing “memetic sweep” (which DOES kind of look like a classic sociological information cascade in some ways) and lacks a community that will replicate and retain the positive innovations over deep time while talking about them the same way and citing the heroes forever.
There was no textbook or professor (not that I’m aware of anyway) that taught John Carmack how to create the doom 3D engine. Alex Krizhevsky’s GPU work for computer vision was sort of out of left field, and a lot of it related to just hunkering down with the minutiae of how a GPU’s memory pipeline could be reconciled with plausible vision-centric neural net architectures. One layer of meta up from there, Peter Thiel has a line he has repeated for years about how being socially attuned might actually make people less good at doing interesting projects. Oh… and Montessori kids showing up all over the place doing new shit.
I’m not saying here that left-field innovators SHOULD be role models. There could be good public and private reasons for optimizing in a way that is more socially aware and build around identifying and copying the greats? But cascades are sort of violating Bayes, and the cascade perspective suggests that not all the low hanging fruit has yet been picked in science, and there are reasons to suspect that being aware of the choices “to cascade or not to cascade” might make the choice more of a CHOICE rather than an accidental default. Mostly people seem to DEFAULT into copying. Then a weird number of innovators also have weird starts.
Thanks for posting this! I was wondering if you might share more about your “isolation-induced unusual internal information cascades” hypothesis/musings! Really interested in how you think this might relate to low-chance occurrences of breakthroughs/productivity.
So, I think Thomas Kuhn can be controversial to talk about, but I feel like maybe “science” isn’t even “really recognizable science” maybe until AFTER it becomes riddled with prestige-related information cascades?
Kuhn noticed, descriptively, that when you look at actual people trying to make progress in various now-well-defined “scientific fields” all the way back at the beginnings, you find heterogeneity of vocabulary, re-invention of wheels, arguments about epistemology, and so on. This is “pre-science” in some sense. The books are aimed at a general audience. Everyone starts from scratch. There is no community that considers itself able to ignore the wider world and just geek out together but instead there is just a bunch of boring argumentative Tesla-caliber geniuses doing weird stuff that isn’t much copied or understood by others.
THEN, a Classic arises. Historically almost always a book. Perhaps a mere monograph. There have been TWO of them named Principia Mathematica already!
It sweeps through a large body of people and everyone who reads it can’t help but feel like conversations with people who haven’t read it are boring retreads of old ideas. The classic lays out a few key ideas, a few key experiments, and a general approach that implies a bunch of almost-certainly-tractable open problems. Then people solve those almost-certainly-tractable problems like puzzles, one after another, and write to each other about it, thereby “making progress” with durable logs of the progress in the form of the publications. That “puzzle and publish” dynamic is “science as usual”.
Subtract the classic, and you don’t have a science… and it isn’t that you don’t necessarily have something fun or interesting or geeky or gadgety or mechanistic or relevant to the effecting of all things possible… its just that it lacks that central organizing “memetic sweep” (which DOES kind of look like a classic sociological information cascade in some ways) and lacks a community that will replicate and retain the positive innovations over deep time while talking about them the same way and citing the heroes forever.
There was no textbook or professor (not that I’m aware of anyway) that taught John Carmack how to create the doom 3D engine. Alex Krizhevsky’s GPU work for computer vision was sort of out of left field, and a lot of it related to just hunkering down with the minutiae of how a GPU’s memory pipeline could be reconciled with plausible vision-centric neural net architectures. One layer of meta up from there, Peter Thiel has a line he has repeated for years about how being socially attuned might actually make people less good at doing interesting projects. Oh… and Montessori kids showing up all over the place doing new shit.
I’m not saying here that left-field innovators SHOULD be role models. There could be good public and private reasons for optimizing in a way that is more socially aware and build around identifying and copying the greats? But cascades are sort of violating Bayes, and the cascade perspective suggests that not all the low hanging fruit has yet been picked in science, and there are reasons to suspect that being aware of the choices “to cascade or not to cascade” might make the choice more of a CHOICE rather than an accidental default. Mostly people seem to DEFAULT into copying. Then a weird number of innovators also have weird starts.