Isegoria

Freedom and choice have proliferated massively, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box):

Consumer choices alone have multiplied by one hundred million compared to before the Industrial Revolution, an increase that dwarfs the increase in wealth over the same period. Interestingly, when choice sets are large, consumers begin to view product decisions as expressions of their identity, raising the stakes for even trivial decisions. The increase in choice has extended to less easily quantifiable domains, like who to be and how to live. The idea of having too much freedom would have seemed absurd to most people throughout history, but in the last two centuries it has become a central preoccupation for some of humanity’s most profound and influential thinkers.

That modern lineage includes seminal thinkers like Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote about the “dizziness of freedom”—the anxiety and responsibility of choosing from endless possibilities—and German-born social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described the urge to “escape from freedom” by seeking structure, either productively through meaningful work or destructively through mindless conformity or blind submission to authority.

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“Anomie” comes from an ancient Greek word that means “ruleless-ness.” French sociologist Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, popularized the term in his book-length investigation of suicide in the late nineteenth century, after several European governments began keeping statistics.

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Unsurprisingly, suicide increased when a nation’s economic fortunes plunged. Surprisingly, it also increased when they soared. Whenever rapid change dislodged social norms and structures, people became more likely to kill themselves. Conversely, when nations came under attack, social norms and community obligations were strengthened, and suicide rates dropped. Researchers have since found that people exposed to war undergo a long-lasting increase in local community involvement and leadership, and in lab experiments demonstrate increased cooperation toward members of their community even years later.

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Anywhere Durkheim looked, in fact, obligation mitigated suicide. People who were married with children were less likely to die by suicide than people who were married without children, who were less likely to die by suicide than people living alone. Durkheim concluded that people require constraints for meaning.

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In the virtual world, Haidt explained, communities are populated by people (or at least avatars) who join easily and, when they don’t like something, quit readily. There are few norms and no social obligations, just a torrent of memes and microdramas played out by a rotating cast. “It’s when you pull away those constraints, that’s what the great rewiring was,” he told me. “It said: Let’s take away all of that real-world anchoring that humans have had since the beginning of the species, just rip it away, and give everyone twenty-five different platforms that will hold them into the virtual world where they can’t possibly develop healthily. It’s not healthy for anyone to have access to everything, everywhere, all the time.”

If the atomized normlessness of virtual life is harmful to development, what, in contrast, is helpful? According to the world’s longest in-depth study of health and happiness: chores.

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Even before total immersion in virtual life became normal, political scientist Robert Putnam famously raised an alarm in his book Bowling Alone that in the US, the constraints of local communities had been steadily dissolving since the 1950s. Civic and community engagement crumbled under the weight of longer commutes, urban and suburban sprawl, and the shift of leisure time from public gatherings to private screens. A 2023 documentary on Putnam’s work is titled Join or Die, in reference to his statement that “your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group, cut in three-quarters by joining two groups.”

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Burkeman describes a fascinating piece of research in Sweden, which found a decline in pharmacies dispensing antidepressants when a large portion of the country was on vacation at the same time—and the effect extended to Swedes who were already retired. “They derived psychological benefits not merely from vacation time,” Burkeman wrote, “but from having the same vacation time as other people.” Burkeman paraphrased Terry Hartig, a scientist who conducted that research: “What people need isn’t greater control over their schedules but rather what he calls ‘the social regulation of time’: greater outside pressure to use their time in particular ways.”

Conversely, the Soviet Union at one time had a disastrous policy of assigning many different five-day workweeks (four workdays and a one-day weekend) to keep factories operating at all times. It destroyed social ties by desynchronizing colleagues and families.

David Epstein shares (in Inside the Box) the story of a famous playground study:

Teachers were directed to take preschool children to local playgrounds that had no designated boundary, and then to playgrounds that had a clear boundary marked by a fence. At the no-boundary playgrounds, the children clustered around their teacher. At the fenced-in playgrounds, the children felt safe to explore, so they left the teacher and roamed widely. Clear boundaries liberated them to experiment.

Unfortunately, in following up on the suggestions to check out that study, I concluded that it doesn’t exist. I traced the story back to an undergraduate project on public spaces that won a student award. That student is now a professor of landscape architecture, and when I asked him about it, he said that he had (understandably) taken the word of two child psychologists about it back in his college days, but had never been able to find an actual study and regretted perpetuating it.

After lauding the brilliance of Dmitri Mendeleev across multiple chapters of Inside the Box, David Epstein admits to keeping something from the reader:

He was not the first person to discover the periodic pattern, nor the second.

Prior to 1860, there were zero periodic tables in history. In nine years following the Karlsruhe conference, where the weights of elements were standardized, there were six. All six arose independently. They differed in appearance, and in details, but all six contained the fundamental insight—that the features of nature’s building blocks change predictably and then reset regularly with increasing weight.

In 1862, a French geologist arranged the elements in a three-dimensional descending spiral, like the stripes on a barber pole. Looking down a vertical column of the spiral showed the pattern. The diagram was complicated, though, so a publisher left it out and the paper was ignored.

In 1863, a British sugar chemist started organizing elements and soon insisted that when elements were ordered by weight their properties reset and repeated every eight places. When he presented his findings in a lecture to the London Chemical Society, he likened it to musical octaves. It was a poetic thought, but led an audience member to treat him like a charlatan and ask if he shouldn’t arrange the elements in alphabetical order instead. He had no academic position, and the Chemical Society declined to publish his work.

In 1864, a prominent English chemist who had attended the Karlsruhe conference drafted a periodic table. He, too, saw the main idea, and unlike the previous two scientists had the professional standing to push it forward. He didn’t, though, perhaps because he considered it merely a classification scheme, and not a law of nature.

In 1867, a Danish immigrant to America and polymath devised a periodic system that looked like a wheel, with elements arranged along spokes radiating out from the center. He was a highly eccentric outsider to chemistry, and the diagram was confusing. His work passed like a ship in the night.

In 1868, a German chemist drafted a periodic table that unlike the others, placed nearly every known element in a system that was both consistent and clear. Like Mendeleev, he was sitting in the room when Stanislao Cannizzaro delivered his argument for standardizing the weights of elements. And, like Mendeleev, he too was writing an intro textbook when he came up with his table. He faced the same constraints as Mendeleev, and produced basically the same table. But a publisher misplaced it and it wasn’t published until years later.

In 1869, Mendeleev published the first version of the table that would eventually hang in every high school science classroom.

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Mendeleev became the “father of the periodic table” because his system was relatively complete, and because his daring predictions of as-yet-undiscovered elements were vindicated. He also wasn’t a chemistry outsider, was only moderately eccentric, made a diagram that was simple to understand, and, to his great fortune, his publisher didn’t lose it or leave it out. Also: Mendeleev really wanted to be known as the discoverer of the periodic law, so he fought for his claim.

Mendeleev won what science historians call a “priority dispute.” They have a name for it because it is so incredibly common.

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Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with the patent office on the same day.

The list of momentous breakthroughs that were independently discovered by multiple people pervades every domain. In astronomy: the discoveries of sunspots and the distance to stars; in math: decimal notation, logarithms, and the principle of least squares (used everywhere from machine learning to medical trials); in chemistry, the discovery of oxygen; in physics, the law of conservation of energy (at least five and arguably twelve co-discoverers); in biology, the theory of infection by microorganisms; and all manner of world-changing practical inventions—photography, the thermometer, the telescope. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, leading to the aptly named Newton–Leibniz calculus controversy. (The Newton–Hooke controversy, meanwhile, was over gravity.) Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection. When a stunned Darwin—who had not yet published his findings—read Wallace’s unpublished manuscript, he wrote to his mentor: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.”

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The programmable digital computer was independently invented in three countries in a short span. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other and enabled our digital age.

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In 1961, Robert Merton, a pioneer of the sociology of science, wrote that “multiple discovery” (which has itself been multiply discovered over generations) is so ubiquitous that “singletons” should be considered the exceptions.

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The lone genius trope was popularized in nineteenth-century England, when the word “creativity” itself was invented. It was part of an intellectual movement that championed humanity’s power to discover the secrets of nature and turn them into practical gains. It was important for progress but also fed the image of the lone, outside-the-box genius, and dovetailed with the era’s so-called cult of the hero.

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If ever there was a paradigm shift, that was it. And yet, none of the pieces of Darwin’s theory of evolution—selection, adaptation, heritability, the struggle for survival, even random changes that are passed down—were entirely new. Several were reasonably common among naturalists who studied plants and animals. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, believed that all “warm-blooded animals” had a common origin in the distant past.

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Darwin’s breakthrough came from meticulously compiling available but disparate knowledge into a coherent whole in order to answer pressing questions of his time, like “Why does breeding work so well?” and “Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth?” Darwin kept at least 231 scientific pen pals—from conchologists and ornithologists to gardeners—whom he peppered with questions and questionnaires. He cut up their letters and pasted information into his own notebooks. Darwin learned that breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.”

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After he disembarked from the Beagle, Darwin read a popular biography of Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” and considered how order could emerge from competition. As Waller wrote: Darwin’s notebooks “show how deeply he was rooted… in the intellectual trends of the early 1800s.”

Decades of research on group brainstorming have shown, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), that it basically doesn’t work:

Participants who have valuable insights stay quiet for fear of looking stupid, or the group simply conforms to the speaker who is the most forceful, or who makes the most money. (This last factor is colloquially known as HiPPO: highest-paid person’s opinion.) Participants in a brainstorming session can also be confused by unclear norms that encourage them to say whatever comes to mind but also not to criticize. Group brainstorming works so poorly in terms of generating novel ideas that “brainwriting” works better, in which individuals write down ideas on their own, submit them anonymously, and only then come together as a group to discuss them. Brainwriting improves on brainstorming in part because it sets rules that ensure more voices and ideas are welcomed.

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The psychologists determined, first, that collective intelligence is real: Teams that did well on one task tended to do well on all, and vice versa. Incredibly, obvious factors like group cohesion, motivation, satisfaction, and the average (or maximum) intelligence of members did not predict team intelligence. But a hallmark of the best teams was that they had relatively equal “conversational turn-taking.” As in Google’s Project Aristotle, that can look messy in practice, with interjections, debates, changes of topic, and swerves from an agenda. But those are signs of healthy and inclusive group norms. Conversely, I once worked under an editor who would copy the entire office on emails when he criticized an idea. It had an immense chilling effect on some younger employees.

In the early nineteenth century, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), chemists were using different conventions for how they weighed substances, and thus were reporting different weights for the same elements:

The lack of standard practices meant that disagree­ments on fundamental issues pervaded chemistry. A prominent book listed nineteen notations for acetic acid used by different practitioners. Chemists didn’t even agree on the meaning of basic terms like “molecule.” It was a complete morass—for teaching, and for discovery.

In the summer of 1860, a small group of scientists called for an international conference—the first of its kind—to resolve the confusion. It would be held in September in Karlsruhe, Germany. The location was fortuitous. Twenty-six-year-old Mendeleev happened to be studying abroad in Heidelberg, thirty miles away.

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Cannizzaro made a pitch to revive the fifty-year-old idea from one of his countrymen, Amedeo Avogadro, that if you have equal volumes of gas of different substances, and those gases are at the same temperature and pressure, they will contain the same number of molecules. The old idea was correct, Cannizzaro argued. Just as importantly, using it would allow chemists to compare different substances and arrive at consistent weights for the elements that comprised them. The lone other Italian at the meeting passed out copies of a pamphlet Cannizzaro had created. It explained his reasoning and included a list of weights that chemists should be using for common elements.

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Thirty years later, while giving an honorary speech in England, Mendeleev would recall that day. He recounted how disastrously fragmented the field was at that time, but that Cannizzaro “seemed to advocate truth itself.”

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The creation of standard definitions may seem boring compared to the thrill of discovery. But without consistent weights, Mendeleev’s formidable brain would have stood no chance, and nature’s pattern would have remained hidden. Standardization empowered innovation.

It allowed work to communicate across distance, even if the individuals doing it were not themselves in direct communication. In effect, it made the problem-solving team much, much larger. By 1867, when Mendeleev began to write his textbook, he could rely on the knowledge of weights uncovered anywhere in the world. In a certain sense, the new standards empowered him to collaborate with people he didn’t know.