May 21, 2008
A little thread concerning the nature of inventiveness
In his review of Silvan Schweber's Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Harvard), Eric Ormsby summarizes a key part of Schweber's argument thusly:
Mr. Schweber draws out the contrasts between these two extraordinary men in great detail, but he's really interested in something more fundamental, which their parallel careers exemplify. He wishes not only, as his subtitle suggests, to explore "the meaning of genius" but in fact "to banish the term," especially with regard to Einstein. "Calling Einstein a 'genius' dwarfs the background against which his work was done," he argues. Though Einstein saw himself as "a loner," his epochal discoveries of 1905 — of which the special theory of relativity is only the most celebrated — did not emerge out of "pure thought" alone. Einstein drew on the scattered insights and discoveries of others; he was active in conferences and maintained a far-flung and intensive correspondence. Even in the Bern patent office he remained in the thick of things. None of this, of course, diminishes Einstein's achievements; as Mr. Schweber emphasizes, it is simply the way groundbreaking research works. Scientific discovery is collaborative even in seclusion.
This rhymes with an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the May 12 issue of the New Yorker, which profiled entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, and his company Intellectual Ventures, and make a similar point:
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.
How useful is it to have a group of really smart people brainstorm for a day? [...] But then, in August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea of what it was going to be like.”
Of course, as Kevin Kelly noted on May 9 (via kottke.org):
Gladwell's article is terrific, as usual, but there is a very odd absence. It lacks any reference to others doing exactly the same thing as Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. For instance it does not mention Jay Walker, of Priceline fame. Walker runs Walker Digital Labs, which does exactly what IV does. At the labs a bunch of interesting folks sit around with patent lawyers coming up with one idea after the next, which they patent at a furious rate. And then licence to others to develop. Thats' the entire business model of the outfit, just like IV.
Recognition of other people who, like Myhrvold, got the idea to manufacture patents without physical research would have been a great way to conclude this wonderful introduction to simultaneous invention. It's a rare miss for Gladwell.
I also tend to discount the "rare genius" model of invention and pathbreaking intellectual work. I take as my cues the acknowledgements page of any important book as well as my own experience in matters of the mind, both as the shepherd of an idea and as the aide who helps bring it to fruition.