De zojuist verstuurde nieuwsbrief “Maandag links” bevatte meerder verkeerde links. Hier lees je de nieuwsbrief met de correcte links. Sorry!!
Sinds een paar jaar is het piepjonge veld van “progress studies” in opkomst. Het idee is om vooruitgang te bestuderen. Dit schrijven Patrick Collison en Tyler Cowen in The Atlantic:
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”
Een mentaliteit van verbetering
De interessante vraag is dan natuurlijk: hoe kunnen we door het verleden te bestuderen vandaag een mentaliteit van constante verbeteringen cultiveren?
Deze nieuwsbrief van een historicus die zich in de Britse Industriële revolutie verdiept, doet een interessante poging tot een antwoord op deze vraag.
Een van de belangrijkste inzichten is dat uitvinders contact hadden met andere uitvinders voordat ze zelf iets nieuws uitvonden. Uitvinden is een mentaliteit:
Core to the model is the observation that innovation spreads from person to person. It is a mentality, that we pick up from others. Of my sample of inventors, active c.1550-1850, the vast majority of them had had some kind of contact with an inventor before inventing anything themselves. So far, I’ve found evidence of that contact for about 83% of them, and for the remainder we frankly know next to nothing about them anyway. On the balance of probability, I suspect that all inventors had and continue to have such prior contact, even if the evidence has been lost to the mists of time.
Supposing I’m right about this — and there’s also more recent evidence from the largest and most detailed ever study of modern American inventors to support it — then such exposure to an inventor is the ultimate cause of innovation. Everything else we worry about when promoting innovation, from funding to intellectual property rights, or from education to social acceptance, is in a sense downstream of it.
De meeste problemen worden geaccepteerd “omdat dingen nu eenmaal zo zijn”:
Absent any exposure to inventors, people simply don’t become inventors. Knowing about invention as an activity is a necessary precondition to becoming an inventor yourself. The vast majority of people never innovate, for the very simple reason that it never occurs to them to do so. People are faced with problems all the time, but they generally have all sorts of pre-existing responses to them. Famine? The millennia-old response was to tighten belts or starve. Not to try to innovate with agricultural techniques. Trade route collapse? The millennia-old response was to take the hit, or try to shift to other familiar markets. Not to try to send ships into the icy unknown. As I’ve noticed time and time and time again, necessity is not the mother of invention. It only appears that way in retrospect — it’s when faced with a crisis that pre-existing inventors step forth to solve problems in ways they had already been investigating. Without them, there would be no such innovative response. Crises have an effect on the direction of invention — that is, on what problems people identify and then try to solve — but not on its underlying supply.
De rest van deze interessante post lees je hier.
De vraag aan de lezer moet natuurlijk zijn: waarom ben jij eigenlijk niet bezig met het oplossen van een probleem waarvan je weet dat het belangrijk is?