good blog post
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-there-a-tension-between-creativity-and-accuracy/
Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?
2017-04-09
Siva
<div><div>
	<p>On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend <a href="https://juliagalef.com/">Julia Galef</a> about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error.</p>
<p>Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing error in our thinking!</p>
<p>However, all other things are not always equal.</p>
<p>In particular, I <a href="https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/849871072178561024">believe</a> “there’s a tension, too, between behaviours which maximize accuracy &amp; which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl.”</p>
<p>Julia has summarized some of her thinking in a <a href="https://juliagalef.com/2017/04/07/does-irrationality-fuel-innovation/">blog post</a>, where she disagrees, writing: “I totally agree that we need more experimentation with â€œcrazy ideasâ€! Iâ€™m just skeptical that rationality is, on the margin, in tension with that goal.”</p>
<p>Before getting to Julia’s arguments, I want to flesh out the idea of a tension between maximizing creativity and maximizing accuracy.</p>
<p>Consider the following statement of Feynman’s, on the need to fool himself into believing that he had a creative edge in his work. He’s talking about his early ideas on how to develop a theory of electrons and light (which became, after many years, quantum electrodynamics). The statement is a little jarring to modern sensibilities, but please look past that to the idea he’s trying to convey:</p>
<blockquote><p> I told myself [of his competitors]: “They’re on the wrong track: I’ve got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on – my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.</p>
<p>It’s like the African savages who are going into battle – first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Many of the most creative scientists I know are extremely determined people, willing to explore unusual positions for years. Sometimes, those positions are well grounded. And sometimes, even well after the fact, it’s obvious they were fooling themselves, but somehow their early errors helped them find their way to the truth. They were, to use the mathematician Goro Shimura’s phrase “gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction”.</p>
<p>An extreme example is the physicist Joseph Weber, who pioneered gravitational wave astronomy. The verdict of both his contemporaries and of history is that he was fooling himself: his systems simply didn’t work the way he thought. On the other hand, even though he fooled himself for decades, the principals on the (successful!) LIGO project have repeatedly acknowledged that his work was a major stimulus for them to work on finding gravitational waves. In retrospect, it’s difficult to be anything other than glad that Weber clung so tenaciously to his erroneous beliefs.</p>
<p>For me, what matters here is that: (a) much of Weber’s work was based on an unreasonable belief; and (b) on net, it helped speed up important discoveries.</p>
<p>Weber demonstrates my point in an extreme form. He was <em>outright</em> wrong, and remained so, and yet his erroneous example still served a useful purpose, helping inspire others to pursue ideas that eventually worked. In some sense, this is a collective (rather than individual) version of my point. More common is the case – like Feynman – of a person who may cling to mistaken beliefs for a long period, but ultimately uses that as a bridge to new discovery.</p>
<p>Turning to Julia’s post, she responds to my argument with: “In general, I think overconfidence stifles experimentation”, and argues that the great majority of people in society reject “crazy” ideas – say, seasteading – because they’re overconfident in conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>I agree that people often mistakenly reject unusual ideas because they’re overconfident in the conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>However, I don’t think it’s relevant to my argument. Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.</p>
<p>You may wonder if the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same, and perhaps there’s some kind of broad disposition to overconfidence?</p>
<p>But if that was the case then you’d expect that someone overconfident in their own unusual ideas would, in other areas, also be overconfident in the conventional wisdom.</p>
<p>However, my anecdotal experience is that a colleague willing to pursue unusual ideas of their own is often particularly sympathetic to unusual ideas from other people in other areas. This suggests that being overconfident in your own crazy ideas isn’t likely to stifle other experimentation.</p>
<p>Julia also suggests several variants on the “strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be <em>as<br />
if</em> you were 100% confident.”</p>
<p>In a sense, Feynman and Weber were practicing an extreme version of this strategy. I don’t know Weber’s work well, but it’s notable that in the details of Feynman’s work he was good at ferreting out error, and not fooling himself. He wasn’t always rigorous – mathematicians have, for instance, spent decades trying to make the path integral rigorous – but there was usually a strong core argument. Indeed, Feynman delivered a very stimulating <a href="http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm">speech</a> on the value of careful thought in scientific work.</p>
<p>How can this careful approach to the details of argument be reconciled with his remarks about the need to fool yourself in creative work?</p>
<p>I never met Feynman, and can’t say how he reconciled the two points of view. But my own approach in creative work, and I believe many others also take this approach, is to carve out a sort of creative cocoon around nascent ideas.</p>
<p>Consider Apple designer Jony Ive’s remarks at a memorial after Steve Jobs’ death:</p>
<blockquote><p> Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”</p>
<p>And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
</p></blockquote>
<p>To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and<br />
truth. And if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative cocoon around them, a set of stories you tell yourself to protect the idea not just from others, but from your own self doubts. The purpose of those stories isn’t to be an air tight defence. It’s to give you the confidence to nurture the idea, possibly for years, to find out if there’s something really there. </p>
<p>And so, even someone who has extremely high standards for the final details of their work, may have an important component to their thinking which relies on rather woolly arguments. And they may well need to cling to that cocoon. Perhaps other approaches are possible. But my own experience is that this is often the case.</p>
<h2>Postscript</h2>
<p>Julia finishes her post with:</p>
<blockquote><p> One last point: Even if it turned out to be true that irrationality is necessary for innovators, thatâ€™s only a weak defense of your original claim, which was that Iâ€™m significantly overrating the value of rationality in general. Remember, â€œcoming up with brilliant new ideasâ€ is just one domain in which we could evaluate the potential value-add of increased rationality. There are lots of other domains to consider, such as designing policy, allocating philanthropic funds, military strategy, etc. We could certainly talk about those separately; for now, Iâ€™m just noting that you made this original claim about the dubious value of rationality in general, but then your argument focused on this one particular domain, innovation.
</p></blockquote>
<p>To clarify, I didn’t intend my claim to be in general: the tension I see is between creativity and accuracy.</p>
<p>That said, this tension does leak into other areas. </p>
<p>If you’re a funder, say, trying to determine what to fund in AI research, you go and talk to AI experts. And many of those people are likely to have cultivated their own creative cocoons, which will inform their remarks. How a funder should deal with that is a separate essay. My point here is simply that this process of creative cocooning isn’t easily untangled from things like evaluation of work.</p>
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 Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?

 by Michael Nielsen on April 9, 2017

 On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend Julia Galef about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error.

 Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing error in our thinking!

 However, all other things are not always equal.

 In particular, I believe “there’s a tension, too, between behaviours which maximize accuracy & which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl.”

 Julia has summarized some of her thinking in a blog post, where she disagrees, writing: “I totally agree that we need more experimentation with â€œcrazy ideasâ€! Iâ€™m just skeptical that rationality is, on the margin, in tension with that goal.”

 Before getting to Julia’s arguments, I want to flesh out the idea of a tension between maximizing creativity and maximizing accuracy.

 Consider the following statement of Feynman’s, on the need to fool himself into believing that he had a creative edge in his work. He’s talking about his early ideas on how to develop a theory of electrons and light (which became, after many years, quantum electrodynamics). The statement is a little jarring to modern sensibilities, but please look past that to the idea he’s trying to convey:

 I told myself [of his competitors]: “They’re on the wrong track: I’ve got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on – my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.

 It’s like the African savages who are going into battle – first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.

 Many of the most creative scientists I know are extremely determined people, willing to explore unusual positions for years. Sometimes, those positions are well grounded. And sometimes, even well after the fact, it’s obvious they were fooling themselves, but somehow their early errors helped them find their way to the truth. They were, to use the mathematician Goro Shimura’s phrase “gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction”.

 An extreme example is the physicist Joseph Weber, who pioneered gravitational wave astronomy. The verdict of both his contemporaries and of history is that he was fooling himself: his systems simply didn’t work the way he thought. On the other hand, even though he fooled himself for decades, the principals on the (successful!) LIGO project have repeatedly acknowledged that his work was a major stimulus for them to work on finding gravitational waves. In retrospect, it’s difficult to be anything other than glad that Weber clung so tenaciously to his erroneous beliefs.

 For me, what matters here is that: (a) much of Weber’s work was based on an unreasonable belief; and (b) on net, it helped speed up important discoveries.

 Weber demonstrates my point in an extreme form. He was outright wrong, and remained so, and yet his erroneous example still served a useful purpose, helping inspire others to pursue ideas that eventually worked. In some sense, this is a collective (rather than individual) version of my point. More common is the case – like Feynman – of a person who may cling to mistaken beliefs for a long period, but ultimately uses that as a bridge to new discovery.

 Turning to Julia’s post, she responds to my argument with: “In general, I think overconfidence stifles experimentation”, and argues that the great majority of people in society reject “crazy” ideas – say, seasteading – because they’re overconfident in conventional wisdom.

 I agree that people often mistakenly reject unusual ideas because they’re overconfident in the conventional wisdom.

 However, I don’t think it’s relevant to my argument. Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.

 You may wonder if the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same, and perhaps there’s some kind of broad disposition to overconfidence?

 But if that was the case then you’d expect that someone overconfident in their own unusual ideas would, in other areas, also be overconfident in the conventional wisdom.

 However, my anecdotal experience is that a colleague willing to pursue unusual ideas of their own is often particularly sympathetic to unusual ideas from other people in other areas. This suggests that being overconfident in your own crazy ideas isn’t likely to stifle other experimentation.

 Julia also suggests several variants on the “strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be as
 if you were 100% confident.”

 In a sense, Feynman and Weber were practicing an extreme version of this strategy. I don’t know Weber’s work well, but it’s notable that in the details of Feynman’s work he was good at ferreting out error, and not fooling himself. He wasn’t always rigorous – mathematicians have, for instance, spent decades trying to make the path integral rigorous – but there was usually a strong core argument. Indeed, Feynman delivered a very stimulating speech on the value of careful thought in scientific work.

 How can this careful approach to the details of argument be reconciled with his remarks about the need to fool yourself in creative work?

 I never met Feynman, and can’t say how he reconciled the two points of view. But my own approach in creative work, and I believe many others also take this approach, is to carve out a sort of creative cocoon around nascent ideas.

 Consider Apple designer Jony Ive’s remarks at a memorial after Steve Jobs’ death:

 Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”

 And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

 To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and
 truth. And if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative cocoon around them, a set of stories you tell yourself to protect the idea not just from others, but from your own self doubts. The purpose of those stories isn’t to be an air tight defence. It’s to give you the confidence to nurture the idea, possibly for years, to find out if there’s something really there.

 And so, even someone who has extremely high standards for the final details of their work, may have an important component to their thinking which relies on rather woolly arguments. And they may well need to cling to that cocoon. Perhaps other approaches are possible. But my own experience is that this is often the case.

 Postscript

 Julia finishes her post with:

 One last point: Even if it turned out to be true that irrationality is necessary for innovators, thatâ€™s only a weak defense of your original claim, which was that Iâ€™m significantly overrating the value of rationality in general. Remember, â€œcoming up with brilliant new ideasâ€ is just one domain in which we could evaluate the potential value-add of increased rationality. There are lots of other domains to consider, such as designing policy, allocating philanthropic funds, military strategy, etc. We could certainly talk about those separately; for now, Iâ€™m just noting that you made this original claim about the dubious value of rationality in general, but then your argument focused on this one particular domain, innovation.

 To clarify, I didn’t intend my claim to be in general: the tension I see is between creativity and accuracy.

 That said, this tension does leak into other areas.

 If you’re a funder, say, trying to determine what to fund in AI research, you go and talk to AI experts. And many of those people are likely to have cultivated their own creative cocoons, which will inform their remarks. How a funder should deal with that is a separate essay. My point here is simply that this process of creative cocooning isn’t easily untangled from things like evaluation of work.

 From → Uncategorized

 10 Comments
 1. Izabella Laba permalink

 I think that this is why we’re often more creative in collaboration than when we work on our own. When we collaborate, we can role-play so that one person is doing the “creative daydreaming” and the other is doing the rigorous cross-checks. When we work on our own, we have to do two opposing things at the same time.

 2. Visa permalink

 ^ absolutely agreed with Izabella. Also, when we’re working on our own, we operate in a familiar territory of our own assumptions and perspectives. Sometimes just explaining something to somebody else, or watching somebody else do something we were already thinking, etc â€“ triggers all sorts of new thoughts and conceptual collisions.

 3. Michael Nielsen permalink *

 Very interesting idea! Instinctively, I’m inclined to agree.

 4. heng permalink

 Thanks for writing this

 5. Romeo Stevens permalink

 I think the argument got caught up in a slightly deceptive frame early on. Rational vs irrational makes it seem like the conflict is over how epistemically rigorous to be overall whereas I think the conflict is properly framed over strictness of individual steps. You allude to this but I think worth outlining explicitly:

 Consider traversal of a knowledge graph with ideas at vertices and inferences as edges. You can imagine people following different rules for exploring the graph and experiencing conflict when they encounter someone who claims their traversal strategy is closer to a global optimum. In this frame some people are more concerned that if the rigor of an individual edge is too low that you could wind up somewhere crazy. Other people think its fine to wind up in weird places because you can always try to confirm that there is a valid path to that location later if it is worthwhile to do so. These two groups have likely had very different experiences that told them how dangerous/valuable these sorts of actions are (along with innate differences in risk preference).

 6. Florian Seidl-Schulz permalink

 Creativity is a near related to some forms of schizophrenia, a conspiracy theory of ideas or concepts. A conspiracy theory usually collapses under rigorous tests. It can then be defended by detailing or given up.

 We live in guilded age, every thought is imagined to be allready thought, every idea already invented. Suggesting otherwise is viewed as either beeing a dreamer, fool or delusional.

 Not beeing able to argue instantly with refined logic for every point is then concluded to be a victory over a new idea. Add to that, that creative people usually are not the convincing sales-man type of person- and you have the base for the scientific slowdown we are currently in.

 7. Siname permalink

 “Modern sensibilities” is a rather strange way to put it; such sensibilities are “modern” only in the West. (And: modern, but still not internalized, apparently–as opposed to similar sensibilities about, say, slurs against Jewish people)

 8. kBite permalink

 Lateral thinking and thus creative thinking correlates with loose associations and thus inaccuracy. Creativity is somehow a result of errors; just like metaphors. You won’t understand a metaphor by looking at the words dictionary entries. Metaphors are contextually counter determined. Ever thought about a deaf mouth? No? Because there is nothing deaf in mouth’s (common) scope of meaning. But now you try to correlate them. If you succeed it’s like mental short-circuiting. You can’t come up with good metaphors by logically deducing them. They just happen. Creativity just happens the same way. You can’t force creativity but you can maximize lateral thinking and thus lower your idea’s resistance to short with totally unrelated ideas.

 But how are you supposed to logically reason if your mind is down the rabbit hole? The way our brain works you can’t have both: creativity is irrational.

 9. Siva permalink

 I like to phrase it a little more provocatively: it’s about smelling the fragrance in one’s own BS.

 Humans have probably evolved to not waste cognitive resources. The simplest way to maximize accuracy (and not “waste” resources) is to never try anything risky. Just about every radically new idea (almost tautologically) has gone through a phase where it was criticized by conventional wisdom, and needed ardent defenders willing to stick it out while there were many hanging questions. In the face of the fact that most new ideas fail, it’s difficult to invest the effort to pursue something original unless one is “irrationally” invested in it.

 As a corollary, I conjecture that the need for irrational faith will be higher when trying to be original in more resource-intensive endeavors. As a flipside, the tension between creativity and correctness should dissolve when it’s cheaper to check whether something works. This must be part of why programming (especially interactively) helps unleash creativity — it is very easy to unload the emotional burden of checking for correctness! In the same spirit, I think Izabella makes a great point regarding collaboration helping creativity; that comment has certainly helped me better understand my inclinations.

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On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend Julia Galef about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error.
Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing error in our thinking!
However, all other things are not always equal.
In particular, I believe “there’s a tension, too, between behaviours which maximize accuracy &amp; which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from v. irrational ppl.”
Julia has summarized some of her thinking in a blog post, where she disagrees, writing: “I totally agree that we need more experimentation with â€œcrazy ideasâ€! Iâ€™m just skeptical that rationality is, on the margin, in tension with that goal.”
Before getting to Julia’s arguments, I want to flesh out the idea of a tension between maximizing creativity and maximizing accuracy.
Consider the following statement of Feynman’s, on the need to fool himself into believing that he had a creative edge in his work. He’s talking about his early ideas on how to develop a theory of electrons and light (which became, after many years, quantum electrodynamics). The statement is a little jarring to modern sensibilities, but please look past that to the idea he’s trying to convey:
  I told myself [of his competitors]: “They’re on the wrong track: I’ve got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of retarded action and so on – my original idea of electrons not acting on themselves disappeared, but because I had been working so hard I found something. So, as long as I can drive myself one way or the other, it’s okay. Even if it’s an illusion, it still makes me go, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the depths.
It’s like the African savages who are going into battle – first they have to gather around and beat drums and jump up and down to build up their energy to fight. I feel the same way, building up my energy by talking to myself and telling myself, “They are trying to do it this way, I’m going to do it that way” and then I get excited and I can go back to work again.
 
Many of the most creative scientists I know are extremely determined people, willing to explore unusual positions for years. Sometimes, those positions are well grounded. And sometimes, even well after the fact, it’s obvious they were fooling themselves, but somehow their early errors helped them find their way to the truth. They were, to use the mathematician Goro Shimura’s phrase “gifted with the special capability of making many mistakes, mostly in the right direction”.
An extreme example is the physicist Joseph Weber, who pioneered gravitational wave astronomy. The verdict of both his contemporaries and of history is that he was fooling himself: his systems simply didn’t work the way he thought. On the other hand, even though he fooled himself for decades, the principals on the (successful!) LIGO project have repeatedly acknowledged that his work was a major stimulus for them to work on finding gravitational waves. In retrospect, it’s difficult to be anything other than glad that Weber clung so tenaciously to his erroneous beliefs.
For me, what matters here is that: (a) much of Weber’s work was based on an unreasonable belief; and (b) on net, it helped speed up important discoveries.
Weber demonstrates my point in an extreme form. He was outright wrong, and remained so, and yet his erroneous example still served a useful purpose, helping inspire others to pursue ideas that eventually worked. In some sense, this is a collective (rather than individual) version of my point. More common is the case – like Feynman – of a person who may cling to mistaken beliefs for a long period, but ultimately uses that as a bridge to new discovery.
Turning to Julia’s post, she responds to my argument with: “In general, I think overconfidence stifles experimentation”, and argues that the great majority of people in society reject “crazy” ideas – say, seasteading – because they’re overconfident in conventional wisdom.
I agree that people often mistakenly reject unusual ideas because they’re overconfident in the conventional wisdom.
However, I don’t think it’s relevant to my argument. Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.
You may wonder if the underlying cognitive mechanisms are the same, and perhaps there’s some kind of broad disposition to overconfidence?
But if that was the case then you’d expect that someone overconfident in their own unusual ideas would, in other areas, also be overconfident in the conventional wisdom.
However, my anecdotal experience is that a colleague willing to pursue unusual ideas of their own is often particularly sympathetic to unusual ideas from other people in other areas. This suggests that being overconfident in your own crazy ideas isn’t likely to stifle other experimentation.
Julia also suggests several variants on the “strategy of temporarily suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself headlong into something for a while, allowing your emotional state to be as
if you were 100% confident.”
In a sense, Feynman and Weber were practicing an extreme version of this strategy. I don’t know Weber’s work well, but it’s notable that in the details of Feynman’s work he was good at ferreting out error, and not fooling himself. He wasn’t always rigorous – mathematicians have, for instance, spent decades trying to make the path integral rigorous – but there was usually a strong core argument. Indeed, Feynman delivered a very stimulating speech on the value of careful thought in scientific work.
How can this careful approach to the details of argument be reconciled with his remarks about the need to fool yourself in creative work?
I never met Feynman, and can’t say how he reconciled the two points of view. But my own approach in creative work, and I believe many others also take this approach, is to carve out a sort of creative cocoon around nascent ideas.
Consider Apple designer Jony Ive’s remarks at a memorial after Steve Jobs’ death:
  Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”
And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound. And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.
 
To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and
truth. And if they seem important enough to be worth pursuing, you construct a creative cocoon around them, a set of stories you tell yourself to protect the idea not just from others, but from your own self doubts. The purpose of those stories isn’t to be an air tight defence. It’s to give you the confidence to nurture the idea, possibly for years, to find out if there’s something really there. 
And so, even someone who has extremely high standards for the final details of their work, may have an important component to their thinking which relies on rather woolly arguments. And they may well need to cling to that cocoon. Perhaps other approaches are possible. But my own experience is that this is often the case.
Postscript
Julia finishes her post with:
  One last point: Even if it turned out to be true that irrationality is necessary for innovators, thatâ€™s only a weak defense of your original claim, which was that Iâ€™m significantly overrating the value of rationality in general. Remember, â€œcoming up with brilliant new ideasâ€ is just one domain in which we could evaluate the potential value-add of increased rationality. There are lots of other domains to consider, such as designing policy, allocating philanthropic funds, military strategy, etc. We could certainly talk about those separately; for now, Iâ€™m just noting that you made this original claim about the dubious value of rationality in general, but then your argument focused on this one particular domain, innovation.
 
To clarify, I didn’t intend my claim to be in general: the tension I see is between creativity and accuracy.
That said, this tension does leak into other areas. 
If you’re a funder, say, trying to determine what to fund in AI research, you go and talk to AI experts. And many of those people are likely to have cultivated their own creative cocoons, which will inform their remarks. How a funder should deal with that is a separate essay. My point here is simply that this process of creative cocooning isn’t easily untangled from things like evaluation of work.
Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-there-a-tension-between-creativity-and-accuracy/
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-indirect-perception-plausible.html
Is Indirect Perception Plausible?
2021-11-18
Andrew
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 Thursday 18 November 2021

 Is Indirect Perception Plausible?

 There are two basic ways perception might work to let us experience the world in behaviourally relevant ways. Direct perception is the idea that perception only requires two components; the environment and the organism. Indirect perception is the idea that perception requires at least three components; the environment, the organism, and at least one other component that mediates between the organism and the environment. Over the last few posts, I've been working through the specifics of the ecological approach to making direct perception plausible, because this is a question I often get (usually in the form of 'I don't see how this could work in this case'). Regardless of whether or not it's correct, we can show that we have all the pieces needed to make direct perception work in principle, and the empirical programme is about seeing if it works in practice. What about indirect perception?

 I asked this question on Twitter , and one interesting thing I noticed was just how little sense the question seems to make to people these days. Responses fell into roughly two categories: 'I don't see how we can do with it in this case', and 'brains do stuff, so...', neither of which answer the question. Even if some form of indirect perception is required in those cases (which is, of course, still up for grabs) we're still owed an account of how this might work, at least in principle and then later in practice.

 People used to know this. The most recent indirect perception hypothesis is that the key mediator is a mental representation, understood as a computational, information processing system implementing some form of inference that combines sensory data and information stored in memory to create a model of the world that represents the system's best guess about what is out there and how to behave successfully with respect to what's out there. This hypothesis didn't come out of nowhere; the development of the computer and the theory of information that allows them to work turned out to provide the pieces required to create a formal account of representations that stood a chance of living up to the challenge of explaining perception. Cognitive scientists therefore leaned heavily into the details of these pieces as they worked very hard, from the late 1950s on, to make indirect perception implemented this way plausible.

 The exact details of the process have, of course, changed and evolved with empirical data and developments in computational theory. For example, while all the accounts have to do inference that combine sources of information into a best guess, there are a variety of ways of doing inference, some better than others. Probably the best way to do inference is via Bayesian methods, and so most modern theories propose that indirect perception combines sources of information this way so as to be optimal.

 Before these inferential methods can even be brought into play, however, there remain two related and big unanswered challenges that need to be addressed. The first one is the grounding problem; how do representations get the content they need so as to combine sources of information in a way that works? It's all very well describing the inferential process of the fully formed system, but how do you build one in the first place? The second is the 'which representation?' problem; of all the different sources of information the system has to combine, how does it know which information to bring together for a given task? These reflect a circular problem indirect theories create for themselves. If perception is not good enough to be direct, and thus requires representational support, where do those representations come from? In order for a theory of indirect perception to be plausible, these must be addressed (analogous to how in order for a theory of direct perception to be plausible, questions like 'can the physical world present itself in behaviourally relevant ways?' had to be addressed).

 I am not going to address these challenges to indirect theories, because it isn't my job. But they are legitimate questions that people have mostly stopped asking. Debates about the form and content of representations were prominent and explicit right up until the end of the 1990s, and then it all just seemed to stop. Interface theory, for all it's problems, at least got back into the fight and tackled the grounding problem ( unsuccessfully, I've argued , but it was a solid swing and at least Hoffman recognised he owed us an account). Mark Bickhard's work is probably the only currently active research programme explicitly working out the details, but I don't know many scientists who even know who he is, and a lot of his work is about mapping out the rules of living up to the challenge, versus actually solving the problem.

 Until these foundational issues are addressed and answered, whether indirect perception is plausible remains unclear, and no matter how sophisticated your inferential machinery is (looking at you, free energy principle) it can't help until you explain how it came to be organised that way in the first place. Even if the ecological theory of direct perception doesn't hold up, representational theories of indirect perception are not viable options if they cannot be shown to be plausible.

 Posted by Andrew at 14:33
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 Labels: Bickhard , indirect perception , inference , interface theory , is it plausible , representation , symbol grounding problem

 2 comments:

 1. Dominik Lukeš22 November 2021 at 23:50

 I agree, I don't think you can tell a plausible story about perception mediated by computational symbolic representation. But I think you make your life too easy by limiting representation to a "computational, information processing system".

 There are theories of mental representation that make that assumption. Lakoff's Idealized Cognitive Models are constructs I find incredibly useful but Goffman's frames/footing could also be used. Arguably, people feel like the only way to make them make sense of this in the moment of use is computational or try to postulate some sort of neural correlate that does the same thing. But that's not necessary for the theory of mental representation itself.

 Surely, lots of perception tasks involve some kind of representation. It may not be processed in any sense computationally (and I don't think it is). But it only makes sense if some representation exists. Just try to describe the process of writing the blog post (full of perception tasks) without some notion of mental imagery.

 Or to think of a contrived perception task. You have baseball pitcher who has to pick up balls from a bucket to pitch. All the balls have pictures of people but the pitcher can only throw the ones with a US president on them. Even though that's as close to a computational task of memory retrieval and pattern matching, I don't think that that's what's happening. But representation of some sort is at least adjacent to the task.

 You can make it more difficult by saying to the pitcher that they must put a spin on any odd numbered president. Completing this sort of task would require some external look up source for most people - almost perfectly computational. What is happening there? What sort of training would be required to achieve any level of fluency? Would this even be an achievable task for a batter?

 And I would argue that most direct perception is motivated by or at least adjacent to some sort of representation that is experienced by people who try to turn introspective attention to it as vaguely computational. Which is why indirect perception makes better intuitive sense to most people than direct perception. We can guess at the nature of those representations from the demands of the tasks. But that does not mean we have to postulate them as abstract symbols presented for computation.

 People with aphantasia are an interesting case. They literally cannot form a mental image of a face but they can still recognise people. So, the representations cannot rely on actual mental images. But we still act as if we had some - that's the only way we can make sense of them.

 The symbolic computational account is not plausible. But neither is denying that something like representations is somehow involved. What is the alternative ecological psychology has to offer here?

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 2. Thomas14 December 2022 at 04:27

 Do dreams can be classified as the indirect perception of our reality?

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Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists
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 Thursday 18 November 2021
 Is Indirect Perception Plausible?
 There are two basic ways perception might work to let us experience the world in behaviourally relevant ways. Direct perception is the idea that perception only requires two components; the environment and the organism. Indirect perception is the idea that perception requires at least three components; the environment, the organism, and at least one other component that mediates between the organism and the environment. Over the last few posts, I've been working through the specifics of the ecological approach to making direct perception plausible, because this is a question I often get (usually in the form of 'I don't see how this could work in this case'). Regardless of whether or not it's correct, we can show that we have all the pieces needed to make direct perception work in principle, and the empirical programme is about seeing if it works in practice. What about indirect perception?
 I asked this question on Twitter , and one interesting thing I noticed was just how little sense the question seems to make to people these days. Responses fell into roughly two categories: 'I don't see how we can do with it in this case', and 'brains do stuff, so...', neither of which answer the question. Even if some form of indirect perception is required in those cases (which is, of course, still up for grabs) we're still owed an account of how this might work, at least in principle and then later in practice.
 People used to know this. The most recent indirect perception hypothesis is that the key mediator is a mental representation, understood as a computational, information processing system implementing some form of inference that combines sensory data and information stored in memory to create a model of the world that represents the system's best guess about what is out there and how to behave successfully with respect to what's out there. This hypothesis didn't come out of nowhere; the development of the computer and the theory of information that allows them to work turned out to provide the pieces required to create a formal account of representations that stood a chance of living up to the challenge of explaining perception. Cognitive scientists therefore leaned heavily into the details of these pieces as they worked very hard, from the late 1950s on, to make indirect perception implemented this way plausible.
 The exact details of the process have, of course, changed and evolved with empirical data and developments in computational theory. For example, while all the accounts have to do inference that combine sources of information into a best guess, there are a variety of ways of doing inference, some better than others. Probably the best way to do inference is via Bayesian methods, and so most modern theories propose that indirect perception combines sources of information this way so as to be optimal.
 Before these inferential methods can even be brought into play, however, there remain two related and big unanswered challenges that need to be addressed. The first one is the grounding problem; how do representations get the content they need so as to combine sources of information in a way that works? It's all very well describing the inferential process of the fully formed system, but how do you build one in the first place? The second is the 'which representation?' problem; of all the different sources of information the system has to combine, how does it know which information to bring together for a given task? These reflect a circular problem indirect theories create for themselves. If perception is not good enough to be direct, and thus requires representational support, where do those representations come from? In order for a theory of indirect perception to be plausible, these must be addressed (analogous to how in order for a theory of direct perception to be plausible, questions like 'can the physical world present itself in behaviourally relevant ways?' had to be addressed).
 I am not going to address these challenges to indirect theories, because it isn't my job. But they are legitimate questions that people have mostly stopped asking. Debates about the form and content of representations were prominent and explicit right up until the end of the 1990s, and then it all just seemed to stop. Interface theory, for all it's problems, at least got back into the fight and tackled the grounding problem ( unsuccessfully, I've argued , but it was a solid swing and at least Hoffman recognised he owed us an account). Mark Bickhard's work is probably the only currently active research programme explicitly working out the details, but I don't know many scientists who even know who he is, and a lot of his work is about mapping out the rules of living up to the challenge, versus actually solving the problem.
 Until these foundational issues are addressed and answered, whether indirect perception is plausible remains unclear, and no matter how sophisticated your inferential machinery is (looking at you, free energy principle) it can't help until you explain how it came to be organised that way in the first place. Even if the ecological theory of direct perception doesn't hold up, representational theories of indirect perception are not viable options if they cannot be shown to be plausible.
 Posted by Andrew at 14:33
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 Labels: Bickhard , indirect perception , inference , interface theory , is it plausible , representation , symbol grounding problem
 2 comments:
 1. Dominik Lukeš22 November 2021 at 23:50
 I agree, I don't think you can tell a plausible story about perception mediated by computational symbolic representation. But I think you make your life too easy by limiting representation to a "computational, information processing system".
 There are theories of mental representation that make that assumption. Lakoff's Idealized Cognitive Models are constructs I find incredibly useful but Goffman's frames/footing could also be used. Arguably, people feel like the only way to make them make sense of this in the moment of use is computational or try to postulate some sort of neural correlate that does the same thing. But that's not necessary for the theory of mental representation itself.
 Surely, lots of perception tasks involve some kind of representation. It may not be processed in any sense computationally (and I don't think it is). But it only makes sense if some representation exists. Just try to describe the process of writing the blog post (full of perception tasks) without some notion of mental imagery.
 Or to think of a contrived perception task. You have baseball pitcher who has to pick up balls from a bucket to pitch. All the balls have pictures of people but the pitcher can only throw the ones with a US president on them. Even though that's as close to a computational task of memory retrieval and pattern matching, I don't think that that's what's happening. But representation of some sort is at least adjacent to the task.
 You can make it more difficult by saying to the pitcher that they must put a spin on any odd numbered president. Completing this sort of task would require some external look up source for most people - almost perfectly computational. What is happening there? What sort of training would be required to achieve any level of fluency? Would this even be an achievable task for a batter?
 And I would argue that most direct perception is motivated by or at least adjacent to some sort of representation that is experienced by people who try to turn introspective attention to it as vaguely computational. Which is why indirect perception makes better intuitive sense to most people than direct perception. We can guess at the nature of those representations from the demands of the tasks. But that does not mean we have to postulate them as abstract symbols presented for computation.
 People with aphantasia are an interesting case. They literally cannot form a mental image of a face but they can still recognise people. So, the representations cannot rely on actual mental images. But we still act as if we had some - that's the only way we can make sense of them.
 The symbolic computational account is not plausible. But neither is denying that something like representations is somehow involved. What is the alternative ecological psychology has to offer here?
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 2. Thomas14 December 2022 at 04:27
 Do dreams can be classified as the indirect perception of our reality?
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Is Indirect Perception Plausible?
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-indirect-perception-plausible.html
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45378
The Year in History Blog History – The History Blog
2016-12-31
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<p>This year The History Blog <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/42526">celebrated its 10th anniverary</a>. The Six Million Dollar Man didn’t make an appearance at this party like he did at the Six Millionth View party last year, but we made up for it with a really great comment thread. I love when readers who rarely (or never!) comment mingle with the regular commenters to say nice things about the blog. It’s downright invigorating. (No, that is not a prompt for more of same in the comments on this post. Okay it kind of is. Not that you need prompting.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Flagstones-from-Joe-the-Quilters-cottage.jpg"></a>It’s the on-topic posts that capture people’s attention on the larger web. The article about the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41653">17th century silk gown</a> found on the Texel shipwreck was the runaway most visited of the year with 11,555 views. The story of the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/40204">murder of Joe the Quilter</a> and the discovery of the remains of his cottage was the second most popular of the year with 6,276 views. It was also one of my favorites. The tragic story, Joe’s outstanding artisanship, the rare survival of a labourer’s cottage from the 1820s and my first encounter with the <a href="http://www.beamish.org.uk/">Beamish Museum</a> all captivated my attention. Then the modern Joe the Quilter topped it all off by commenting.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Deep-peri-mortem-gash-on-cranium.-Michael-Westaway..jpg"></a>That wasn’t the only murderous story of the year. I was particularly interested in the story of <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/40777">Martha Brown</a>, the woman who killed her abusive husband and was hanged for it. Among the thousands of people who attended her execution was a 16-year-old Thomas Hardy. Years later he would write <em>Tess of the d’Urbervilles</em> about a woman who kills her abuser and is hanged for murder. The <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/40748">century-old cold case</a> of the Fontaubert bones only has the legend of a gloriously lurid murder behind it, but maybe the new forensic investigation will turn up something if not equally interesting, at least mildly so. Then there was the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44492">first known boomerang victim</a>, killed in the 13th century by a fighting boomerang, a heavy, sharp-edged wood weapon that cut through his bone like metal. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that the remains of the victim of <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44444">a huge 17th century royal sex scandal</a> have been found, but the odds are slim.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Westbury-quilt-c.-1900–03.jpg"></a>I allowed myself some shameless photographic indulgences this year. The <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/43391">Australian quilts</a> were probably my richest haul in a single post, but in sheer size and beauty, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45359">Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic</a> gets very high ranking in the end of the year summary even though I only just posted it a couple of days ago. Another December entry gave me my greatest source of photographic gluttony, however. It’s the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45284">boxwood miniatures</a>. When the Art Gallery of Ontario gave me access to their folder of high resolution photographs, I seriously got a rush. It’s because the carving is so, so small. Having gigantic pictures where the details could be seen in extreme close-up totally made my year.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Skara-Brae-Buddo-front.jpg"></a>Along similar lines, I love how high resolution 3D scans of artifacts and remains are becoming more common. This year alone we saw 3D scans of <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41278">Chinese oracle bones</a>, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41588">Dandaleith Pictish stone</a>, a <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44617">Pictish cross slab</a>, an <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/43158">Anglo-Saxon name stone found at Lindisfarne</a>, <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/43987">bones and objects from the Tudor flagship <em>Mary Rose</em></a>, the first church where <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44977">Norway’s Viking saint king Olaf II was buried</a> and the irrepressible charm of the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/42744">Skara Brae “Buddo” figurine</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Partially-cleaned-stele.jpg"></a>Some of my favorite finds of the year were inscriptions. There was the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41401">Etruscan stele</a> found in the foundations of an ancient temple in Tuscany, later found to include the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/43864">name of the goddess Uni</a>. Newly discovered Etruscan inscriptions are always cause for celebration, and this one is very long and very old. I also loved the two from modern-day Turkey, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41987">2,000-year-old horse racing rules</a> and the amazing <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44303">2,200-year-old lease contract</a>. It’s a contract! Literally carved in stone! And thus metaphor becomes literal.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Amphorae-and-bagged-coins-AFP.jpg"></a>With no particular thread connecting them other than my personal interest, I got a big kick out of discoveries from all over the world. There was that group of <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41102">small ceremonial iron weapons</a> found in Oman, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/42019">small fragment of 13th century pottery</a> from Teruel, Spain, decorated with a unique depiction of a Jewish man, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44531">Tuscan villa of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus</a>, a 4th century senator and one of the last politically prominent adherents of traditional Roman religion to fight for its preservation, that <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45033">freaking huge gold torc</a> found in Cambridgeshire and the unbearable cuteness of the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45006">Canaanite “Thinker” figurine</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/spectral-imaging-by-the-early-manuscripts-electronic-library.-processed-image-by-david-kelbe.-©-project-fwf-p24523-g19.jpg"></a>In the ephemera category, the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/42533">only copy of Utrecht’s first newspaper</a>, published in 1623, was found in a hand-bound anthology in the City Archives and Athenaeum Library in Deventer, the Netherlands. The news wasn’t fresh (even our Dutch-speaking readers struggled to follow it), but the history of newspapers was entirely unknown to me before I researched the find. Fascinating subject. The account of <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41391">another battle of Thermopylae</a>, this one between invading Goths and a combined Roman-Greek force during the 3rd century Gothic wars, discovered in a palimpsest in Vienna is a stand-out of the year. It’s a previously unknown passage in the <em>Scythica</em>, a history of the wars written by Athenian historian P. Herennius Dexippus who lived through them. Only a few fragments from this history survived quoted in later books. The palimpsest gave us by far the longest surviving passage, and a riveting one at that.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Bishop-poop.-Photo-by-Rogvi-S.-Johansen-Moesgaard-Museum.jpg"></a>Denmark may win the award this year for most exciting finds in one country. There was the wee <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41184">gold pendant</a> found by a metal detectorist that is the earliest figure of Christ found in Denmark, the lead <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41785">amulet invoking elves and the Christian Trinity</a>, the rediscovery of the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41691">long-lost Ydby Runestone</a>, the stabby beauty of the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41616">Viking treasure hoard</a> found in Lille Karleby, the<br/>
<a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/42800">two pounds of Viking gold bangles</a>, <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44813">the Viking toolbox</a> unearthed at Borgring, and that amazingly smooth <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41892">giant Neolithic flint axe</a>. But of all the great and wondrous treasures Denmark has brought us this year, the greatest of them all was the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44950">17th century bishop’s turd</a>. The title alone made me laugh for a solid two days.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Cooking-pot-filled-with-lamps-and-coins.-Aargau-Canton-archeology-department-Bela-Polyvas.jpg"></a>The hoards of the Danes had sturdy competition this year from Spain and Switzerland. The sheer quantity, <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/41899">1,300 pounds of Roman coins</a>, found in Tomares outside Seville, Spain, would have been impressive enough on its own, but they came in custom matching amphorae of a type never seen before. Researchers are still going through the tens of thousands of coins from the late 3rd, early 4th century. It’s not cash or pounds of gold, but the <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44908">Roman lamp hoard</a> found in Switzerland stands next to these glories with its head held high, just because it’s so pristine and unique.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Section-showing-the-length-of-the-vertical-chute-connecting-to-the-dump-chute-in-the-cellar-body-dangling-from-the-rope.-Drawing-in-The-Cincinnati-Enquirer-Friday-May-31st-1878.jpg"></a>I think the highlight of the year, maybe the highlight of the first decade of The History Blog history, was the chilling Halloween three-parter about the Harrison Horror (<a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/29198">part I</a>, <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44644">part II</a>, <a href="http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/44691">part III</a>). I’d been thinking about writing a serial for years, and a long-form treatment of the body-snatching of John Scott Harrison and Augustus Devin for at least two years. I finally did it and it was so, so worth it. I’m warning you, though, there is no way I’m even trying to top it next year, not for Halloween anyway. Maybe some other theme will inspire me, or maybe it’ll just be something that I randomly stumble across. Stay tuned to find out!</p>
<p>I wish you all the very best of New Years, full of prosperity, peace and nerdery. I will continue to do my utmost to contribute to the last of those.</p>
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 Home » Ex Cathedra » The Year in History Blog History

 The Year in History Blog History

 December 31, 2016 Ex Cathedra

 This year The History Blog celebrated its 10th anniverary. The Six Million Dollar Man didn’t make an appearance at this party like he did at the Six Millionth View party last year, but we made up for it with a really great comment thread. I love when readers who rarely (or never!) comment mingle with the regular commenters to say nice things about the blog. It’s downright invigorating. (No, that is not a prompt for more of same in the comments on this post. Okay it kind of is. Not that you need prompting.)

 It’s the on-topic posts that capture people’s attention on the larger web. The article about the 17th century silk gown found on the Texel shipwreck was the runaway most visited of the year with 11,555 views. The story of the murder of Joe the Quilter and the discovery of the remains of his cottage was the second most popular of the year with 6,276 views. It was also one of my favorites. The tragic story, Joe’s outstanding artisanship, the rare survival of a labourer’s cottage from the 1820s and my first encounter with the Beamish Museum all captivated my attention. Then the modern Joe the Quilter topped it all off by commenting.

 That wasn’t the only murderous story of the year. I was particularly interested in the story of Martha Brown, the woman who killed her abusive husband and was hanged for it. Among the thousands of people who attended her execution was a 16-year-old Thomas Hardy. Years later he would write Tess of the d’Urbervilles about a woman who kills her abuser and is hanged for murder. The century-old cold case of the Fontaubert bones only has the legend of a gloriously lurid murder behind it, but maybe the new forensic investigation will turn up something if not equally interesting, at least mildly so. Then there was the first known boomerang victim, killed in the 13th century by a fighting boomerang, a heavy, sharp-edged wood weapon that cut through his bone like metal. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that the remains of the victim of a huge 17th century royal sex scandal have been found, but the odds are slim.

 I allowed myself some shameless photographic indulgences this year. The Australian quilts were probably my richest haul in a single post, but in sheer size and beauty, the Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic gets very high ranking in the end of the year summary even though I only just posted it a couple of days ago. Another December entry gave me my greatest source of photographic gluttony, however. It’s the boxwood miniatures. When the Art Gallery of Ontario gave me access to their folder of high resolution photographs, I seriously got a rush. It’s because the carving is so, so small. Having gigantic pictures where the details could be seen in extreme close-up totally made my year.

 Along similar lines, I love how high resolution 3D scans of artifacts and remains are becoming more common. This year alone we saw 3D scans of Chinese oracle bones, the Dandaleith Pictish stone, a Pictish cross slab, an Anglo-Saxon name stone found at Lindisfarne, bones and objects from the Tudor flagship Mary Rose, the first church where Norway’s Viking saint king Olaf II was buried and the irrepressible charm of the Skara Brae “Buddo” figurine.

 Some of my favorite finds of the year were inscriptions. There was the Etruscan stele found in the foundations of an ancient temple in Tuscany, later found to include the name of the goddess Uni. Newly discovered Etruscan inscriptions are always cause for celebration, and this one is very long and very old. I also loved the two from modern-day Turkey, the 2,000-year-old horse racing rules and the amazing 2,200-year-old lease contract. It’s a contract! Literally carved in stone! And thus metaphor becomes literal.

 With no particular thread connecting them other than my personal interest, I got a big kick out of discoveries from all over the world. There was that group of small ceremonial iron weapons found in Oman, the small fragment of 13th century pottery from Teruel, Spain, decorated with a unique depiction of a Jewish man, the Tuscan villa of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, a 4th century senator and one of the last politically prominent adherents of traditional Roman religion to fight for its preservation, that freaking huge gold torc found in Cambridgeshire and the unbearable cuteness of the Canaanite “Thinker” figurine.

 In the ephemera category, the only copy of Utrecht’s first newspaper, published in 1623, was found in a hand-bound anthology in the City Archives and Athenaeum Library in Deventer, the Netherlands. The news wasn’t fresh (even our Dutch-speaking readers struggled to follow it), but the history of newspapers was entirely unknown to me before I researched the find. Fascinating subject. The account of another battle of Thermopylae, this one between invading Goths and a combined Roman-Greek force during the 3rd century Gothic wars, discovered in a palimpsest in Vienna is a stand-out of the year. It’s a previously unknown passage in the Scythica, a history of the wars written by Athenian historian P. Herennius Dexippus who lived through them. Only a few fragments from this history survived quoted in later books. The palimpsest gave us by far the longest surviving passage, and a riveting one at that.

 Denmark may win the award this year for most exciting finds in one country. There was the wee gold pendant found by a metal detectorist that is the earliest figure of Christ found in Denmark, the lead amulet invoking elves and the Christian Trinity, the rediscovery of the long-lost Ydby Runestone, the stabby beauty of the Viking treasure hoard found in Lille Karleby, the
 two pounds of Viking gold bangles, the Viking toolbox unearthed at Borgring, and that amazingly smooth giant Neolithic flint axe. But of all the great and wondrous treasures Denmark has brought us this year, the greatest of them all was the 17th century bishop’s turd. The title alone made me laugh for a solid two days.

 The hoards of the Danes had sturdy competition this year from Spain and Switzerland. The sheer quantity, 1,300 pounds of Roman coins, found in Tomares outside Seville, Spain, would have been impressive enough on its own, but they came in custom matching amphorae of a type never seen before. Researchers are still going through the tens of thousands of coins from the late 3rd, early 4th century. It’s not cash or pounds of gold, but the Roman lamp hoard found in Switzerland stands next to these glories with its head held high, just because it’s so pristine and unique.

 I think the highlight of the year, maybe the highlight of the first decade of The History Blog history, was the chilling Halloween three-parter about the Harrison Horror (part I, part II, part III). I’d been thinking about writing a serial for years, and a long-form treatment of the body-snatching of John Scott Harrison and Augustus Devin for at least two years. I finally did it and it was so, so worth it. I’m warning you, though, there is no way I’m even trying to top it next year, not for Halloween anyway. Maybe some other theme will inspire me, or maybe it’ll just be something that I randomly stumble across. Stay tuned to find out!

 I wish you all the very best of New Years, full of prosperity, peace and nerdery. I will continue to do my utmost to contribute to the last of those.

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 34 thoughts on “ The Year in History Blog History ”

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 1. Albertus Minimus says:
 January 3, 2017 at 10:37 AM

 Well-deserved maximum congratulations; as a former blogger, I have a little understanding about the effort required to keep up a good blog, never mind an excellent one like yours. May you and The History Blog live long and prosper.

 Reply
 2. Mike Benz says:
 January 3, 2017 at 11:46 AM

 I am a lawyer in Chicago. This is my #1 favorite daily internet stop. Thank you so much for the work you put into this blog.

 Reply
 3. Clay says:
 January 3, 2017 at 12:11 PM

 Happy New Year Livius. and thanks for all the incredible stories in 2016!

 I read The History Blog every day (well, except for weekends, but that’s okay because it means I get to read 3 stories on Monday).

 The little boy in me has to admit that stories of treasure troves of coins and other valuables that keep showing up in Europe are my favorites.

 Reply
 4. Chloe says:
 January 3, 2017 at 2:16 PM

 Ditto, ditto, ditto! Thank you for all your hard work. Your blog postings are like sunshine through the clouds on many of my days.

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This year The History Blog celebrated its 10th anniverary. The Six Million Dollar Man didn’t make an appearance at this party like he did at the Six Millionth View party last year, but we made up for it with a really great comment thread. I love when readers who rarely (or never!) comment mingle with the regular commenters to say nice things about the blog. It’s downright invigorating. (No, that is not a prompt for more of same in the comments on this post. Okay it kind of is. Not that you need prompting.)
  It’s the on-topic posts that capture people’s attention on the larger web. The article about the 17th century silk gown found on the Texel shipwreck was the runaway most visited of the year with 11,555 views. The story of the murder of Joe the Quilter and the discovery of the remains of his cottage was the second most popular of the year with 6,276 views. It was also one of my favorites. The tragic story, Joe’s outstanding artisanship, the rare survival of a labourer’s cottage from the 1820s and my first encounter with the Beamish Museum all captivated my attention. Then the modern Joe the Quilter topped it all off by commenting.
  That wasn’t the only murderous story of the year. I was particularly interested in the story of Martha Brown, the woman who killed her abusive husband and was hanged for it. Among the thousands of people who attended her execution was a 16-year-old Thomas Hardy. Years later he would write Tess of the d’Urbervilles about a woman who kills her abuser and is hanged for murder. The century-old cold case of the Fontaubert bones only has the legend of a gloriously lurid murder behind it, but maybe the new forensic investigation will turn up something if not equally interesting, at least mildly so. Then there was the first known boomerang victim, killed in the 13th century by a fighting boomerang, a heavy, sharp-edged wood weapon that cut through his bone like metal. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that the remains of the victim of a huge 17th century royal sex scandal have been found, but the odds are slim.
  I allowed myself some shameless photographic indulgences this year. The Australian quilts were probably my richest haul in a single post, but in sheer size and beauty, the Dream Garden Tiffany mosaic gets very high ranking in the end of the year summary even though I only just posted it a couple of days ago. Another December entry gave me my greatest source of photographic gluttony, however. It’s the boxwood miniatures. When the Art Gallery of Ontario gave me access to their folder of high resolution photographs, I seriously got a rush. It’s because the carving is so, so small. Having gigantic pictures where the details could be seen in extreme close-up totally made my year.
  Along similar lines, I love how high resolution 3D scans of artifacts and remains are becoming more common. This year alone we saw 3D scans of Chinese oracle bones, the Dandaleith Pictish stone, a Pictish cross slab, an Anglo-Saxon name stone found at Lindisfarne, bones and objects from the Tudor flagship Mary Rose , the first church where Norway’s Viking saint king Olaf II was buried and the irrepressible charm of the Skara Brae “Buddo” figurine.
  Some of my favorite finds of the year were inscriptions. There was the Etruscan stele found in the foundations of an ancient temple in Tuscany, later found to include the name of the goddess Uni. Newly discovered Etruscan inscriptions are always cause for celebration, and this one is very long and very old. I also loved the two from modern-day Turkey, the 2,000-year-old horse racing rules and the amazing 2,200-year-old lease contract. It’s a contract! Literally carved in stone! And thus metaphor becomes literal.
  With no particular thread connecting them other than my personal interest, I got a big kick out of discoveries from all over the world. There was that group of small ceremonial iron weapons found in Oman, the small fragment of 13th century pottery from Teruel, Spain, decorated with a unique depiction of a Jewish man, the Tuscan villa of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, a 4th century senator and one of the last politically prominent adherents of traditional Roman religion to fight for its preservation, that freaking huge gold torc found in Cambridgeshire and the unbearable cuteness of the Canaanite “Thinker” figurine.
  In the ephemera category, the only copy of Utrecht’s first newspaper, published in 1623, was found in a hand-bound anthology in the City Archives and Athenaeum Library in Deventer, the Netherlands. The news wasn’t fresh (even our Dutch-speaking readers struggled to follow it), but the history of newspapers was entirely unknown to me before I researched the find. Fascinating subject. The account of another battle of Thermopylae, this one between invading Goths and a combined Roman-Greek force during the 3rd century Gothic wars, discovered in a palimpsest in Vienna is a stand-out of the year. It’s a previously unknown passage in the Scythica, a history of the wars written by Athenian historian P. Herennius Dexippus who lived through them. Only a few fragments from this history survived quoted in later books. The palimpsest gave us by far the longest surviving passage, and a riveting one at that.
  Denmark may win the award this year for most exciting finds in one country. There was the wee gold pendant found by a metal detectorist that is the earliest figure of Christ found in Denmark, the lead amulet invoking elves and the Christian Trinity, the rediscovery of the long-lost Ydby Runestone, the stabby beauty of the Viking treasure hoard found in Lille Karleby, the
two pounds of Viking gold bangles, the Viking toolbox unearthed at Borgring, and that amazingly smooth giant Neolithic flint axe. But of all the great and wondrous treasures Denmark has brought us this year, the greatest of them all was the 17th century bishop’s turd. The title alone made me laugh for a solid two days.
  The hoards of the Danes had sturdy competition this year from Spain and Switzerland. The sheer quantity, 1,300 pounds of Roman coins, found in Tomares outside Seville, Spain, would have been impressive enough on its own, but they came in custom matching amphorae of a type never seen before. Researchers are still going through the tens of thousands of coins from the late 3rd, early 4th century. It’s not cash or pounds of gold, but the Roman lamp hoard found in Switzerland stands next to these glories with its head held high, just because it’s so pristine and unique.
  I think the highlight of the year, maybe the highlight of the first decade of The History Blog history, was the chilling Halloween three-parter about the Harrison Horror (part I, part II, part III). I’d been thinking about writing a serial for years, and a long-form treatment of the body-snatching of John Scott Harrison and Augustus Devin for at least two years. I finally did it and it was so, so worth it. I’m warning you, though, there is no way I’m even trying to top it next year, not for Halloween anyway. Maybe some other theme will inspire me, or maybe it’ll just be something that I randomly stumble across. Stay tuned to find out!
I wish you all the very best of New Years, full of prosperity, peace and nerdery. I will continue to do my utmost to contribute to the last of those.
The Year in History Blog History – The History Blog
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/45378
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
Horizontal History — Wait But Why
2016-01-13
Tim Urban
<div><article>
	<div><p>Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.</p>
<p>The reason history is so hard is that it’s so <em>soft</em>. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.</p>
<p>That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved <em>at the time</em> can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.</p>
<p>And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to <em>simplify </em>things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.</p>
<p>Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the <em>us </em>guys—and they detest the bad guys—the <em>them</em> guys<em>—</em>and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved <em>Shawshank </em>and <em>Braveheart</em> and <em>Star Wars</em>, right?</p>
<p>So when it comes to the story we’re all a <em>part </em>of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.</p>
<p>The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. <em>Someone </em>has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, <em>complete </em>story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even <em>knows </em>the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.</p>
<p>This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.</p>
<p>The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)</p>
<p>This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an <em>insanely</em> complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.</p>
<p>So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.</p>
<p>Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe <em>both</em> of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">from</a> <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/absurdly-famous-people-probably-dont-know-enough.html">experience</a>.</p>
<p>This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.</p>
<p>So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—<em>who </em>happened when.</p>
<p>Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.</p>
<p>But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.</p>
<p>Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each <em>other</em>. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a <em>vertical </em>sense.</p>
<p>And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially <em>complete</em> picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all <em>about. </em></p>
<p>Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work <i>On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres </i>in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the <em>times</em>. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct <em>personality</em>. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s <em>horizontally</em>, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.</p>
<p>A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.</p>
<p>Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about <em>who </em>I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like <em>Time</em>. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.</p>
<p><strong>Horizontal History—First Crack:</strong></p>
<p>For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially <em>in relation to each other</em>.</p>
<p>Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/My-generations.png"></a></p>
<p>If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/My-generations-decades.png"></a></p>
<p>But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Older-decades.png"></a></p>
<p>Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.</p>
<p>Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.</p>
<p>Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Generations-4.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.</p>
<p><strong>Horizontal History—Second Crack:</strong></p>
<p>For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.</p>
<p>This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year <em>and </em>the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.</p>
<p>As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with <em>way </em>more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. <em>But</em>, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Recent-1-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Recent-2-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-4.jpg"></a></p><p>
[<strong>Note: </strong>A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Horizontal-History-Lifespans-Sideways.jpg">Here it is.</a>]
</p><p>Some overall thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Lifespans are unfair.</strong> Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Murder is dickish.</strong> Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone <em>else’s </em>bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and <em>snipped </em>his bar.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><b>On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. </b>This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Some people aren’t easily categorized<em>. </em></strong>I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks.<em> </em></strong>I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?</li>
</ul>
<p>Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:</p>
<p>I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his <em>Requiem</em> the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1780.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1610.png"></a></p>
<p>And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1510.png"></a></p>
<p>But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Renaissance-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.</p>
<p>Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing <em>On the Origin of Species </em>(1859), Dickens published <em>A Tale of Two Cities </em>(1859) and <em>Great Expectations </em>(1861), Lewis Carroll published <em>Alice in Wonderland </em>(1865), Dostoyevsky published <em>Crime and Punishment</em> (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with <em>War and Peace</em> (1869). These guys were all in their primes <em>at the same time</em>. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/1860s-2.jpg"></a></p>
<p>So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="http://eepurl.com/Ffj9D">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>More Wait But Why history posts:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong> – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html"><strong>Putting Time in Perspective</strong></a> – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/the-death-toll-comparison-breakdown.html"><strong>The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown</strong></a> – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/american-presidents-washington-lincoln.html">The American Presidents series</a></strong></p>
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 Horizontal History

 January 13, 2016 By Tim Urban


 Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.

 The reason history is so hard is that it’s so soft. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.

 That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved at the time can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.

 And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to simplify things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.

 Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the us guys—and they detest the bad guys—the them guys—and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved Shawshank and Braveheart and Star Wars, right?

 So when it comes to the story we’re all a part of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.

 The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. Someone has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, complete story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even knows the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.

 This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.

 The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)

 This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an insanely complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.

 Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.

 So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.

 Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe both of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this from experience.

 This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.

 So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—who happened when.

 Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.

 But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.

 Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense.

 And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially complete picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all about.

 Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the times. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct personality. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s horizontally, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.

 A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.

 Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about who I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like Time. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.

 Horizontal History—First Crack:

 For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially in relation to each other.

 Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:

 If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:

 But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:

 Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.

 Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.

 Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.

 Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.

 Horizontal History—Second Crack:

 For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.

 This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year and the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.

 As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with way more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. But, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:

 Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.

 [Note: A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. Here it is.]

 Some overall thoughts:

 * Lifespans are unfair. Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.
 * Murder is dickish. Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone else’s bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and snipped his bar.
 * On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.
 * Some people aren’t easily categorized. I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.
 * Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks. I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?

 Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:

 I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.

 I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.

 And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.

 But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:

 While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.

 Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing On the Origin of Species (1859), Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with War and Peace (1869). These guys were all in their primes at the same time. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.

 So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 More Wait But Why history posts:

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq

 Putting Time in Perspective – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now

 The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective

 The American Presidents series

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Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives. Without a foundational, tree-trunk understanding of all parts of history, we often forget the things we do learn, leaving even our favorite parts of history a bit hazy in our heads. Raise your hand if you’d like to go on stage and debate a history buff on the nuances of a historical time period of your choosing. That’s what I thought.
The reason history is so hard is that it’s so soft. To truly, fully understand a time period, an event, a movement, or an important historical figure, you’d have to be there, and many times over. You’d have to be in the homes of the public living at the time to hear what they’re saying; you’d have to be a fly on the wall in dozens of secret, closed-door meetings and conversations; you’d need to be inside the minds of the key players to know their innermost thoughts and motivations. Even then, you’d be lacking context. To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.
That’s why not only can’t even the most perfect history buff fully understand history, but the key people involved at the time can’t ever know the full story. History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators.
And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to simplify things. History provides the context of our world and our lives, because each of us is a character in this grand story—and the last thing we want to believe is that the story is too complicated and mysterious for us to understand.
Fairy tales are satisfying, because the plot is crystal clear—there are good guys and there are bad guys and there’s only one side of the story. Children identify with the good guys—the us guys—and they detest the bad guys—the them guys—and everyone’s happy. Stories written for adults aren’t that different—you loved Shawshank and Braveheart and Star Wars, right?
So when it comes to the story we’re all a part of, we most certainly want to feel the same way. We want history to be simple and clear, with good guys and bad guys, and we’d like to make sure that our ancestors, our ethnic group, our nation, and all the other tribes we belong to are Aladdin in the story—not Jafar.
The problem with this is that not everyone can be Aladdin. Someone has to be Jafar, right? Well, no. Not if there are many different story-tellers. Since no one is ever telling anything close to the full, real, complete story, in all its complexity—as we said, no one even knows the full story—each historian, each ruler, and each society creates their own fairy tale version of what went down in the past. When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.
This leaves us with plenty of tools to leave every story with a proper Aladdin and a proper Jafar and allows us to make sure that Aladdin is exactly who we want him to be.
The US is a good example. A huge number of people in today’s world have been told a story of the US in which the US is Aladdin, and a huge other number of people have heard the same story with the US as Jafar. Some people will claim to have a more nuanced view, but deep in their heart, when they see an American flag, they see either a good guy flag or a bad guy flag. (One of the major political divides in the US stems from liberals thinking conservatives over-Aladdinize the US and conservatives thinking liberals over-Jafarify the US while Aladdinizing the other side.)
This is the same phenomenon behind the stark opinion divide around Israel and Palestine. Hordes of people on both sides of what is an insanely complicated story are red in the face with ire at the other side, completely positive that their side is Aladdin and incensed that anyone could ever call the other side Aladdin and their side Jafar. Only with the stark clarity of a fairy tale could people ever feel so unshakingly sure.
Of course, it’s not that there are no good guys or bad guys in history. History is a pretty ugly story—what else would you expect from a species of primitive biological animals—and accountability for that ugliness isn’t spread out evenly amongst all people. To an extent, the definition of words like good and bad, right and wrong, and hero and villain lie in the eye of the beholder—but there’s also plenty of human behavior that qualifies as objectively good or bad.
So it’s not that there are never objective Aladdins and there are never objective Jafars—it’s that almost none of us has any idea what the fuck we’re talking about. Point to a historical event and tell me that there was a true Aladdin and Jafar going on, and I’ll acknowledge that that might be true. Tell me that you know who was who, and in most cases I’ll shake my head.
Which brings me to me. Blogging about history is asking for trouble. Portray nearly any story or person as an Aladdin or a Jafar and you’ll feel the wrath of both the people who believe the opposite situation and the people who think you’ve oversimplified the situation. Portray something in a nuanced and balanced way and you’ll get yelled at by people who believe both of the one-sided views. Nothing brings people’s tribal fires to the table like history. I’ve learned this from experience.
This doesn’t make me any less excited to write about history—but it makes me want to research the shit out of a part of history before I write about it. Only by reading a bunch of varying accounts and opinions can you start to form a clear picture of what we know and don’t know.
So that’s why for this post, I’m not gonna tell you shit. Rather than dive into the weeds of what happened when, and why, I’m going to focus on one of the rare elements of history that’s indisputably black-and-white—who happened when.
Because before we can responsibly start arguing with each other about Aladdins and Jafars, we need to get the basic timeline and characters of the story clear.
But I’m going to lay things out a little differently than you’re probably used to.
Normally, we learn about history’s storylines in isolation. We might have a strong sense of the history of physics breakthroughs or the progression of western philosophical thought or the succession of French rulers—but we’re not as clear on how each of these storylines relate to each other. If you think of history like a tangle of vines growing upwards through time, studying one type of history at a time is like following the path of one particular vine while ignoring the other vines around it. It’s understanding history in a vertical sense.
And while vertical history has its merits, it doesn’t leave you with an especially complete picture of any one time. An econ buff in the year 2500 might know all about the Great Depression that happened in the early 20th century and the major recession that happened about 80 years later, but that same person might mistake the two world wars for happening in the 1800s or the 2200s if they’re a little hazy on the history of wars. So while an econ buff, that person would have a pretty poor understanding of what our modern times are all about.  
Likewise, I might know that Copernicus began writing his seminal work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres in Poland in the early 1510s, but by learning that right around that same time in Italy, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I get a better picture of the times. By learning that it was right while both of these things were happening that Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon in England, the 1510s suddenly begins to take on a distinct personality. These three facts, when put together, allow me to see a more three-dimensional picture of the 1510s—it allows me to see the 1510s horizontally, like cutting out a complete segment of the vine tangle and examining it all together.
A blog post is limited in its ability to examine all of history horizontally. But I’ve taken two separate cracks below that I think can work together nicely to help us take a horizontal view of different times. Both involve a lot of names.
Which leads me to the inevitable disclaimer about who I chose to include. I tried to remove my own biases by gathering the names from a handful of lists by publications like Time. I searched the internet for things like “most influential people in history” and “most important people in the Middle Ages” and “most famous people of the 19th century” and “most powerful Chinese emperors” and ended up with a big pile of names, some of whom I’m familiar with, others I’m not. That said, between the fact that the lists I used were by publications targeting English-speaking people and that I inevitably leaned more towards people I had heard of, the group of names will skew America- and Euro-centric, with places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia probably underrepresented. This isn’t entirely by accident, though—this post is only useful if you’ve heard of the people, and I intentionally chose names I thought a large portion of Wait But Why readers would know. In other words, merit wasn’t the only criteria—household fame mattered too. And yes, I missed a lot of people—with limited space on the screen, the names had to be a sampling, not an exhaustive list.
 Horizontal History—First Crack: 
For my first crack, I present to you a big pile of famous names, organized by birth decade—kind of a “2,600 Under 2,600” list. The purpose is to help orient ourselves on when people lived, especially in relation to each other.
Having a clear picture of generations is very easy when you think about currently-living people. For example, I know that Mark Zuckerberg is around my age while Vladimir Putin is about the age of my parents and George H.W. Bush is about the age of my grandparents. On the other side of things, Prince George—the one world-famous baby—is the age of my kids if I had kids. I know this without having to think about it:
   
If I list people by birth decade instead of generation, it still makes sense. People born in the 70s and 60s feel older than me but not as old as my parents, and people born in the 30s and 40s feel older than my parents but younger than my grandparents:
   
But this is much harder for generations that aren’t currently alive, and it gets less and less clear the farther back you go. Quick! Name the oldest member and youngest member of this group: Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Twain. Not that easy, right? And that’s only going back 200 years. But by laying them out by birth decade, you can get oriented:
   
Since a generation is typically about 30 years, you can move three or six lines down from a name to see who they viewed as their parents’ or grandparents’ ages during their lifetimes, and you can go the same distance up to see who they viewed as their kids’ or grandkids’ age. So Darwin would have seen Twain as some young kid and he would have shaken his old man fist at Gandhi from the rocking chair on his porch. Meanwhile, Nietzsche would have seen Marx as a guy his dad’s age and Freud as a contemporary, though a bit younger.
Two people more than seven or eight lines away from each other on the list probably were not ever alive at the same time, which means they were likely not that clear about each others’ generation, in the way I’m not really clear on whether Hemingway was in my great-grandparents’ generation, my great-great-grandparents’ generation, or some other age.
Using this decade list tool, let’s look at a whole group of famous historical figures to see who was the same age as whom, who shook their old man fist at whom, and who was and wasn’t alive at the same time. The decade colors are in a three-way cycle, so you can jump to rows of the same color above and below to quickly go up and down by generations (i.e. if you take a name on a green line, one green line down is their parents’ age, three green lines up is their great-grandchildren’s age, etc.). For people alive today and in the past century, I couldn’t come close to including every famous person, so I just picked a sampling.
   
Okay how did that go? Fun? Icky? I can’t quite tell. In any case, let’s move on.
 Horizontal History—Second Crack: 
For my second crack at depicting history horizontally, I present to you A Psychotic Jumble of Colorful Vertical Bars That Might Be Awesome or Maybe Not I Can’t Tell Here Either But I Think It Might Be Fun.
This time, I got more specific than birth decade and actually identified the exact birth year and the death year of each name, using a bar to depict their lifespan. While the above chart simplifies who lived when, the diagram below allows you to follow a single horizontal path along any year and see who was and wasn’t alive at that time.
As I made the diagram, I ran into a big problem, which is that it looked like an upside-down L with way more names at the top than the bottom (because there are a lot more household names who were alive in the last 200 years than in previous centuries). Crunching all those recent names into blog width made the font tiny—so I solved the problem by cutting out about half of the recent names. But, before I did, I broke the complete list of 1800–2016 names into two groups by category and here they are below:
   
   
Okay now that that’s out of the way, here’s the big list (with only half of the total 1800–2016 names included). It goes back to 1450. Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.
    
[Note: A number of people have requested a sideways version of this diagram. Here it is.]
 Some overall thoughts:
 Lifespans are unfair. Looking at people’s lives visually really makes it clear when two people are born around the same time but then one of them randomly dies 30 years before the other.
 Murder is dickish. Another thing this diagram highlights. How not okay is it to cut someone else’s bar short? JFK might have been on his way to a nice 85-year bar when this other guy just took a scissors and snipped his bar.
 On the other hand, short lives were appreciated during the making of this diagram. This was a nightmare of a puzzle, especially at the top, and while trying to fit a lot of bars into a small space, there were times I found myself saying, out loud, “Oh nice,” when I’d look up someone’s life dates and realize that they were murdered at a young age. Likewise, one factor that led to a number of the recent people being cut from the big diagram was living too long. Frank Lloyd Wright’s a cool dude, but not 2.5 inches of diagram cool.
 Some people aren’t easily categorized.  I tried my best. You try putting Ben Franklin into a category.
 Yeah, yeah, I said the whole “Aladdin and Jafar are in the eye of the beholder” thing and then I created a category for people who I deemed dicks.  I know. But it was fun to label certain people as dicks. Ya know?
Each little part of this diagram tells a story. Let’s go through a few examples:
I mentioned in a box in the first chart that Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights and that Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon—but using the lifespan diagram, you can see both of these stories visually.
   
I also mentioned the major Shakespeare, Galileo, Tokugawa, and John Smith events that all happened right around the year 1610.
   
And in the intro, I referenced Copernicus’s seminal work happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.
   
But if you look at the other stuff the diagram shows going on around that same time, it tells a bigger story:
   
While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the golden age of European exploration—look at all those light purple explorers!—and the precursor age to the oncoming Age of Imperialism. Simultaneously, you can see the Protestant Reformation brewing with the presence of all those dark blue religious figures. The one dark blue exception is Guru Nanak, who was over in Asia being the founding prophet of Sikhism (today’s 5th biggest religion). Meanwhile, Michelangelo was part of something larger, as the other pink bars—and Machiavelli—remind us that the Italian Renaissance was in full swing.
Every time I look at the lifespan diagram, a new interesting horizontal pops out to me. Here’s one more: People in the US associate the 1860s with Lincoln and the Civil War. But what we overlook is that the 1860s was one of history’s greatest literary decades. In the ten years between 1859 and 1869, Darwin published his world-changing On the Origin of Species (1859), Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), Lewis Carroll published Alice in Wonderland (1865), Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment (1866), and Tolstoy capped things off with War and Peace (1869). These guys were all in their primes at the same time. So was Lincoln, before some cock snipped his bar off at the worst time possible.
   
So there’s some horizontal history for you. Now go brush up so we can all be oriented the next time we yell at each other about fairy tales.
___________
If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the  Wait But Why email list  and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site and wonder!
If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
___________
 More Wait But Why history posts: 
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  – written after my visit to Kurdish Iraq
  Putting Time in Perspective  – a diagram to help visualize everything that happened between the Big Bang and now
  The Death Toll Comparison Breakdown  – a diagram to put famous death tolls in perspective
  The American Presidents series
Horizontal History — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html
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 No contributions on December 18, 2022
 No contributions on December 19, 2022
 No contributions on December 20, 2022
 No contributions on December 21, 2022
 No contributions on December 22, 2022
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 No contributions on December 24, 2022
 
 
 No contributions on December 25, 2022
 No contributions on December 26, 2022
 No contributions on December 27, 2022
 No contributions on December 28, 2022
 No contributions on December 29, 2022
 No contributions on December 30, 2022
 No contributions on December 31, 2022
 
 
 No contributions on January 1, 2023
 No contributions on January 2, 2023
 12 contributions on January 3, 2023
 5 contributions on January 4, 2023
 No contributions on January 5, 2023
 No contributions on January 6, 2023
 No contributions on January 7, 2023
 
 
 No contributions on January 8, 2023
 5 contributions on January 9, 2023
 10 contributions on January 10, 2023
 6 contributions on January 11, 2023
 3 contributions on January 12, 2023
 No contributions on January 13, 2023
 No contributions on January 14, 2023
 
 
 6 contributions on January 15, 2023
 No contributions on January 16, 2023
 No contributions on January 17, 2023
 No contributions on January 18, 2023
 No contributions on January 19, 2023
 20 contributions on January 20, 2023
 14 contributions on January 21, 2023
 
 
 No contributions on January 22, 2023
 No contributions on January 23, 2023
 No contributions on January 24, 2023
 2 contributions on January 25, 2023
 No contributions on January 26, 2023
 No contributions on January 27, 2023
 No contributions on January 28, 2023
 
 
 No contributions on January 29, 2023
 No contributions on January 30, 2023
 No contributions on January 31, 2023
 No contributions on February 1, 2023
 2 contributions on February 2, 2023
 No contributions on February 3, 2023
 No contributions on February 4, 2023
 
 
 No contributions on February 5, 2023
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 No contributions on February 7, 2023
 
 Feb
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 Mon
 
 Wed
 
 Fri
 
 
 
 </div>
</div>
 <div>
 <p>
 </p><h5>
 Activity
 overview
 </h5>
 
 <p></p>
 
 </div>
</div>
 <div>
 
 <h2>
 Contribution activity
 </h2>
 
<div>
 <h3>
 February 2023
 </h3>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 <div>
 
 
 <p>
 2
 contributions
 in private repositories
 
 
 Feb 2
 
</p>
</div>
 
 </div>
 </div>
 </div>
 <div>
 <ul>
 <li>
 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2023-02-01&amp;to=2023-02-07">2023</a>
 </li>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2022-12-01&amp;to=2022-12-31">2022</a>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2021-12-01&amp;to=2021-12-31">2021</a>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2020-12-01&amp;to=2020-12-31">2020</a>
 </li>
 <li>
 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2019-12-01&amp;to=2019-12-31">2019</a>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2018-12-01&amp;to=2018-12-31">2018</a>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2012-12-01&amp;to=2012-12-31">2012</a>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2011-12-01&amp;to=2011-12-31">2011</a>
 </li>
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 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2010-12-01&amp;to=2010-12-31">2010</a>
 </li>
 <li>
 <a href="/mnielsen?tab=overview&amp;from=2009-12-01&amp;to=2009-12-31">2009</a>
 </li>
 </ul>
 </div>
</div>
 </div>
 
</div>
</div>
 </main>
 </div>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 mnielsen Follow
 Overview Repositories 35 Projects 0 Packages 0 Stars 52
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 Overview Repositories 35 Projects 0 Packages 0 Stars 52
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 Popular repositories

 1. neural-networks-and-deep-learning Public

 Code samples for my book "Neural Networks and Deep Learning"

 Python 14k 6.2k

 2. notes-on-writing Public

 Notes on writing

 482 74

 3. magic_paper Public

 Experiments in an explorable visual medium for mathematics

 JavaScript 234 32

 4. tiddlylisp Public

 A toy Lisp interpreter and simple eval function

 Python 130 34

 5. ec2_tools Public

 Deprecated. Formerly: scripts to make it easier to set up and manipulate clusters at Amazon EC2

 Python 111 48

 6. Pregel Public

 Toy single-machine implementation of the Pregel graph-based framework

 Python 105 38

 786 contributions in the last year

 3 contributions on February 6, 2022 6 contributions on February 7, 2022 31 contributions on February 8, 2022 3 contributions on February 9, 2022 2 contributions on February 10, 2022 No contributions on February 11, 2022 5 contributions on February 12, 2022 1 contribution on February 13, 2022 No contributions on February 14, 2022 11 contributions on February 15, 2022 7 contributions on February 16, 2022 8 contributions on February 17, 2022 14 contributions on February 18, 2022 26 contributions on February 19, 2022 17 contributions on February 20, 2022 No contributions on February 21, 2022 No contributions on February 22, 2022 No contributions on February 23, 2022 No contributions on February 24, 2022 No contributions on February 25, 2022 No contributions on February 26, 2022 2 contributions on February 27, 2022 8 contributions on February 28, 2022 No contributions on March 1, 2022 2 contributions on March 2, 2022 1 contribution on March 3, 2022 No contributions on March 4, 2022 8 contributions on March 5, 2022 1 contribution on March 6, 2022 No contributions on March 7, 2022 1 contribution on March 8, 2022 No contributions on March 9, 2022 No contributions on March 10, 2022 No contributions on March 11, 2022 1 contribution on March 12, 2022 No contributions on March 13, 2022 No contributions on March 14, 2022 No contributions on March 15, 2022 No contributions on March 16, 2022 No contributions on March 17, 2022 No contributions on March 18, 2022 No contributions on March 19, 2022 No contributions on March 20, 2022 No contributions on March 21, 2022 No contributions on March 22, 2022 No contributions on March 23, 2022 1 contribution on March 24, 2022 No contributions on March 25, 2022 No contributions on March 26, 2022 No contributions on March 27, 2022 No contributions on March 28, 2022 No contributions on March 29, 2022 No contributions on March 30, 2022 No contributions on March 31, 2022 2 contributions on April 1, 2022 No contributions on April 2, 2022 3 contributions on April 3, 2022 No contributions on April 4, 2022 1 contribution on April 5, 2022 3 contributions on April 6, 2022 No contributions on April 7, 2022 No contributions on April 8, 2022 No contributions on April 9, 2022 No contributions on April 10, 2022 No contributions on April 11, 2022 No contributions on April 12, 2022 No contributions on April 13, 2022 No contributions on April 14, 2022 No contributions on April 15, 2022 No contributions on April 16, 2022 No contributions on April 17, 2022 No contributions on April 18, 2022 No contributions on April 19, 2022 No contributions on April 20, 2022 No contributions on April 21, 2022 No contributions on April 22, 2022 No contributions on April 23, 2022 No contributions on April 24, 2022 No contributions on April 25, 2022 No contributions on April 26, 2022 No contributions on April 27, 2022 No contributions on April 28, 2022 No contributions on April 29, 2022 No contributions on April 30, 2022 No contributions on May 1, 2022 No contributions on May 2, 2022 No contributions on May 3, 2022 No contributions on May 4, 2022 No contributions on May 5, 2022 No contributions on May 6, 2022 No contributions on May 7, 2022 No contributions on May 8, 2022 1 contribution on May 9, 2022 No contributions on May 10, 2022 No contributions on May 11, 2022 No contributions on May 12, 2022 No contributions on May 13, 2022 No contributions on May 14, 2022 No contributions on May 15, 2022 No contributions on May 16, 2022 No contributions on May 17, 2022 4 contributions on May 18, 2022 11 contributions on May 19, 2022 2 contributions on May 20, 2022 5 contributions on May 21, 2022 1 contribution on May 22, 2022 9 contributions on May 23, 2022 No contributions on May 24, 2022 3 contributions on May 25, 2022 2 contributions on May 26, 2022 No contributions on May 27, 2022 11 contributions on May 28, 2022 No contributions on May 29, 2022 No contributions on May 30, 2022 No contributions on May 31, 2022 5 contributions on June 1, 2022 5 contributions on June 2, 2022 1 contribution on June 3, 2022 No contributions on June 4, 2022 3 contributions on June 5, 2022 No contributions on June 6, 2022 1 contribution on June 7, 2022 No contributions on June 8, 2022 No contributions on June 9, 2022 1 contribution on June 10, 2022 No contributions on June 11, 2022 No contributions on June 12, 2022 No contributions on June 13, 2022 No contributions on June 14, 2022 4 contributions on June 15, 2022 1 contribution on June 16, 2022 No contributions on June 17, 2022 No contributions on June 18, 2022 No contributions on June 19, 2022 No contributions on June 20, 2022 No contributions on June 21, 2022 No contributions on June 22, 2022 No contributions on June 23, 2022 No contributions on June 24, 2022 No contributions on June 25, 2022 3 contributions on June 26, 2022 No contributions on June 27, 2022 1 contribution on June 28, 2022 No contributions on June 29, 2022 1 contribution on June 30, 2022 No contributions on July 1, 2022 No contributions on July 2, 2022 No contributions on July 3, 2022 No contributions on July 4, 2022 No contributions on July 5, 2022 4 contributions on July 6, 2022 6 contributions on July 7, 2022 No contributions on July 8, 2022 No contributions on July 9, 2022 No contributions on July 10, 2022 No contributions on July 11, 2022 No contributions on July 12, 2022 3 contributions on July 13, 2022 1 contribution on July 14, 2022 No contributions on July 15, 2022 No contributions on July 16, 2022 No contributions on July 17, 2022 2 contributions on July 18, 2022 9 contributions on July 19, 2022 4 contributions on July 20, 2022 4 contributions on July 21, 2022 4 contributions on July 22, 2022 No contributions on July 23, 2022 No contributions on July 24, 2022 No contributions on July 25, 2022 No contributions on July 26, 2022 No contributions on July 27, 2022 2 contributions on July 28, 2022 4 contributions on July 29, 2022 No contributions on July 30, 2022 No contributions on July 31, 2022 No contributions on August 1, 2022 No contributions on August 2, 2022 2 contributions on August 3, 2022 13 contributions on August 4, 2022 No contributions on August 5, 2022 No contributions on August 6, 2022 No contributions on August 7, 2022 1 contribution on August 8, 2022 No contributions on August 9, 2022 1 contribution on August 10, 2022 4 contributions on August 11, 2022 6 contributions on August 12, 2022 No contributions on August 13, 2022 No contributions on August 14, 2022 11 contributions on August 15, 2022 17 contributions on August 16, 2022 No contributions on August 17, 2022 No contributions on August 18, 2022 2 contributions on August 19, 2022 No contributions on August 20, 2022 No contributions on August 21, 2022 No contributions on August 22, 2022 No contributions on August 23, 2022 2 contributions on August 24, 2022 14 contributions on August 25, 2022 No contributions on August 26, 2022 3 contributions on August 27, 2022 2 contributions on August 28, 2022 8 contributions on August 29, 2022 5 contributions on August 30, 2022 3 contributions on August 31, 2022 No contributions on September 1, 2022 2 contributions on September 2, 2022 No contributions on September 3, 2022 No contributions on September 4, 2022 No contributions on September 5, 2022 No contributions on September 6, 2022 No contributions on September 7, 2022 2 contributions on September 8, 2022 No contributions on September 9, 2022 No contributions on September 10, 2022 2 contributions on September 11, 2022 12 contributions on September 12, 2022 11 contributions on September 13, 2022 54 contributions on September 14, 2022 2 contributions on September 15, 2022 17 contributions on September 16, 2022 19 contributions on September 17, 2022 34 contributions on September 18, 2022 1 contribution on September 19, 2022 1 contribution on September 20, 2022 No contributions on September 21, 2022 No contributions on September 22, 2022 No contributions on September 23, 2022 6 contributions on September 24, 2022 1 contribution on September 25, 2022 No contributions on September 26, 2022 1 contribution on September 27, 2022 3 contributions on September 28, 2022 1 contribution on September 29, 2022 8 contributions on September 30, 2022 2 contributions on October 1, 2022 No contributions on October 2, 2022 1 contribution on October 3, 2022 5 contributions on October 4, 2022 3 contributions on October 5, 2022 No contributions on October 6, 2022 47 contributions on October 7, 2022 4 contributions on October 8, 2022 No contributions on October 9, 2022 No contributions on October 10, 2022 1 contribution on October 11, 2022 No contributions on October 12, 2022 No contributions on October 13, 2022 23 contributions on October 14, 2022 3 contributions on October 15, 2022 8 contributions on October 16, 2022 2 contributions on October 17, 2022 6 contributions on October 18, 2022 1 contribution on October 19, 2022 No contributions on October 20, 2022 1 contribution on October 21, 2022 No contributions on October 22, 2022 No contributions on October 23, 2022 6 contributions on October 24, 2022 No contributions on October 25, 2022 No contributions on October 26, 2022 No contributions on October 27, 2022 No contributions on October 28, 2022 No contributions on October 29, 2022 No contributions on October 30, 2022 No contributions on October 31, 2022 No contributions on November 1, 2022 No contributions on November 2, 2022 No contributions on November 3, 2022 No contributions on November 4, 2022 No contributions on November 5, 2022 No contributions on November 6, 2022 No contributions on November 7, 2022 2 contributions on November 8, 2022 1 contribution on November 9, 2022 1 contribution on November 10, 2022 No contributions on November 11, 2022 No contributions on November 12, 2022 No contributions on November 13, 2022 No contributions on November 14, 2022 No contributions on November 15, 2022 2 contributions on November 16, 2022 No contributions on November 17, 2022 No contributions on November 18, 2022 1 contribution on November 19, 2022 1 contribution on November 20, 2022 1 contribution on November 21, 2022 No contributions on November 22, 2022 7 contributions on November 23, 2022 No contributions on November 24, 2022 1 contribution on November 25, 2022 No contributions on November 26, 2022 No contributions on November 27, 2022 No contributions on November 28, 2022 No contributions on November 29, 2022 No contributions on November 30, 2022 4 contributions on December 1, 2022 No contributions on December 2, 2022 No contributions on December 3, 2022 No contributions on December 4, 2022 3 contributions on December 5, 2022 No contributions on December 6, 2022 No contributions on December 7, 2022 No contributions on December 8, 2022 4 contributions on December 9, 2022 1 contribution on December 10, 2022 2 contributions on December 11, 2022 No contributions on December 12, 2022 No contributions on December 13, 2022 No contributions on December 14, 2022 No contributions on December 15, 2022 No contributions on December 16, 2022 No contributions on December 17, 2022 No contributions on December 18, 2022 No contributions on December 19, 2022 No contributions on December 20, 2022 No contributions on December 21, 2022 No contributions on December 22, 2022 No contributions on December 23, 2022 No contributions on December 24, 2022 No contributions on December 25, 2022 No contributions on December 26, 2022 No contributions on December 27, 2022 No contributions on December 28, 2022 No contributions on December 29, 2022 No contributions on December 30, 2022 No contributions on December 31, 2022 No contributions on January 1, 2023 No contributions on January 2, 2023 12 contributions on January 3, 2023 5 contributions on January 4, 2023 No contributions on January 5, 2023 No contributions on January 6, 2023 No contributions on January 7, 2023 No contributions on January 8, 2023 5 contributions on January 9, 2023 10 contributions on January 10, 2023 6 contributions on January 11, 2023 3 contributions on January 12, 2023 No contributions on January 13, 2023 No contributions on January 14, 2023 6 contributions on January 15, 2023 No contributions on January 16, 2023 No contributions on January 17, 2023 No contributions on January 18, 2023 No contributions on January 19, 2023 20 contributions on January 20, 2023 14 contributions on January 21, 2023 No contributions on January 22, 2023 No contributions on January 23, 2023 No contributions on January 24, 2023 2 contributions on January 25, 2023 No contributions on January 26, 2023 No contributions on January 27, 2023 No contributions on January 28, 2023 No contributions on January 29, 2023 No contributions on January 30, 2023 No contributions on January 31, 2023 No contributions on February 1, 2023 2 contributions on February 2, 2023 No contributions on February 3, 2023 No contributions on February 4, 2023 No contributions on February 5, 2023 No contributions on February 6, 2023 No contributions on February 7, 2023 Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Mon Wed Fri
 Learn how we count contributions
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 Activity overview

 Contribution activity

 February 2023

 2 contributions in private repositories Feb 2
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 Michael Nielsen
 
 
 mnielsen
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Block or Report
 
 
 
 Block or report mnielsen
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 Popular repositories
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Code samples for my book "Neural Networks and Deep Learning"
 
 
 
 
 Python
 
 
 
 14k
 
 
 
 
 6.2k
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Experiments in an explorable visual medium for mathematics
 
 
 
 
 JavaScript
 
 
 
 234
 
 
 
 
 32
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A toy Lisp interpreter and simple eval function
 
 
 
 
 Python
 
 
 
 130
 
 
 
 
 34
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Deprecated. Formerly: scripts to make it easier to set up and manipulate clusters at Amazon EC2
 
 
 
 
 Python
 
 
 
 111
 
 
 
 
 48
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Toy single-machine implementation of the Pregel graph-based framework
 
 
 
 
 Python
 
 
 
 105
 
 
 
 
 38
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 786
 contributions
 in the last year
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 contributions on February 6, 2022
 6 contributions on February 7, 2022
 31 contributions on February 8, 2022
 3 contributions on February 9, 2022
 2 contributions on February 10, 2022
 No contributions on February 11, 2022
 5 contributions on February 12, 2022
 
 
 1 contribution on February 13, 2022
 No contributions on February 14, 2022
 11 contributions on February 15, 2022
 7 contributions on February 16, 2022
 8 contributions on February 17, 2022
 14 contributions on February 18, 2022
 26 contributions on February 19, 2022
 
 
 17 contributions on February 20, 2022
 No contributions on February 21, 2022
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 No contributions on February 25, 2022
 No contributions on February 26, 2022
 
 
 2 contributions on February 27, 2022
 8 contributions on February 28, 2022
 No contributions on March 1, 2022
 2 contributions on March 2, 2022
 1 contribution on March 3, 2022
 No contributions on March 4, 2022
 8 contributions on March 5, 2022
 
 
 1 contribution on March 6, 2022
 No contributions on March 7, 2022
 1 contribution on March 8, 2022
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 2 contributions on April 1, 2022
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 3 contributions on April 3, 2022
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 2 contributions on August 28, 2022
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 3 contributions on August 31, 2022
 No contributions on September 1, 2022
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mnielsen - Overview
https://github.com/mnielsen
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=michaniels-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0691148902
Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton Science Library, 91) Hardcover – October 23, 2011
2011-10-23
Michael A Nielsen
<div><div> <h3>Review</h3> <p>In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book. -- Victoria Stodden, Columbia University </p> <h3>Review</h3> <p>"[Reinventing Discovery] opens with a fantastic account of what we can learn about the future of science from explorations such as the Polymath Project and 'the greatest chess game in history,' Kasparov vs. the World. But what really distinguishes it is its nuanced, intelligent descriptions of just how these projects work, noticing what is important about them in a way that few popular summaries do. . . . Highly recommended!"―Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media<p>"Anyone who has followed science in recent years has noticed something odd: science is less and less about a solitary scientist working alone in a lab. Scientists are working in networks, and those networks are gaining scope, speed, and power through the internet. Nonscientists have been getting in on the act, too, folding proteins and identifying galaxies. Michael Nielsen has been watching these developments too, but he's done much more: he's provided the best synthesis I've seen of this new kind of science, and he's also thought deeply about what it means for the future of how we understand the world. </p>Reinventing Discovery is a delightfully written, thought-provoking book."―Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses and The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution<p>"This is </p>the book on how networks will drive a revolution in scientific discovery; definitely recommended."―Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation<p>"Science has always been a contact sport; the interaction of many minds is the engine of the discipline. Michael Nielsen has given us an unparalleled account of how new tools for collaboration are transforming scientific practice. </p>Reinventing Discovery doesn't just help us understand how the sciences are changing, it shows us how we can participate in the change."―Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus<p>"This wonderful book is a pleasure to read. Michael Nielsen writes in an authoritative yet clear, concise, and accessible style, making an informative and compelling case for open, networked science and how to achieve it."</p>―William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute<p>"In </p>Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book."―Victoria Stodden, Columbia University </p> </div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 How the internet and powerful online tools are democratizing and accelerating scientific discovery

 In Reinventing Discovery , Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world.

 Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book―the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower.

 This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today―and why the revolution is just beginning.

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 Editorial Reviews

 Review

 In Reinventing Discovery , Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book. -- Victoria Stodden, Columbia University

 Review

 "[ Reinventing Discovery ] opens with a fantastic account of what we can learn about the future of science from explorations such as the Polymath Project and 'the greatest chess game in history,' Kasparov vs. the World. But what really distinguishes it is its nuanced, intelligent descriptions of just how these projects work, noticing what is important about them in a way that few popular summaries do. . . . Highly recommended!" ―Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media

 "Anyone who has followed science in recent years has noticed something odd: science is less and less about a solitary scientist working alone in a lab. Scientists are working in networks, and those networks are gaining scope, speed, and power through the internet. Nonscientists have been getting in on the act, too, folding proteins and identifying galaxies. Michael Nielsen has been watching these developments too, but he's done much more: he's provided the best synthesis I've seen of this new kind of science, and he's also thought deeply about what it means for the future of how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery is a delightfully written, thought-provoking book." ―Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses and The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution

 "This is the book on how networks will drive a revolution in scientific discovery; definitely recommended." ―Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation

 "Science has always been a contact sport; the interaction of many minds is the engine of the discipline. Michael Nielsen has given us an unparalleled account of how new tools for collaboration are transforming scientific practice. Reinventing Discovery doesn't just help us understand how the sciences are changing, it shows us how we can participate in the change." ―Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus

 "This wonderful book is a pleasure to read. Michael Nielsen writes in an authoritative yet clear, concise, and accessible style, making an informative and compelling case for open, networked science and how to achieve it." ―William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute

 "In Reinventing Discovery , Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book." ―Victoria Stodden, Columbia University
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 * Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; First Edition (October 23, 2011)
 * Language ‏ : ‎ English
 * Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
 * ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691148902
 * ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691148908
 * Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds
 * Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.75 inches
 * Best Sellers Rank: #1,775,179 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )
 + #732 in Scientific Reference
 + #808 in Scientific Research
 + #7,744 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
 * Customer Reviews:
 4.5 out of 5 stars 47 ratings
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  Dennis B. Mulcare
  4.0 out of 5 stars From Intriguing Reportage/Analysis to Sentimental Exhortation
  Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2014
  Verified Purchase
  Overall, the book is quite interesting and the writing is exceptionally good. It is a provocative, informative, and worthwhile selection for general readership. More specifically, the book starts out strong, but then gets somewhat wearisome due to lack of depth and closure. PART 1 of this book is entitled “Amplifying Collective Intelligence”, and the cases and critiques of on-line research coordination are quite fascinating if not rather surprising. Moreover, the author’s analysis of the collaboration phenomena is impressive and convincing. PART 2, “Networked Science”, however, takes an unexpected trajectory. It really doesn’t describe networked science in much detail or focus beyond disparate problems and anecdotes. Especially in view of the strong first part, I was expecting a rather more definitive characterization or encompassing vision of networked science per se, as for example a coherent projection of the touted “new paradigm” of research.

  In PART 1, the rather familiar concept of collective intelligence is rendered quite tangible and concrete. Through a variety of exemplars, many non-professional persons are shown to successfully perform substantive scientific work. Vital features of collaborative practice are described, the most impactful of which is that of “shared praxis”. It is noted to be the fundamental requirement for collective intelligence – basically having all collaborators working together toward a common goal via shared groundrules and methods. Furthermore, shared praxis is noted to have prevailed among professional mathematicians in working so well together in the Polymath Project.

  Other operative factors in achieving collective intelligence include mutual access to relevant data in a tractable form, along with shared analysis tools that are suitable for assessing such data. A coordinative on-line site then manages the reconciliation and compilation of incremental work submissions from various participants. These work contributions are integrated into the evolving research baseline according to predefined progress criteria. To ensure that all participants are proceeding with the latest information, the on-line site continually reports the project status and baseline configuration. Accordingly, a single on-line environment for a given project is the hub that logs, synchronizes, and facilitates cooperative work among multiple remote participants. As recounted in Part 1, significant non-trivial research has been accomplished through such on-line cooperative efforts in a variety of domains, largely on ad hoc bases.

  Apparently, such demonstrated capabilities and successful projects provided the motivation for the aspiration of extending or adapting comparable on-line facilities for scientific research in general. Regrettably, PART 2 of the book does not make a very strong case for pursuing such an agenda, nor does it even enunciate such an agenda explicitly. In particular, there is a lack of an integrated concept of networked science, say a strawman architecture, one that establishes a shareable tangible vision or an enabling framework. Furthermore, this part lacks: justification of the implicit vision; substance and depth regarding the means of practical realization; and a clear focal message. It would seem that the author considered the particular success stories of the first part to serve as justification and the model for the general extrapolation pursued in the second part. In any case, the ostensive aspirations of the latter part require appreciably more in the way of specificity, rationale, and justification.

  Ultimately, the rather sketchy warrant advanced for scientific information and publication sharing seems to be largely sentimental and unduly idealistic. The book is heavy with admittedly intriguing vignettes, anecdotes, and exemplars, but quite lacking in programmatic or technological specifics. The last chapter is entitled “The Open Science Imperative”, but it does not exhibit a forceful sense of discursive convergence or thematic closure. What constitutes the imperative is essentially each reader’s own subjective construal of a largely insinuated realm of universal networked science. Its nature, pursuit, and value are barely examined directly in the book.

  In all, this is a well-written book, but one that ideationally is weakly formed. Disappointingly, it does not cohere a substantive message, albeit it describes some appealing and proven concepts (architecture of attention/shared praxis/common tools). In short, the message stops short of a well-formed characterization of networked science that would enable the public scrutiny and deliberative refinement of the author’s intent. Accordingly, he needs to articulate an explicit if merely notional architecture for networked science, together with a outline plan for its realization. Only then need he critique its pending problems and potential benefits. Nevertheless, his still vague proposal clearly appears to hold promise, and his bringing the matter into broader consideration is itself a valuable contribution. In any case, networked science would seem to be an increasingly practical reality, even if it is evolving on a largely unorchestrated basis. Maybe that is the best of all courses anyway, as perhaps supported by ad hoc working groups to resolve logistical and interoperability issues.
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  Steven J. Koch
  5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read and great introduction to the untapped power of open science
  Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2011
  Verified Purchase
  I read Nielsen's new book cover to cover on my flights to / from an Open Access Week event in Tucson this week and I give it my strongest recommendation for a pleasurable read about a crucial topic. I am a scientist and my students and I practice open science as much as possible--open notebook science, open protocols, open data, open proposals, etc. I have also seen the author, Michael Nielsen speak a couple times, and I have read many of his blog posts. So, before reading this book I didn't necessarily expect to learn much or certainly to be further convinced of the possibility of transforming science in this new era. From the moment I started reading, though, I was captivated. Many of the stories were not new to me (such as Galaxy Zoo or the polymath project), but I hadn't heard them in such detail before and I enjoyed learning a lot more about those successful crowd- or citizen-science projects. There were also many success and failure stories in open or collaborative science that I hadn't known about, such as the Microsoft-sponsored "Kasparov versus the world" chess event, or the research into how small groups can make bad decisions if the collaborative conditions aren't set up correctly. I learned a lot from these new stories, and remained captivated throughout.

  In any of the topics that I am deeply familiar with, such as the current reward system for academic scientists (peer-reviewed publications are gold), I can say that Nielsen is spot-on and insightful. He ties together well all of the stories and descriptions of the scientific process and by the end, I think he's done a great job of convincing us all of his main point: We have a tremendous opportunity to transform and multiply the power of scientific research in the coming decades. But it won't happen automatically and there are some attitudes and policies that need to be changed to ensure we achieve this revolution. Nielsen gives concrete specific solutions to the barriers to the revolution. Furthermore, he gives advice to all of us as to what we can do as individuals to promote a change in science. My students and I in our teaching and research labs have taken the leap towards open science, and it has been tremendously rewarding. So I encourage you to read this book and to take your own small steps towards transforming science, whether you're a scientist, a fan of science, or an interested supporter of science (taxpayer!).

  I rate this book 5 stars. Incidentally, I almost rated it with 4 stars because I was so frustrated at the black and white photos that I desperately wanted to see in color when I was on the plane! I realize this is a cost issue, but DARN! I was able to cancel this negative factor by adding in a bonus star for a truly excellent job Nielsen does with sourcing his information. He does such a good job that you can even read the "notes" section and understand what he's talking about and learn further information beyond the text. Kudos to Nielsen for an excellent book!
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  Nick Drengenberg
  5.0 out of 5 stars Important, lucid and entertaining
  Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2013
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  Nielsen has written an important and very engaging book. I remember Bruno Latour saying quite a few years ago now that science was shifting away from a model of operation that sometimes (simplistically) gets called 'the scientific method' towards a model of research. Where society increasingly doesn't just act as the recipient of scientific work, but is involved right from the earliest stages, helping to determine what scientific work gets done, and how it gets done. A concrete realisation of the understanding of science that Latour has been describing so beautifully for decades. Nielsen charts this shift from the inside, in fascinating detail.

  The zeitgeist is increasingly about collective phenomena - wisdom of crowds, open organisations, etc. Nielsen's book shows how science itself is being changed by these ideas. Highly recommended.
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  Mathlete
  5.0 out of 5 stars Crucial knowledge for the science world
  Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2013
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  This book is a fantastic summary of the uneasy meeting of research science and recent trends in online collaboration technology. A tight narrative, some fascinating examples of successes where science has dipped its toe into the online collaboration world, and solid analysis of the examples of failures. Hopefully the hypothetical scenarios he describes will come to pass, and we'll all be better for it, but first more people need to hear what he's saying about the cultural roadblocks that still need to be overcome.
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  Amazon Customer
  5.0 out of 5 stars A New View of Science
  Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2015
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  This is an aspirational view of how science can move forward in an era of "big data". Of course, the challenge is the tension between two human traits: the drive to compete and the need to collaborate. The author provides several examples of how networking can create new discoveries. All in all this is an inspiring book, and a challenge to the practice of science.
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  DC
  5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book - ever world leader should read and get people working on it
  Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2013
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  Brilliant book - ever world leader should read and get people working on it.

  The top ***** reviews are spot on about how good it is.
  One person found this helpful
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  Carlos Vazquez Quintana
  3.0 out of 5 stars reiterante
  Reviewed in Spain on January 3, 2016
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  Este libro propone algo que al principio entretiene, y además es importante: se puede sustituir a los genios o talentos individuales, sobre todo en ciencia, pero también en juegos como el ajedrez, por la colaboración vía telemática de mucha gente que no tiene nada de genial, incluso mediocre, siguiendo el precepto de que "cuatro ojos ven más que dos". Parece que el autor tiene experiencia en este importante campo y es un entusiasta. El problema es que pese a ese entusiasmo, no se oculta que toda esa colaboración, en general no ha ganado a los grandes expertos profesionales, individuales. Kasparov, campeón del mundo en 1999, venció al grupo formado por miles de usuarios en ajedrez. Otros, en Física, han aportado hallazgos importantes, porque en Astronomía ningún observador individual puede ver tanto como muchas personas juntas. Sin embargo queda ese lastre de una cierta impresión de mediocridad y de dudas acerca del valor real de estos métodos, que parece sirven para algunas materias más que para otras. El autor se entusiasma con algo que al lector no le suena que sea para tanto. Aun no.
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  Save the Planet. Stop Climate Change!
  5.0 out of 5 stars Networked Science
  Reviewed in Germany on February 9, 2013
  Verified Purchase
  According to Michael Nielsen, online tools could help to bring about a revolution of science that would speed up the process of scientific discovery tremendously, provided that the open sharing of scientific papers, ideas, data and programming code evolves from being the exception to being the norm within the global scientific community. Nielsen not only describes the impact this transformation would have on the pace of scientific progress but also explains how scientists, grant agents, public policy makers and members of the general public can contribute to making it happen.
  To me, a university graduate who is not a scientist, his claim, that this new era of networked science would mean the greatest change in how science is done since the establishment of the scientific method in the 17th century, appears justified after I've read his book which is well written, very well argued and accessible to the scientific layperson.
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  BRUCE A CURRIE-ALDER
  4.0 out of 5 stars Good on 'what is happening' in networked science, yet needs more on philosophy of science
  Reviewed in Canada on July 21, 2015
  Verified Purchase
  The author points to new approaches of creating knowledge based on open science and mass collaboration among researchers, including: real-time posting of ideas and lab results, software for tapping collective intelligence, crafting of data webs and open access to speed up the creation of new knowledge. The author illustrates these concepts with specific examples such as Polymath Project, Galaxy Zoo, HapMap, Genbank, Innocentive, PLoS, and Foldit. In the author's words, "the division of labor is changing, with some people specializing in building the experimental apparatus and collecting data, while others specialize in analyzing the data from those experiments.' The promise of this 'new era' of science is the potential for tackling both increasing complex problems and more elaborate models of explanation (i.e. behaviour of simulation models rather than single mathematical equations or universal laws).

  Nielsen is critical of these approaches, noting they favor modular participation in fields of inquiry where a shared praxis exists, which facilitates a dynamic division of labor via manageable subtasks. The implication is that such approaches are more relevant for fields with a high degree of agreement on problems and methods (such as bioinformatics, chemistry, econometrics) and less immediately relevant for fields marked by pluralism (such as public policy). Additionally, the trends towards 'networked science' are countered the 'publish or perish' incentive: the competitive pressure on professional scientists to allocate their time to "the kinds of activities that lead to jobs, grants, and promotion".

  Yet this book has two interrelated weaknesses. First is the author's wide ambition, which means the book covers a lot of material somewhat superficially, almost inundating the reader in jargon or 'hot topics'. Second, the author sometimes follows spurious non-topics, such as pondering the distinction between simple vs complex explanation, or ideas vs models, rather than the nature of intelligence and explanation. Consider language translation, both human and machine approaches 'work'. Whereas human translation is based on in depth knowledge of causality (how people use and understand messages), machine translation is more correlation (which word in one language has a high probability of being represented by another given the frequency of word pairs in a database of billions of texts). There is a deeper philosophy of science here regarding how do we know what we know that belies the variety of methods for asking and answering questions.

  It is precisely this potential that ultimately remains unexplored in this otherwise impressive book. Nielsen eludes to Homer-Dixon's 'ingenuity gap' between the complexity of the problems faced by a society and that society''s capacity to solve such problems. Yet this is also left largely unexplored in the book, with the author merely suggesting that bridging this gap requires changing the institutions that shape 'who funds research', 'how science informs policy', and 'who can be a scientist''.

  In short, a good introduction to the topic and survey of emerging topics, yet readers already familiar with research policy and some of these approaches will be left wanting more.
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  H. Schulze
  3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting - but limited practical application
  Reviewed in Germany on December 5, 2015
  Verified Purchase
  Nielsen provides a very cohesive and well structured argument about the future of science, being grounded in collaboration. While the book is a good read, its practical application cases are rather limited.
  Report abuse
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Review In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book. -- Victoria Stodden, Columbia University  Review "[Reinventing Discovery] opens with a fantastic account of what we can learn about the future of science from explorations such as the Polymath Project and 'the greatest chess game in history,' Kasparov vs. the World. But what really distinguishes it is its nuanced, intelligent descriptions of just how these projects work, noticing what is important about them in a way that few popular summaries do. . . . Highly recommended!"―Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media"Anyone who has followed science in recent years has noticed something odd: science is less and less about a solitary scientist working alone in a lab. Scientists are working in networks, and those networks are gaining scope, speed, and power through the internet. Nonscientists have been getting in on the act, too, folding proteins and identifying galaxies. Michael Nielsen has been watching these developments too, but he's done much more: he's provided the best synthesis I've seen of this new kind of science, and he's also thought deeply about what it means for the future of how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery is a delightfully written, thought-provoking book."―Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses and The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution"This is the book on how networks will drive a revolution in scientific discovery; definitely recommended."―Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation"Science has always been a contact sport; the interaction of many minds is the engine of the discipline. Michael Nielsen has given us an unparalleled account of how new tools for collaboration are transforming scientific practice. Reinventing Discovery doesn't just help us understand how the sciences are changing, it shows us how we can participate in the change."―Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus"This wonderful book is a pleasure to read. Michael Nielsen writes in an authoritative yet clear, concise, and accessible style, making an informative and compelling case for open, networked science and how to achieve it."―William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute"In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen introduces us to the new world of the modern scientist, where the Web is amplifying communication and accelerating discovery in unexpected ways, making for extraordinary problem solving. This is a unique and valuable book."―Victoria Stodden, Columbia University
Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science (Princeton Science Library, 91) Hardcover – October 23, 2011
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=michaniels-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0691148902
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/
Michael Nielsen – Michael Nielsen
2011-12-18
None
<div><div>
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<article>
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<p><a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2005/03/Michael_Nielsen_Web.jpg"></a></p>
<p>I’m a writer, scientist, and programmer.</p>
<p>I’m currently taking a sabbatical to write a technical book about artificial neural networks and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning">deep learning</a>. The book explains how neural networks can learn to solve complex pattern recognition problems. Early beta chapters from the book are available <a href="http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com">here</a>. Sign up <a href="http://eepurl.com/BYr9L">here</a> if you’d like to receive announcements about the book. Work-in-progress <a href="https://github.com/mnielsen/neural-networks-and-deep-learning">code</a> for the project is also available. </p>
<p>My work is motivated by the creation of tools to help people think better, either individually or in groups. Put another way, I’m interested in cognitive tools and in collective intelligence.</p>
<h2>Open science</h2>
<p>I believe that publicly funded science should be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science">open science</a>, and from 2008-2012 I worked as an advocate for open science. You can get the flavour of my work on open science from my talk at <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_nielsen_open_science_now.html">ted.com</a>, or in my <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653573191370088.html">op-ed in the Wall Street Journal</a>. I’ve developed these ideas at length in my essay on <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-future-of-science-2/">The Future of Science</a> and in <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/writing/">other essays</a>. I’ve also written a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691148902/ref=as_li_tf_tl?tag=michaniels-20">book</a> about collective intelligence and open science. It was named one of the best books of 2011 by the <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ebf6c124-1468-11e1-85c7-00144feabdc0.html">Financial Times</a> and by the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20120117105657/http://bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2011/12/18/science-best-books-year/kmT6xnNy2nWED5Q1XE5rAK/story.html">Boston Globe</a>. (Reviews: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/24/reinventing-discovery-michael-nielsen-review">Guardian</a>, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/c5f01366-fef3-11e0-9769-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1tRJ1POqb">Financial Times</a>, <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2005/03/Lintott.pdf">Nature</a>, <a href="https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/CKSzoUGYmBa">Tim O’Reilly’s review on Google+</a>)</p>
<p>Much of my own creative work is carried out in the open, on my blogs (<a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/">here</a> and <a href="http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/">here</a>), on <a href="https://github.com/mnielsen">GitHub</a>, and in other online fora (see links on the right). Nearly all my scientific papers are available for download <a href="http://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=ZP0eZ94AAAAJ">here</a>.</p>
<h2>Scientific work</h2>
<p>My interest in open science grew out of my work as a scientist. In the 1990s and 2000s I helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, I wrote the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Anniversary-Edition/dp/1107002176">standard text on quantum computing</a>. This is one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, March 2012). I’ve written more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2005/03/SciAmSimpleRules.pdf">Scientific American</a> and <a href="http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2005/03/mcm.pdf">Nature</a>. My research contributions include the <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9811053">majorization theorem</a> governing the manipulation of entangled quantum states, involvement in one of the first <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9811020">quantum teleportation experiments</a>, named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9703032">quantum gate teleportation</a>, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9610001">quantum process tomography</a>, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity (<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9604022">1</a>, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9702049">2</a>, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9809010">3</a>). A full list of papers is <a href="http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&amp;user=ZP0eZ94AAAAJ">here</a>.</p>
<h2>Education and Employment</h2>
<p>I was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar in the group of Carl Caves at the University of New Mexico. I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at Caltech as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow, at the University of Queensland as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics as a Senior Faculty member. In 2008, I gave up my tenured academic position in order to work as an advocate for open science.</p>
<h2>Contact</h2>
<p>Email: mn@michaelnielsen.org</p>
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 Michael Nielsen

 Michael Nielsen

 I’m a writer, scientist, and programmer.

 I’m currently taking a sabbatical to write a technical book about artificial neural networks and deep learning. The book explains how neural networks can learn to solve complex pattern recognition problems. Early beta chapters from the book are available here. Sign up here if you’d like to receive announcements about the book. Work-in-progress code for the project is also available.

 My work is motivated by the creation of tools to help people think better, either individually or in groups. Put another way, I’m interested in cognitive tools and in collective intelligence.

 Open science

 I believe that publicly funded science should be open science, and from 2008-2012 I worked as an advocate for open science. You can get the flavour of my work on open science from my talk at ted.com, or in my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve developed these ideas at length in my essay on The Future of Science and in other essays. I’ve also written a book about collective intelligence and open science. It was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Financial Times and by the Boston Globe. (Reviews: Guardian, Financial Times, Nature, Tim O’Reilly’s review on Google+)

 Much of my own creative work is carried out in the open, on my blogs (here and here), on GitHub, and in other online fora (see links on the right). Nearly all my scientific papers are available for download here.

 Scientific work

 My interest in open science grew out of my work as a scientist. In the 1990s and 2000s I helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, I wrote the standard text on quantum computing. This is one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, March 2012). I’ve written more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Scientific American and Nature. My research contributions include the majorization theorem governing the manipulation of entangled quantum states, involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, quantum gate teleportation, quantum process tomography, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity (1, 2, 3). A full list of papers is here.

 Education and Employment

 I was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar in the group of Carl Caves at the University of New Mexico. I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at Caltech as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow, at the University of Queensland as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics as a Senior Faculty member. In 2008, I gave up my tenured academic position in order to work as an advocate for open science.

 Contact

 Email: mn@michaelnielsen.org

 Michael Nielsen
 Proudly powered by WordPress.
I’m a writer, scientist, and programmer.
I’m currently taking a sabbatical to write a technical book about artificial neural networks and deep learning. The book explains how neural networks can learn to solve complex pattern recognition problems. Early beta chapters from the book are available here. Sign up here if you’d like to receive announcements about the book. Work-in-progress code for the project is also available. 
My work is motivated by the creation of tools to help people think better, either individually or in groups. Put another way, I’m interested in cognitive tools and in collective intelligence.
Open science
I believe that publicly funded science should be open science, and from 2008-2012 I worked as an advocate for open science. You can get the flavour of my work on open science from my talk at ted.com, or in my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve developed these ideas at length in my essay on The Future of Science and in other essays. I’ve also written a book about collective intelligence and open science. It was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Financial Times and by the Boston Globe. (Reviews: Guardian, Financial Times, Nature, Tim O’Reilly’s review on Google+)
Much of my own creative work is carried out in the open, on my blogs (here and here), on GitHub, and in other online fora (see links on the right). Nearly all my scientific papers are available for download here.
Scientific work
My interest in open science grew out of my work as a scientist. In the 1990s and 2000s I helped pioneer the field of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, I wrote the standard text on quantum computing. This is one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, March 2012). I’ve written more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Scientific American and Nature. My research contributions include the majorization theorem governing the manipulation of entangled quantum states, involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments, named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, quantum gate teleportation, quantum process tomography, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity (1, 2, 3). A full list of papers is here.
Education and Employment
I was educated at the University of Queensland, and as a Fulbright Scholar in the group of Carl Caves at the University of New Mexico. I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at Caltech as the Richard Chace Tolman Prize Fellow, at the University of Queensland as Foundation Professor of Quantum Information Science and a Federation Fellow, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics as a Senior Faculty member. In 2008, I gave up my tenured academic position in order to work as an advocate for open science.
Contact
Email: mn@michaelnielsen.org
Michael Nielsen – Michael Nielsen
https://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/
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   Siva’s Bookshelves   
 
 read‎
 (112)
 
 currently-reading‎
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 (226)
 
 2014‎
 (29)
 
 
 
 summer-2014‎
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 2017‎
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 Oliver Burkeman
 
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 Dec 03, 2023 10:28PM
 
 
  
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 V.S. Naipaul
 
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 Frank Partnoy
 
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Jun 23, 2013 11:56PM
 
 
 
 Jun 23, 2013 11:55PM
 
 
 
 See all 6 books that
 Siva is reading…
   
     recent posts   Siva’s Groups    
  
Analytically Yours
 
   Siva’s Year In Books      
Siva’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Siva’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
 Go to Siva’s 2023 Year in Books
 
 
   Siva’s Friends (30)   
    
 Varun Joshi 
  
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 Harsh Pareek 
  
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 413 friends
  
    
 Jay 
  
 305 books
 
 68 friends
  
    
 Arun Prakash 
  
 89 books
 
 367 friends
  
    
 Conal Elliott 
  
 116 books
 
 69 friends
  
    
 Arunothia Marappan 
  
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 aswin 
  
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 Arjun Bharadwaj 
  
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 Best Internet Studies Books  
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 The Most Begun "Read but Unfinished" (Started) book ever  
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