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The Risk of Discovery

• scandox 10y ago
  We do not in fact know how Theology turned out. But we will know or rather we won't when we do.
• graeham 10y ago
  So what's the take-away? Make many high risk bets in hoping one will pay off? Newton is an exception as well. While his biographers down-play his failures, he is also credited (at least in High School Physics) with things that were the work of dozens or even hundreds of scientists - or giants you might say.
• vacri 10y ago
  This is mostly confirmation bias. It's quite common to be 'kind of crazy', and it happens at all levels of intellect, from your working-class 'nutter' to your high-born 'eccentric'. There's nothing special about being smart when it comes to being 'kind of crazy'.
• gist 10y ago
  > Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky. Risky? What is the definition of risk? What was the downside to Newton making these 'bets'? What was the risk of Andressen deciding in college to think that what he did was the right way to go? And importantly (and my point) wouldn't the exact same action by a tenured professor be more of a risk? Let's take the risk that Donald Trump took vs. Hillary Clinton. Trump is hated by many now and would be regardless of whether he won or lost the election (in many ways decimated his brand). The same is not true for Hillary even though she did take a reputation hit it's nowhere near what Trump (with his rhetoric) took. So same thing "run for President" different people different levels of risk.
• acalderaro 10y ago
  On his essay tab, PG's "Risk of Discovery" is loading at the bottom, instead of the top near the more recent ones - is this happening for anyone else?
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I love this insight. I have often experienced in my life seeing someone come up with something really useful in the midst of spouting complete rubbish. Oddly it is about 50/50 internal and external, where half the time they stop in the middle of what they are saying and realize they have a really good idea, and half the time someone else stops them and says "hey, that could really work." or something like that. The common theme can best be described as "fearless thinking" or perhaps unconstrained thinking. I suspect that the personality trait most closely associated with creativity like this is a lack of fear of embarrassment. When someone tells me something I have suggested is wrong I respond by asking questions to understand how they understand the topic so that I can learn from them. When you tell someone who has vested their self image in being right that they are wrong they take it personally and respond dismissively. They fight to have their point of view validated rather than understand a counter point of view. But this makes them unwilling to share partially understood topics because it could expose them to being 'wrong' in public. Other times people self censor their own thinking. I get so frustrated when someone says "Well I thought that might be a solution to the problem but assumed it would be too expensive." That is an example of someone who had a creative idea, self censored it, and it had to come out through someone else in order to reach the collective consciousness of the group. I try really hard to have people not self censor but it is so ingrained sometimes. And all of that then feeds back into the genius/hero narrative where the narrative of a person includes only their noteworthy accomplishments and so the perception is that people like that only do noteworthy things, and then they are impossible to live up to. Dare to ask stupid questions, it could make you the smartest person in the room.
  • junko 10y ago
    > I get so frustrated when someone says "Well I thought that might be a solution to the problem but assumed it would be too expensive." Well darn it, that's how we were taught in engineering school.
  • orthoganol 10y ago
    A stronger version of this, which is how I interpreted PG's post, is dare to spend years of your life grinding away (in relative isolation) on something that seems crazy, with no guarantee of any success, but full of promise. I think there are actually very few people who would take such a risk, even though I think it's a necessary risk if you want to be part of "huge, if true."
• wahsd 10y ago
  What is also discounted now even, when we are supposed to be smart and all learned, is that religion not only has played a fundamental role in why we, the west and roughly central-European based cultures are where they are that cannot or is foolish to discount. There is a particular reason why other non-central European cultures have brought us basically every single human achievement and every single good and positive thing around you that separates you from a brutish and savage life, which other societies simply have not been capable of developing on their own. Not recognizing that only leaves as single alternative view point that it is somehow inherent to genetics and "race" which is a far more dark perspective than acknowledging the role of society and culture and, yes, religion and the particular values it bears in the advancement of society. When, e.g., your value system is founded on the notion that you reincarnate and have many/infinite attempts at doing good and that "good" is of a certain characteristic, then your life and choices and values and priorities are driven by that frame of mind and world view. If you are driven by the murderous and pedophilic values of islam that demands total domination through lying and killing and the murder of anyone that does not submit to islam then your values are going to form your perspective on the world that is a kind of parasitic and rapacious. I find it rather odd that the tech industry of all sectors and disciplines would not seem to understand that the parameters and the system define and confine the behavior and outputs. You can put the most pure and perfect data into a shitty system that is broken in so many different ways and it won't output or produce anything of value or might even produce things that are dangerous. We really are underestimating the value or not only risk and failure by dismissing it altogether and assuming and taking things for granted, but we are dismissing the humanistic and spiritualistic aspect that has played a role in human development and advancement for eons and is probably the core driver of what separated humans from animals in so many different ways.
• blazespin 10y ago
  Maybe alchemy and theology was just how he blew off steam. It seems like me did them a lot, but you know, we all like to have our hobbies. Trying to describe the mindset of newton 100s of years after his death seems a bit reaching.
• xolb 10y ago
  What PG calls "bets" I would call interesting topics for Newton. Maybe he just liked the subjects. Calling bets is saying he was trying to actually accomplish something out of their studies and work. I don't think a curious mind would work like that. Even in physics, he studied a broad range of topics, not only Mechanics. Furthermore, you don't need to make a breakthrough in everything to satisfy your desire for knowledge. Even more so for Newton, which was known by his seclusion and introversion.
• emmelaich 10y ago
  I honestly think that Newton was well aware of the unlikelihood of making breakthroughs in theology and alchemy[1]. In physics he had a lower[2] benefit but much higher probability of progress. 1. Plus he went a little mad from chemical fumes. 2. Really. Imagine[3] making a real breakthrough in alchemy or theology! 3. I can't imagine it and you almost certainly can't either.
  • ulucs 10y ago
    Nuclear science can be considered a breakthrough in alchemy. We can even create new elements!
• dxhdr 10y ago
  I bet Newton pursued what he was interested in, rather than thinking "well, I better hedge my bets!"
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• cayblood 10y ago
  Graham's casual dismissal of 'useless' theology demonstrates a complete lack of awareness of the demise of the secularization hypothesis.
• jorangreef 10y ago
  pg's "theology" is a strawman. Theology is nothing but a study of the implications of the historical events concerning Jesus of Nazareth, those events themselves being subject to the historical method. Either I am missing something, or pg is essentially implying some or all of the following: 1. The person of Jesus Christ did not exist in history. 2. There is insufficient information concerning him. 3. Studying the historical person of Jesus Christ according to the historical method is akin to, or of similar value to, the study of alchemy, i.e. a waste of time. I seriously doubt whether any historian interested in ancient history would make such claims. It's pretty ignorant and reckless coming from pg.
  • thegenius2000 10y ago
    Yes, to dismiss theology along with alchemy -- in the same sentence -- as altogether useless is childish oversimplification. Rejecting Biblical faiths is one thing, but to ignore the impact the Christian worldview has had on Western science, including the life of Isaac Newton (who would never have invested time in studying the physical world if he didn't believe it had a Creator, and therefore order), either shows a gross lack of historical knowledge or poor taste. It's a pity because I agree with him otherwise about the risk taking, which was the main point of his article.
    • olavk 10y ago
      If want to use words like childish, ignorant, poor taste, you really need to make your case better. Many scientists does not believe in a creator but still believe the physical world to have order. In any case, whether a creator exist or not, it is still a waste of time to search in the Bible for information about his plans for the future, like Newton did. If you are going to argue it wasn't a waste of time, you have to point out what useful information Newton discovered in his studies of the Bible.
  • olavk 10y ago
    Theology is not the study of the historical Jesus. The study of the historical Jesus using the same methods as other historical research is just historical research. Theology on the other hand is the study of God and the Bible from a religious rather then historical angle. So it is a completely different subject.
• Flenser 10y ago
  Cory Doctorow made a similar connection between science and alchemy a while ago: "FLOSS .. is better for the same reason that science is better than alchemy. Back before we had science we had alchemy, a lot like science except alchemists never told anyone else what they thought they'd learned and so they were prey to the most common human frailty which is self deception, which is how how alchemists discovered in the hardest way possible that you shouldn't drink mercury, and when alchemists started telling each other what they thought they'd learned, and subjecting themselves to adversarial peer review, and they started publishing their source they turned something base into something noble, they turned superstition into science and created the enlightenment, and FLOSS is everywhere because it continues the enlightenment tradition." Source: [1:40 to 2:20] http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/oscon-tx/public/content/how-you-got-here http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/oscon-tx/public/content...
• trefn 10y ago
  Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" goes into great detail about Isaac Newton's life, and his focus on alchemy and theology. It is of course fiction, but well researched and utterly fascinating. I recommend it!
• sidlls 10y ago
  It's amusing that he uses a modern chauvinism ("making a bet") in this way, while noting that some of Newton's "bets" were only "wasteful" (risky, bad, whatever) when viewed through the lense of modern knowledge. He has a good point, put poorly, and without good support in his chosen example.
  • mturmon 10y ago
    I think you have a point here. Newton seems to have been encouraged in his mathematical/physical pursuits by several people early in his career, when he was studying and, later, a young professor at Cambridge. This kind of slow work and accumulating recognition (by a series of Cambridge alums up through the Lucasian professor at the time, throughout 1661 to 1672) is not really well-described as a "bet".
  • galdosdi 10y ago
    What do you mean by calling the phrase "making a bet" a chauvinism? It just seems like a figure of speech. Gambling has existed for a very long time. (I don't mean to disagree or agree with you, just genuinely don't know what you mean, might end up going either way after you explain your cryptic (to me) remark)
    • sidlls 10y ago
      In this context it imposes a modern view of "opportunity cost" that would simply not have occurred to Newton or any of his contemporaries. It's just too far back in history to really be useful as a support for his argument, especially given the convoluted and mixed approach used.
• malanj 10y ago
  I wish pg would start writing longer form essays again. His startup essays had a huge impact on my approach to building startups. They were hugely insightful and inspirational for me. This essay has a great core insight, and I get you don't need more words to say it, but I still miss the longer ones
  • tpetricek 10y ago
    If you'd like a longer read along the lines of this note, then you might enjoy Bruno Latour's Science in Action: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Action-Scientists-Engineers-Through/dp/0674792912 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Action-Scientists-Engineers... I found the book super interesting in terms of explaining how innovations happen and how we talk about them in retrospect. Although it is about science, I think a lot of the thinking would apply to programming innovations too. And unlike most blog posts, there is actually some serious sociological research behind it :-).
• aaron-lebo 10y ago
  I'm not seeing what the risk was. He was taking a chance that he was wrong, yes, but that was just science. Risk suggests a danger. But what was it?
  • xiaoma 10y ago
    Excommunication, ostracism and poverty.
    • aaron-lebo 10y ago
      But that's the thing: he was wrong about that stuff and he didn't suffer any real consequences for being so.
  • skolos 10y ago
    Here "risk" is opportunity cost. You can spend all you life in theology and die unknown. Newton is famous only because of physics, the other fields were waste of his time. There are countless people who spend their life perusing projects that do not produce anything valuable. And then there are few that win Nobel.
    • rl3 10y ago
      >There are countless people who spend their life perusing projects that do not produce anything valuable. It can't be understated how painful that has to be from their perspective. I suppose a similar story is where they do produce something of value, but it's incremental in nature. Incremental advancements usually don't receive much recognition.
      • js8 10y ago
        > It can't be understated how painful that has to be from their perspective. Why? Somebody can play videogames all day, because it's fun, and then die all of sudden. They didn't produce anything valuable, and yet, they didn't feel bad about it. It's only painful if you rethink it, and basically say, I should have spent my time doing something else. Which is a paradox of choice.
• cfmcdonald 10y ago
  Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal truths established and maintained by God.
  • rubidium 10y ago
    Exactly. PG: Get your grubby money-first hands off the biographies of those who are driven by a genuine interest in understanding the world.
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  • cobbzilla 10y ago
    Please don't get stuck on semantics. When you decide to take a longer route because you think there will be less traffic, you "make a bet". You "make a bet" by deciding to go to college instead of straight into the working world. Anywhere there is a decision to be made with uncertain outcomes, you "make a bet". It doesn't have to be about money, although it often is.
    • aaron-lebo 10y ago
      But none of that has to do with Newton. Was alchemy or physics the long route? Only Newton knows and he's dead. Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
      • cobbzilla 10y ago
        When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money. For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus). All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
• Rickasaurus 10y ago
  PG's articles sure have gone down hill :(
  • sxg 10y ago
    Or maybe you're just remembering his successful articles and forgetting his lower quality ones?
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• mmwako 10y ago
  Loved the insight, but I don't agree with the conclusions. Maybe Newton was just genius all along, and we have yet to discover the "hugeness" of alchemy and theology.
  • cconcepts 10y ago
    I started typing out a comment but you said what I was trying to say in half as many words, thanks
  • apeace 10y ago
    I think what you're saying compliments the conclusions made by PG. If you think alchemy might have promise, go and study it! You'll be taking a risk, but it might just change the world (and put you in the history books).
• rguzman 10y ago
  also, i have the impression that alchemy's bad reputation is a bit undeserved. IIRC some alchemists believed matter was made of fundamental components and followed the scientific method well. so, that bet may be less risky than we perceive it now. this only makes pg's point stronger: it'd be the most interesting for a biography of Newton to talk about alchemy.
  • goodcanadian 10y ago
    Indeed. Alchemy was the precursor to chemistry. The whole turning lead into gold trope was an obvious failure in hindsight, but that was not the sole point of alchemy. An awful lot was learned about chemistry and the nature of matter.
• kowdermeister 10y ago
  > Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky. Except it was three: - Optics - Gravitation and mechanics - Mathematics There are many scientists out there who spend a lifetime on theories that turn out to be bogus, but calling it a bet is entirely missing the point.
  • dhfhduk 10y ago
    A couple of years ago, I went to a museum exhibition of DaVinci's notebooks. I was completely unprepared for what was my primary reaction: that DaVinci just documented every idea in his head, and that some of them just happened to pan out. But for some reason, we credit him for the small percentage of ideas that just happened to work, and ignore all the wrong ideas. To me, he didn't seem like a genius, he seemed very much like a broken clock that just happened to be right twice a day. There's a certain survivor bias in these sorts of discussions, where we identify great contributors as taking huge risks, and so forth and so on. This is true, but we also maybe tend to give them too much credit because we ignore all their failures. We tell ourselves that's why perseverence is so important, but then turn around and make fun of people or even become angry at them for wasting our time when so many things don't turn out. The difference between perseverence and shotgun approaches to pursuing knowledge seems arbitrary to me lots of times. If you followed every one of DaVinci's ideas, for example, you'd be screwed, because he was so wrong about so many things. Today, he'd probably be seen as a crackpot because it would be so difficult to know when his idea was right and when it was wrong. The value of his ideas lies as much in his audience, the people who realized what of his ideas was correct, as much as, if not more, than in DaVinci himself. I guess I've grown really disillusioned with advancements in science, because so much of it involves a sort of mythmaking that seems fairy-tale to me. To me, the reality seems more distributed, involving small contributions, gradually changing over time, with a lot of randomness involved. I don't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't encourage experimentation and tinkering, or that it shouldn't be valued. In fact, I'd argue the opposite. But at the same time something seems off about our incentive structures--the way we give credit seems off. Think of it this way: we do science because at some level, what's correct and what's not is an empirical idea. You could have 10 very reasonable explanations and 9 of them will be wrong "just because." In many cases, being intelligent has nothing to do with why the 9 are wrong, otherwise all we'd need would be philosophy and math. So why do we pretend that the 1 person who was correct was correct because they are a genius? It seems like you can't have geniuses and a need for science at the same time.
• huckabeen2017 10y ago
  The other anecdote concerning Sir Isaac Newton that seems most apt, and it was particularly well dramatized in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's updated Cosmos series, arose when the Royal Society delayed publishing his Principia due to the spectacular failure of their Encyclopedia of Fish the year before! I am not sure which amazes me more: that "natural philosophy" encompasses everything in the cosmos from optics to marine life. Or contemporaneous short-sightedness can imbue one subject with the most paramount economic and social import, whilst viewing the other as nothing more than a mere parlor trick. Only to have the perspective of history upend such dogma centuries later!
  • Santosh83 10y ago
    Short-sightedness or a matter of economics, considering printing was probably not as easy and cheap in those times as it is now?
  • ccvannorman 10y ago
    Yay! I was going to mention Cosmos but you beat me to it. I certainly appreciated the deep and rich history associated with Newton in particular among others in the fields of math and science. Their lives were often hard and wrought with conflict vs. the powers of their times, which is hugely important.
• curun1r 10y ago
  There are plenty of discoverers who incurred some level of risk and lost in a way that isn't covered up by history. Marie Curie's discovery killed her. Tesla's genius manifested not only in groundbreaking discovery, but also mental illness and isolation. And just ask Elisha Gray about the risks of discovery. But, yes, history has a survivorship bias. But that's literally one of the oldest observations made. It's often said, "History is written by the victors." What PG is saying is just another version of that age-old observation.
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• lmkg 10y ago
  I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered subfields of astronomy; and astronomy was considered the observation of the realm of the divine. Not only was there not a divide between physics and theology, people actually thought that math was a tool for studying theology (one of Copernicus' sources of income was computing astrology charts for royalty). I say this to reinforce Paul's statement, "But that's because we know how things turned out." "How things turned out" includes reclassification of what he was working out as belonging to different fields. I suspect that at the time, he didn't consider himself to be moving from one field to another but rather to trying to build upon his previous work.
  • abecedarius 10y ago
    Yes, Newton actually wanted to include "classical scholia" in the Principia showing that he was just recovering the occult knowledge of the ancients: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.
    • jacobush 10y ago
      Nice detail!
  • nostrademons 10y ago
    Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years. Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on. I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.
• balsam 10y ago
  Newton was betting that he would not go crazy or be seen as crazy. The existential risk for thinkers.
• js8 10y ago
  I find it funny that capitalism requires what is essentially an irrational behavior. It seems to me that big public corporations, which avoid risk, and only buy startups once they have been established, are the rational actors. On the other hands, three guys in the garage doing a startup often do it not because they calculate expected profits, but because they want to do it for other than monetary reasons - typically to show that things can be improved and done differently. And so they are willing to take huge, irrational risks.
  • thefalcon 10y ago
    Similar in some ways to how evolution depends mutation?
    • js8 10y ago
      This is actually on the mark. Evolution doesn't care about individual outcomes, it concerns with survival of the genes, or species. So even if those guys in the garage act irrationally as individuals, someone has to take those risks, otherwise the society as a whole would be out-competed. And that's why some people have evolved (not me :-)) to take more risks, at the personal expense.
  • zanny 10y ago
    Startups are not much risk, though. You start out without, you try to make something, if it doesn't work out just having the experience as long as it wasn't a total catastrophe makes you hirable anywhere you want or you try again. The most you might lose is the support of friends and family if your dreams aren't fully realized. Which can be a lot, but that is why the people who have the most to lose don't try startups.
    • js8 10y ago
      There is opportunity cost which is working for a big company from the start. If startups are not risky enough to be irrational to get involved, are you saying then the big companies are acting irrationally when not getting involved? That's of course a dual view. But it seems to me that the big corporation is more likely the one that calculates the correct expected ROI than the startup in the unknown space..
• almonj 10y ago
  Calling his study of theology and alchemy "crazy" seems a bit short sighted. Newtons intense devotion to understanding the scriptures was likely what allowed him to make so much progress in science. Since God saw what a devoted student he was, chose to reward him in that manner of scientific enlightenment. The study of scripture was primary, his science, secondary.
  • haliax 10y ago
    Except that that fails to account for the many devout believers who tried and failed for such enlightenment, or the fact that others have reached great scientific and mathematical heights without being devout students. Also, having read a fair bit about his life, his scientific and mathematical endeavours were most definitely not secondary to anything.
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• nehushtan 10y ago
  But... isn't it true that at Newton's theology was at the foundation of his physics? The idea of a single deity whose intelligence crafted a rational world, the laws of which it is man's duty to uncover, is certainly not incidental to his discoveries.
• api 10y ago
  I've been saying this for years: science is far too conservative, dogmatic, and risk-averse. The reality is that genius minds are intellectually fearless. Newton was into alchemy and fringe theology. Edison tried to build a machine to contact the dead. Many of the great minds of the 60s who at least envisioned everything you're using now were into all kinds of "crazy" stuff: parapsychology, psychedelic consciousness expansion, shamanism, etc. Was some of that stuff silly? Sure. Was some or even most of it a dead end? Sure. But that's not the point. The point is that great minds fear no idea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSolPNn0G7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSolPNn0G7M
• seiferteric 10y ago
  Wait, I thought alchemy and theology were pretty mainstream back then? How was it risky? Just because they turned out to be wrong, I don't think it was crazy for someone to be studying these things back then. Seems like a modern example would be someone studying something like string theory or dark matter and later we discover these things are wrong... but there is no reason to think that today.
  • btilly 10y ago
    The penalty for unsanctioned alchemy was hanging. His theological conclusions would have been considered heresy. The penalty for heresy was the loss of all property and status and, sometimes, death. He was indeed taking a serious risk in studying these things.
    • seiferteric 10y ago
      While I appreciate what you are saying, I think the type of risk pg was talking about was the risk of wasting his time/career, not the risk to his life. The more I think about it, I think a good modern example may turn out to be someone studying AI (specifically AGI). If it turns out to be possible, and you succeed, it would be huge. If it turns out to be not possible, you would have wasted your career. So maybe the lesson is to do more than one thing.
• crb002 10y ago
  Newton had an epic insight into combinatorics. The calculus work he did during the university quarantine shutdown is great to page through. I wonder how much farther Newton, Gauss, Euler, and Erdos would have gotten if they knew how to code.
• kukx 10y ago
  I don't think that studing chemistry (I like to think about alchemy as a precursor of chemistry) or theology should be stigmatized. I understand that it was just an example to support the core idea of the article, but it still leaves a bad taste.
  • bloaf 10y ago
    Do you know of any unambiguous breakthroughs in understanding that have come out of academic theology in the past, say, 200 years? By "unambiguous" I mean "accepted by the majority of other academic theologians." I have nothing against theology as a hobby or religious pursuit, but at some point we have to say "the well is dry" and admit that there is no grounds for spending public funds on it. Specifically: the only payback we can expect lies in the student's personal religious experience.
  • landon32 10y ago
    I don't think they should be stigmatized, but I also don't think that was really what pg meant to do. How much was Newton able to contribute to theology and chemistry, compared to how much he contributed to physics? Sure, maybe he just worked less hard on theology+chemistry, or he wasn't good at those topics, but what seems more likely is that there were no useful discoveries to be made there at the time given the tools + world context Newton had.
  • callmeed 10y ago
    I got that too. The essay definitely had an anti-religious undertone to me.
    • jp_sc 10y ago
      You cannot study what -by definition- it's impossible to observe or measure directly or indirectly. Believing in God it's an act of faith, you cannot KNOW nothing. So yes, in modern times, theology and alchemy has the same scientific value: none
      • scrollbar 10y ago
• lisper 10y ago
  What exactly was Newton risking? An entrepreneur who quits her job and takes out a mortgage to start a business is risking her livelihood. If she fails, she and her family could end up on the street. Newton came from a wealthy family. If he failed in his intellectual endeavors the "risk" for him was to live out his life as an ordinary rich person and only ending up in the more obscure history books. I think Fredrick Smith (founder of Fedex) is a much better example of someone taking an entrepreneurial and intellectual risk. http://about.van.fedex.com/our-story/history-timeline/history/ http://about.van.fedex.com/our-story/history-timeline/histor...
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    I may be mis-understanding the authors intent, but I don't see him as saying that Newton risked wealth or comfort, rather that he risked time-spent on fruitful endeavors.
  • jaredhansen 10y ago
    He was risking his time and attention in studying it. The opportunity cost is nontrivial, especially if you have the kind of IQ Newton had.
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  • empath75 10y ago
    Opportunity cost
  • ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
    Good point, and there's evidence to support the fact that the main indicator of a successful entrepreneur, is if he or his family is wealthy.
  • gwern 10y ago
    Newton's theology was extremely heretical (to all major religious factions, as he was an anti-Trinitarian!) at a time when religious politics in England were brutal and could easily be fatal; being expelled from Cambridge for violating the religion oaths/tests would've only been the start. And, incidentally, alchemy was, besides being highly disreputable & associated with con artists, illegal in England for centuries before and for most of Newton's career: punishable by death and then confiscation of the deceased's estate (Levere, _Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball_). So if the full extent of Newton's activities & beliefs had been known, he could have lost his good name, job, life, and any family wealth. So what exactly was Newton risking? Everything.
• gdudeman 10y ago
  An addendum to this: Many of the greatest unconventional thinkers of our time are similar to Newton in that they are right about one non-consensus thing and wrong about lots of others. Some of those people become fantastically rich as a result of the one right thing. Just because someone is wildly successful and right about one non-consensus bet, doesn't mean they aren't wrong about most of their other beliefs. The occasional out-of-the-mainstream idea is a revolution, but the vast majority are just nutty and wrong.
• nerfhammer 10y ago
  For those interested in Newton's theology and alchemy work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies
  • pdm55 10y ago
    Plus there is the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1 http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1. One time I looked his alchemy writings were in a code that he had concocted. I recall he had astronomical (astrological) terms for chemicals. Maybe, that ties in with what someone else wrote above about there being a belief at the time that things on earth reflected what was in the heavens.
• gizmo 10y ago
  For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why. It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.
  • kafkaesq 10y ago
    For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why. For his "weird" behavior, yeah, probably. For some of his "other" behavior -- his support for Trump, generally; and his (very recent, and very disturbing) attemps to soft-peddle, and normalize sexual violence -- more likely it's because they lack awareness of some basic political history.
    • ionforce 10y ago
      You're getting downvotes. Could you explain some of the stuff you're describing? Maybe the thinking about normalizing sexual violence?
      • kafkaesq 10y ago
        It mostly refers to a discussion -- now flagged, though there's no reason it should be, as it's perfectly within HN's community guidelines -- about an interview he had in the NYT recently ("Peter Thiel, Trump's Tech Pal, explains himself", or some variant thereof) in which he definitely soft-peddles, and attempts to district attention from the famous Billy Bush tape, in which the Grabber-in-Chief-Elect says, well, you know what: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378029 That's what I mean by "normalizing" -- "it's no big deal, what are all these people so uptight about?" -- that whole line. As for "basic awareness of political history", I'm referring of course to events in the 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to which it is, in my view, really, really hard not to see close parallels (despite certain differences) with the current situation. Unless, that is, one spent one's formative intellectual years going out of one's way to not become aware of certain things.
• throw2016 10y ago
  The most valuable thing we have is time. Unless you are born rich or wealthy time is sustenance and living money. The tradeoffs and risks involved for those born rich and those who have to work for a living are world's apart. In the era Newton came from you would have to be wealthy to be able to afford other interests beyond surviving. So a lot of the big leaps were made by those from rich families or those lucky enough to have some sort of wealthy backer. Plus certain things like education, family, kids are attached to specific timelines in a typical life. Health and the ability to do things are also attached to timelines. When you take a risk you could be putting all of those on line. The ability to expend time with no certainty of returns is a luxury only those from a wealthy background have. And naturally they will be more successfuly as there are more efforts from people of those backgrounds.
• ggame 10y ago
  Newtons dabbling in Alchemy made him very sick, so there was definitely a risk there. He also invested and lost his life savings in a speculative stock bubble. The bet that really paid off financially was his occult connections that got him a job as warden of the royal mint where his currency manipulation lead to an increase in demand for coins and made him a huge personal fortune. At least that's what I heard. Happy to be corrected.
• swalsh 10y ago
  I urge anyone to play a bit of 'why' with a young child, mixed with the Socrates method. If you can get them to try and answer beyond "I don't know"... you'll be taken to some crazy mental places no adult can take you.
  • emiliobumachar 10y ago
    Interesting. How young would you suggest?
  • darkerside 10y ago
    I would love to hear more about this
• sahrizv 10y ago
  I agree with the core insight that we sometimes ignore the risk taking of high achievers while looking at their life in hindsight. However, I would not say with certainty that Newton was pursuing these fields with the mindset of betting on them. He could have been certain about the validity, value and fruitfulness of intellectual pursuits in those fields. Interestingly, this is the second time in the past 24 hours I've encountered the idea of comparing a VC (Marc's reference) with another class of high achievers. (previous one, a comparison with entrepreneurs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13371813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13371813)
• gdubs 10y ago
  "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed." - Michael Jordan
  • omarchowdhury 10y ago
    Which basketball player has not missed a shot, has not lost a game, hasn't missed game winning shots? Did they all become like Michael Jordan? Failure may be on the path to success, but failure does not guarantee success.
    • zenlikethat 10y ago
      Yeah, but you could also easily ask how many would-be Jordans stopped short because of all their failures. Point is Michael wouldn't be Michael without it.
• matt4077 10y ago
  It's either ignorant or insulting to name theology in the same breath as alchemy. Theology is still an academic discipline and it doesn't even require a believe in the supernatural. Unless this is pg's attempt to insert himself into fight about "theology" vs. "religious studies".
  • olavk 10y ago
    Insulting to theology or to alchemy? Alchemy is basically chemistry done with a strong philosophical framework based in the thinking of Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistos. "Making gold" is just a naive interpretation - it was research concerned about transformation of materials. When the underlying philosophy was abandoned it turned into modern chemistry. (The word "alchemy" has the same root as "chemistry".) You can of course argue the underlying hermetic philosophy was BS - but it was and is no better or worse than theology.
  • emiliobumachar 10y ago
    Pg was probably narrowly talking about Theology as studied by Isaac Newton. I think we can all agree that that was a waste of time. (hindsight is a wonderful thing). Relevant smbc: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2007-12-27 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2007-12-27
  • tbabb 10y ago
    How does theology not involve a belief in the supernatural?
    • Diederich 10y ago
      Websters: the study of religious faith, practice, and experience; especially : the study of God and of God's relation to the world
    • jat850 10y ago
      Theology is the study of religion or things supernatural, not necessarily tied to a practice in any belief.
• adamzerner 10y ago
  The core idea of this article is that high reward is usually accompanied by high risk. To exemplify this, pg gave a great example of Newton pursuing physics, alchemy and theology. However, this was just one example. I think the article could be greatly improved by giving, like, 50 examples (in an abbreviated form, like "Newton: physics, alchemy, theology"). With one example it's sorta easy to think, "eh that might just be an exception". With 50 example, it's easy to think, "wow, look at all of that; the core idea definitely does seem to be true".
  • svantana 10y ago
    It's a good example but I think the core of the article is that there is inherent success bias in the history of science and engineering. The scientists of the past that were working on dead end problems were not necessarily worse scientists, it could have been pure bad luck. But in hindsight it's difficult to tell those people from the incompetent.
• mempko 10y ago
  I'm curious, was the risk material for Newton, or just virtual, like "risk of failure" which would just be an embarrassment.
• steejk 10y ago
  This is similar to what Ben Thompson just wrote about [1]. It's easy to forget the bets, such as Apple TV, that weren't so successful. [1] https://stratechery.com/2017/the-ten-year-anniversary-of-the-apple-tv/ https://stratechery.com/2017/the-ten-year-anniversary-of-the...
  • argonaut 10y ago
    Most people have not forgotten the Apple TV.
• l34ch 10y ago
  Why is this at the bottom of his list of essays instead of at the top? It isn't in chronological order anymore.
• richardfeynman 10y ago
  When people say that Newton studied alchemy, what they actually mean was that he studied chemistry. He was studying what happens when you do different things to different elements. Sure he used the language of the time, but he was fundamentally doing chemistry. And the dream of the alchemists -- to turn base materials into gold -- was ultimately more or less realized when Henri Moissan created the first artificial diamond. Alchemy has a bad rep, mostly because it was shrouded in mystery and obfuscation, but at its core it was science, the pursuit of knowledge through experimentation.
  • ajuc 10y ago
    Even more realized in particle accelerators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...
  • woodandsteel 10y ago
    The difference between alchemy and modern chemistry is alchemy is based on a mystic, supernatural view of reality, whereas chemistry assumes reality is basically natural. That makes a huge difference, and chemistry would never have gotten very far if it had stuck with the old metaphysics.
    • olavk 10y ago
      Well it wasn't really "supernatural" at the time. It was literally a theory about the natural world. It just wasn't correct, and have since been replaced with different theories and models.
      • bloaf 10y ago
        Yes and no. I think of alchemy as early contact between mysticism and objectivity. People thought mysticism was a valid way to get info about the world. The failure of alchemy proved them wrong and may have partly led to a more skeptical "hypothesize and test" approach from the original "try to confirm religion" approach.
      • 10y ago
• brown 10y ago
  "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." - Bruce Feirstein
• z3t4 10y ago
  if they failed they still had their lands and titles.
• nocman 10y ago
  "Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time." I'm not sure which "us" pg is referring to, but the essay gives me the impression that he meant something like "most people" (I could be reading him wrong, but that was my impression). Alchemy is obviously a waste of time -- I won't dispute that, and I suspect that "most people" would agree with that assertion. Being that pg is an atheist, I would expect him to personally believe that the study of theology is a waste of time. However, even just taking Christian theology into account, given that over 100 million Bibles are sold or given away in the world every year (https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-copies-bible-sold-year-3a42fbe0f6956bb2 https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-copies-bible-sold-...), and the Bible continues to be "the most widely distributed and best-selling book in the world.", the "us" for which it is true that the study of theology is "crazy" or a "waste of time" seems to me to be much smaller group of people than the essay seems to imply. Again, this is just the impression I got from reading the essay. I would be happy to have pg respond and let me know if my impression was incorrect. (edited to remove unintentional indenting)
  • hueving 10y ago
    50 shades of gray was also a best selling book. However, I think most of the readers recognize that studying it is not going to advance technology/science in any way.
    • openasocket 10y ago
      Replace 50 shades of gray with Hemingway or Shakespeare. Studying Shakespeare isn't going to advance technology or science, but it could advance art, which is a noble human endeavor, as is science.
    • nocman 10y ago
      There's a big difference between "a best selling book", and "the most widely distributed and best-selling book in the world." And I was not addressing whether people think that studying the Bible advances technology/science, but whether people think that studying theology is "crazy" or a "waste of time".
  • 10y ago
• all_usernames 10y ago
  I find this essay pretty confusing. It seems to contradict itself at some basic level. "Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we think." This seems kind of obvious to me. Yes, creative and driven people are interested in lots of strange things. Yes, genius often means the ability to take ideas or discoveries from apparently widely different areas and tie them together to form new understandings. "Newton made three bets. One of them worked." This makes no sense. Of course his physics was a success. But how could anyone judge the theological pursuits of an individual to be a success or a failure? And if the pursuit was a failure, then doesn't that negate the earlier implication that his studying theology ("crazy") was in some ways associated with his success in physics ("genius")?
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]