Priestly Believed in Randomness and Side Projects
Joseph Priestly, the 18th century theologian, philosopher, and inventor, embraced three concepts I've written about at length:
- He exposed himself to randomness: try more stuff than the next guy; law of large numbers; insight at the intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas.
- He maintained side projects: hedge bets; humility around being able to predict which particular project will be the big win; stay intellectually stimulated.
- He experimented and iterated: many little bets over few big bets; learn by doing; adapt rapidly to changing conditions.
Priestly was never one for the grand hypothesis; he rarely
designed experiments specifically to test a general theory….His
approach was far more inventive, even chaotic. While the experiments
themselves were artfully designed, his higher-level plan for working
through a sequence of experiments was less rigorous, Priestly’s mode
was to get interested in a problem – conductivity, fire, air – and throw
the kitchen sink at it. (Literally so, in that many of his experiments
were conducted in the kitchen sink.) The method was closer to that of
natural selection than abstract reasoning: new ideas came out of new
juxtapositions, randomness, diversity. Priestly would later credit the
emerging technology of the period – air pumps and electrostatic
machines – with helping him develop his distinctive approach: “By the
help of these machines,” he wrote, “we are able to put an endless
variety of things into an endless variety of situations, while nature
herself is the agent that shows the result.
That's from Steven Johnson's book, as dog-eared by Russell Davies.
