David Epstein, the author of the brilliant book Range which talked about why generalists are more likely to succeed, has published his new book – Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. This blog which is an adaptation from the book talks about why our best ideas don’t necessarily have to be original and why framing is the key to idea generation. He uses the example of Thomas Malthus whose famous 1798 essay about how population growth will make the world run out of food and resources turned out to be absolutely wrong. Yet, Malthus’ work inspired two naturalists – Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to independently come up with the survival of the fittest theories. And both credited Malthus for the framing. So, ‘Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.’
“Two Englishmen co-invented one of the most radical and significant theories in scientific history by adapting lessons from the exact same economic essay.”
Apparently, it isn’t a coincidence and happens all the time: “Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.”
And he cites the same phenomenon in art as well: “The sociologist Robert Merton has called this phenomenon “multiple discovery.” Most breakthroughs in science and art are born as twins and triplets. As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber summarized: “The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances.””
The author goes on to add in post-script: “Perhaps unsurprisingly, Merton’s idea of multiple discovery was itself multiply discovered.”
What explains this?
“The popular concept of genius and breakthrough is wrong. We want to believe that great new ideas come from non-obvious leaps of creativity; that genius means one individual seeing what no one else can. But the true history of innovation suggests the opposite. Great ideas start to become a little bit obvious when the problem is framed in just the right way.
Darwin and Wallace are often seen as breaking completely with everything that had come before them. In fact, they were applying the ideas of Malthus to the obvious and pressing questions of their time. Why does breeding work so well? Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth? Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale, the wing of a bat, and the arm of a human have so much in common? Before Darwin and Wallace, breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.” Darwin and Wallace were mining and connecting the knowledge of their day, rather than dispensing with it. When they discovered Malthus’s theory of human existence as a grim competition between species and environment, what clicked into focus was the concept of evolution as a competition between rivalrous traits, selected for their environmental fit.
The figures we remember as geniuses are usually the ones who were standing closest when a well-framed question came due. The figures we forget are the ones who did the framing; people like Malthus, who don’t solve the problem but state it clearly enough that someone else does.
….The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found. Once Malthus articulated his grim theory of resource scarcity and competition precisely enough, two scientists on opposite sides of the world arrived at the same revolutionary solution within years of each other. The answer was, in some sense, already waiting….As Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate, put it: “It’s harder to come up with a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.” The unsung heroes of intellectual history are the Malthuses, the ones who were wrong about the answer but right about the frame. Perhaps every brilliant idea is just that: an ordinary answer to an extraordinary question.”
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
