An old acquintance, someone I don't really know all that well, emailed me the following questions this morning: “what do you see really affects change? What do you see that enables people to live better, safer, or more productive lives? / I'm looking for just that- to make a difference. I know you've thought about this. Send me an email, drop me a line. Help me figure out where to look.”

I'm not sure how many people he sent this to, whether it was just a generic question that he's pumping out at everybody he knows or whether he specifically did single me out, but it is definitely something upon which I like to witter, and so I answered him as follows:

* * *

I do have some observations. I don't know how much help they'll be!

The first point is that if you're looking, then you're at least looking in the right direction. Dr. Richard Hamming, one of the Los Alamos guys during the war, has a good piece about this called You and Your Research which you ought to read if you haven't already.

Second, you don't have to do one big thing. You can do lots of little things. In fact, I'm starting to regard that it's a more sensible approach to work on lots of little things, because the people who did the big things may just be statistical freaks. See my recent essay, Chasing Supernovæ; and Alfred Wainwright and Simon Rodia are a couple of exemplars for you to read about.

Tacking on to this is that our contemporary ethics are starting to develop such that the old framing of who is “famous” for being devoted to good causes isn't really sufficient, something that Steven Pinker very clearly illustrated in the New York Times, of all places, just a few weeks ago in an article entitled The Moral Instinct.

One of the key principles that I've been developing, as a philosophy of creativity, is that the rate of change is much more important than the result. In other words, college students get taught calculus quite easily, for example, but could they have discovered calculus? We teach people things, but we don't teach them how things were discovered, or how to discover new things. This is mainly from a science perspective, but the humanities and the arts may be more fallow and fertile (again see “Chasing Supernovæ” above).

So I study people who made big changes, or times that were particularly bustling. Some examples [a slightly more concise list than the one I actually sent in the email; see if you can guess which examples I left out, and others that I could have included]:

I'm especially into Coleridge at the moment.

What are the commonalities between all these people and periods? Note however that these are generally people who made really big contributions, and as such come under the [possible] statistical freak category. Exceptions include the Shakspearean biographers (Malone especially makes a good study), Coleridge (most of whose best works aren't well publically known!), and Charles Fort (who is as often misunderstood as a scholar can be).

If you're looking towards lots of little things to work on, make sure that they are atomic: in other words, that when you work on something small, it will last the ages and be a valuable contribution. You want to be piling up teaspoonfuls of sand, not teaspoonfuls of water.

To achieve this, you need to look at how to stop being temporally provincial. The list above can help with this too: you just ask the question, what did these people work on that lasted? What did they expect to last, and is that different from what actually lasted? And then you have to apply it to the modern day.

One of the big problems that we face is that we're currently in a big technological period of change, what with the rise of the computer, the internet, and the digital revolution in general. There's a lot more data than there ever has been before, and a lot more people connected to the greatest library of all time, the internet. The challenges that historians, especially, will face in the future are presumably going to be phenomenal.

It's certainly possible to contribute to this revolution, by contributing to Wikipedia and writing websites and coding and things like that, but I am suspicious of its temporal provincialism. I've noticed that much of the code that I've written, most of the computer science contributions that I've made, have not been things which last because computer science is moving so swiftly. Everything is obsoleted so quickly that it's just teaspoons of water all the time. In part this is just because I'm probably not a very good computer scientist, but I also suspect that it is in some measure endemic.

As I point out in Chasing Supernovæ, which is really my best summary of these issues so far, the direction I'm taking is certainly different: “I've found out so many things about Shakespeare, who is generally considered to be an overstudied subject, that I'm preparing a large work of these findings. That even Shakespeare is not, in fact, overstudied shows just how much great work there is especially to be done in literary history.”

Yet it's interesting that of all the Whits essays that I've written on these kinds of subjects, the only ones that have been bookmarked at del.icio.us are those which pertain to the Semantic Web; to computer science. Computer science is the current hot topic. It's got a good community, so it's easy to get sucked in to it. But it's a Will-o'-the-wisp that I think one ought to be very wary of in the common sense.

In the extended sense, it almost certainly has a rôle to play. I move now here into the realm of half-considered thoughts about Natural Philosophy. One of the most exciting periods, that I didn't really fully enumerate in the list above, is the 17th century scientists, moving from Bacon's Novum Organum in which he outlines a new kind of scientific method, to the very first Royal Society period, past John Aubrey and Sir Thomas Browne and Newton. The transitioning that this period went through fractioned and factioned science making interdisciplinary study very hard. The concept of Natural Philosophy is perhaps one that ought to be revived for the modern age.

I think that the zeitgeist of mutheism, natural philosophy, metatropes, relativism, cognitive science, mini-models, ars discovery, developments in ethics, temporal provincialism, vectorism, and things like that themselves form a natural advance and a useful thing to humanity, but since many of these findings are my own and those of my friends I am of course apt to be biased on the matter!

That's probably enough for you to be thinking about for now.

Sean B. Palmer, 28th March 2008