Dwarkesh Patel

But in 1600, the idea is history up until now has been sort of unsystematic and people have discovered things kind of at random.

But we can create history.

a method in which we observe the world and use inductive reasoning to figure things out from those observations to create systematic descriptions of the secret motions that underlie nature and from that work out technologies that are good and useful for humankind.

If, as we make our observations of nature, we publish them,

and share them with each other, we can create a community of scientists that will share all of these discoveries with each other and with the world and therefore benefit it.

This is where, when I'm doing this in the classroom, I deliberately provoke and shock my students with the fun claim, Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist.

And what I mean by that is that to be a scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of other scientists so that they can test them, so that the whole human civilization progresses a little bit.

And when my friends who are chemists or my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share that discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances.

What does Leonardo do?

He writes everything he discovers down in coded mirror writing so that nobody but him can possibly use it.

And he refuses to share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing.

Because Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress.

Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later people will see them and marvel and say...

How did he do it?

No one else has ever been able to replicate that method so that he would be marveled at by the future exactly the way he and his peers marveled at the works of the ancients.

And they look at something like the Colosseum or the Pantheon in Rome with its enormous dome and they say, oh, how did they do it?

If only we could work that out, we could work it.

make one and then make sure no one else could.

Brunelleschi, who built Florence's famous beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would be able to replicate his work.

That is an inventor and it is an engineer, but in the sense of a community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress.