Dwarkesh Patel

This is actually a saboteur of human progress, if anything, who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point so that no one else can be his peer.

So that is what you did as a learned inventor in the 1400s and in the 1500s.

But as you get to 1600, the suggestion is different.

And here I'm going to use Francis Bacon's gorgeous simile of the three insects.

So there are three types of knowledge wielders, says Bacon.

first there is the ant who is the encyclopedist who gathers information from all around the world and he learns everything he can and he piles it up into a great big pile and he makes an anthill and he sits on top and if he has the biggest anthill the biggest pile of knowledge then he's proud of having made it but all he does is assemble it and have it possess it a beautiful library nothing comes from it

The second type is the system weaver, the spider who spins elaborate webs of beautiful, intricate logical theory in which you admire them and you can get entranced and ensnared in them easily because they're so beautiful, they're almost hypnotic.

But there's nothing real in them.

They're all just spun out of the body of the spider himself, the theorist theorizing from his own mind.

And the third kind, says Bacon, is the honeybee, who, gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what he gathers through the organ of his own being to produce something which is sweet and useful for humankind.

And that is the scientist who gathers from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind.

And with this rhetorical call and with Francis Bacon's portrait on the title page, the English Academy of Sciences is founded and starts publishing.

And the standard switches over from, you are not a great achiever because you built the dome.

You are a great achiever because you worked out how it can be done.

and you shared that sweet and useful thing with all of humankind.

Bacon says, if we do this, if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better condition than the past.

We will have better agriculture, fewer famines.

We will have refrigeration.

We will have chicken in winter.

We will have all of these things that we aspire to.