Jason Crawford

And then, of course, when your stuff actually starts to work, that's when people switch from ignoring and ridiculing you to actively fighting you and opposing you and denouncing you and so forth.

So, you know...

You see different personality types among innovators.

Pasteur was a little feisty.

He actually kind of enjoyed the sport and the debate, and he enjoyed proving people wrong and having opponents.

And he would be like, OK, I'm going to come in with so much data and so many carefully performed experiments.

I'm just going to knock you over.

He enjoyed that.

Darwin is different.

Darwin is a little more quiet and shy, and he didn't love the public debate.

Famously, Darwin had associates, friends, or colleagues who went out and did the debating for him.

Thomas Huxley was known as Darwin's bulldog, and he would go out and – he'd be the one who'd get up there and debate the priest or the preacher, whoever it was who was –

Yeah, there's a really famous debate between them.

So it's not just one personality type, but I do think you have to be extremely independent-minded, have a lot of perseverance, and as Jeff Bezos says, you must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

So I think that's part of what the progress studies movement and community is about.

So for those who aren't familiar with that term, last summer, Tyler Cowen, the economist from George Mason, and Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, co-authored an article in The Atlantic, which ran under the headline, We Need a New Science of Progress.

And they called for an academic discipline or perhaps an interdisciplinary field, which they referred to as progress studies.

And ever since then, there's been sort of a community of people who are interested in this idea of, yeah, let's actually focus on where does progress come from?

What creates it?

What are the conditions for it?