Estimated reading time: 3 mins : 9 secs
Filippo then issued a challenge, saying that the commission to build the dome should be given to the man who could make an egg stand on end, as that man would have the skills required for the job. After the various architects tried in vain to accomplish it, Filippo took an egg, whacked it on its end and then placed it on the table where it stood upright and did not fall over.
The other architects protested that they could have done that, too, to which Filippo replied that they could have built the dome, too, had they seen his model. Impressed, the judges awarded Filippo the commission to construct the dome.
From Duarte Blog, Great Moments in Presentation History, the Architect and the Egg
More on the dead chickens problem of price discovery and assigning value; I love stories like these.
The vast question, though is:
How do you reconcile this kind of truthy story – the genius leaps into the Adjacent Possible of the unknown sample space – with the idiocies of patent law and copyright?
Let me next define the “Adjacent Possible.” Take a liter flask with 1,000 types of chemicals. Call these “The Actual.” Let them react by a single reaction step. Perhaps new species of chemicals appear. Call these the “Adjacent Possible.”
Now I point to the Adjacent Possible of the evolving biosphere. Once there were lung fish, swim bladders were in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Two billion years ago, before there were multi-celled organisms, swim bladders were not in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere.
If we agree, then watch! We do not know what is in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere! We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!
Then can we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.
Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!
Part of the issue with copyright and patents seems to be that we’re not sure if people have gone from A – Z (which is worthy of reward) or started off from N (which probably isn’t):
“Q: How can companies become more adaptive?
A: You need to be able to recognise your adjacent possibilities. A lot of people can’t. They are at A, they want to go to X. And X is maybe twenty steps away. And they can?t visualise what the next step is that gets them towards X. They can work their way backwards to like N. But they have no idea how to get from A to N. They do know if they can get to N, they can get to X. But they need to know what B and C are. I find that a lot of people at a lot of companies are so focused on being able to articulate X, and then they hire consultants who work them backwards to N, that they never figure out B and C.”
Interview with Michael Lissack, quoted on Purposive Drift
Is the story about Filippo great because he goes right back to the egg?
Credits/thanks/more:
The link to Duarte Blog comes from the ever-resource-full @timkastelle
Edge.org have a talk with Stuart Kauffman on his idea of the Adjacent Possible
Image: the Adjacent Possible from Rafe Furst at Emergent Fool
Image: Buckminster Fuller/Dome from Art Tattler
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