If You Look At History, Innovation Doesn't

Calculus, The Electrical Battery, The Telephone, The Steam Engine, The Radio - All These Groundbreaking Innovations Were Hit Upon By Multiple Inventors Working In Parallel With No Knowledge Of One Another.

How Could So Many Intelligent People Be So Grievously Wrong For Such An Extended Period Of Time? How Could They Ignore So Much Overwhelming Evidence That Contradicted Their Most Basic Theories? These Questions, Too, Deserve Their Own Discipline: The Sociology Of Error.

It Is Extraordinary How Safe Flying Has Become. You Are Now Statistically More Likely To Be Elected President Of The United States In Your Lifetime Than You Are To Die In A Plane Crash. What An Amazing Achievement As A Society! But What We End Up Focusing On Are The Catastrophic Failures That Are Incredibly Rare But Happen Every Now And Then.

The Problem Is, There Are Definitely Some Genuinely Lame Things On Television, And There's More At The Bottom Of The Barrel, Because The Barrel In A Sense Has Gotten Bigger.

Legendary Innovators Like Franklin, Snow, And Darwin All Possess Some Common Intellectual Qualities—a Certain Quickness Of Mind, Unbounded Curiosity—but They Also Share One Other Defining Attribute. They Have A Lot Of Hobbies.