The Great Scene Theory of History
The Royal Society caused the Industrial Revolution. Robert Hooke is extremely underrated.
Previously: History is like the Weather. Related: The Gods of Straight Lines
Newton was a natural philosopher like no other. His monumental achievement was the First Great Unification (1687), which showed that the same laws governed celestial bodies and gravity on Earth. Newton is responsible for the notion that there are natural laws that apply everywhere, a fundamental assumption of all science. He invented calculus and the seven colors of the rainbow:
scholars in Newton’s time [believed] that “pure” light [...] is fundamentally white or colourless, and is altered into color by mixture with darkness caused by interactions with matter. Newton showed the opposite was true: light is composed of different spectral hues (he describes seven – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet), and all colours, including white, are formed by various mixtures of these hues.
George Washington was a virtuous warrior, committed to freedom, republicanism, and the wellbeing of his fellow man.
Had he been less committed to republicanism, he might not have refused to run for a third term in 1796; establishing a tradition that all but one US presidents have kept. Or, worse, when his officers threatened in 1783 to march on Congress and demand the pay they were owed, he might not have ordered them to stop and write letters instead of fighting. Even when his men wanted him to be king, he refused to.
Had Washington chosen differently, the newly free America would have become his kingdom, and not a republic. The American Experiment would have failed. The French Revolution might still have proceeded, but it would probably have kept its focus on constitutional monarchy. Prior to America, it was thought that only small republics worked. For example Montesquieu (1748) wrote that “it is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist.” Without America as a successful continent-scale republic, or Lafayette as an experienced republican, the French would likely have stuck to their initial demands of constitutional monarchy. Nothing but monarchies would have existed in Europe well into the 19th century, or perhaps the 20th.
Because of the huge possible ramifications of this choice, and the great contingent influence that his character had on it, it’s possible that Washington is the single Greatest Man of history. He was a great man conventionally defined, but also a Great Man because history dramatically depended on his idiosyncratic individual choices.
In contrast, if Newton hadn’t existed, other people would have discovered the same stuff. Sure, it might have taken 3-5 different people to do all of Newton’s discoveries, but it would have happened in a generation or two. Newton was also discovering natural truths, so his character would not have influenced the content of his discoveries much.
Robert Hooke, his fellow Fellow of the Royal Society, had earlier written that the Sun and the planets mutually attracted each other and followed linear inertia. He accused Newton of plagiarizing his ‘inverse square law’ of attraction, while acknowledging that Newton had mathematically proven that elliptical orbits follow from it. (In reality, Hooke was a sore loser, though still very cool.)
Christiaan Huygens also understood inertia and developed the formula of centripetal acceleration for circular motion, but philosophically rejected action at a distance and so did not posit the same for planets. (He and Leibniz both thought that changes in motion had to result from material impact.) Leibniz, of course, independently invented calculus and fought Newton for priority over the discovery.
Does this mean Newton was a nobody? If he hadn’t existed, perhaps Hooke would eventually have figured out the mathematical laws, or Huygens would have proposed them with a transmitting fluid. Perhaps in the next generation Bernoulli, Hermann and Varignon, who in our timeline re-proved Newton’s results using Leibnizian calculus, would have proved that Huygens’ centripetal acceleration generated elliptical orbits.
The Great Scene theory of History
BRIAN ENO: [...] those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.
So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people.
The Great Man theory of history posits that history is largely explained by the particular attributes and actions of heroes, that is Great Men. Proposed by Thomas Carlyle in a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, it posits that history is decisively determined by Great Men. By studying their lives, beliefs, virtues and vices, we can understand history. We can predict the future by identifying and predicting the heroes among us.
The Straight Lines position objects that in reality, many quantities measured historically evolve remarkably smoothly, even if many single seemingly significant events happen. Global GDP, the per-country maximum of women’s life expectancy, price of batteries after 1996, price of solar panels plotted against installed capacity. The Internet doesn’t show up on productivity (GDP per hour worked). It is obviously true that much of the time historical events follow lines on graphs, but I don’t think that’s it.
The Great Scene theory of history posits that exceptional milieus and their cultural practices determine history. By default the effect of structures on society makes individual behavior average out to a line, but every little while a focused, connected group of people radically alters the trajectory.
Take a second to look at the conditions needed to replace Newton. There were perhaps 3-5 scientists of a remotely similar calibre in each generation, and they all talked to each other. Of the 6 or so soon before or in Newton’s time, none of them accumulated all the insights. It might have taken maybe 10 other draws from Newton-tier natural philosophers to get the First Unification. If we remove just 20 people from history, we could delay the First Unification by 100 years – or perhaps more, if the conditions that created this Great Scene never arise again.
In “A Culture of Growth”, Joel Mokyr argues the Industrial Revolution needed certain cultural changes to occur. The specific change, which he terms the “Industrial Enlightenment”, is the idea that understanding natural phenomena through empirical observation and then applying this understanding to production would improve the human condition.1 This notion, just like Newton’s postulated universal laws, did not exist before. The change did not come about by itself, but was articulated chiefly by a few thinkers2 , which were central to creating the Royal Society. From page 67 (emphasis mine):
In summary, much like in any story of innovation, it is convenient and only a little misleading to organize the tale around a few key entrepreneurial figures […] two of the cultural entrepreneurs whose influence I consider as supremely important for the rise of the Industrial Enlightenment and eventually the emergence of useful knowledge as the main engine of modern economic growth—Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
If it is true, it means that removing 20-200 people from history3 would have delayed or averted the entire Industrial Revolution, and correspondingly the bending of per-capita GDP from horizontal to vertical: the singular most important exception to the Gods of Straight Lines.
Great scenes are made of Great individuals: Shapley values
The cultural collaboration in Great Scenes makes them greater than each of their individuals put together. But it does seem like some individuals have a lot more influence nevertheless.
We can rescue the notion of a Great Man using Shapley values: the game theoretic method for allocating fair rewards to members of a group that is more capable than the sum of its parts.
Shapley values arise when cooperative coalitions, rather than individuals, determine the payoff for a game.4 The way you assign a Shapley value to some individual is as follows: for all possible coalitions without the individual, add the individual and see how much that improves the payoff of the coalition. Take the average of all that.5
To apply Shapley values to history, the set of possible coalitions is any subset of actual individuals from history. The ‘gains of the coalition’ are how much does it change history to include a particular scene, or group of people. To actually compute this, you not only have to figure out alternative histories each including only a subset of the scene, for every subset. You also have to define numerically how changed a particular alt-history is compared to our timeline! Obviously this is completely out of reach of current methods.6
We cannot compute a number. We can however use some key property of Shapley values to arrive at what makes a Great Man: the Shapley value of a Scene (treated as if it was an individual) is the sum of Shapley values of each individual belonging to it. Relatedly, the Shapley of a Scene is the sum of Shapleys of all mutually disjoint Scenes within it.
That is, if you remove a Scene from history and things drastically change, then the “payoff” represented by that change accrues to the individuals in the Scene. (or, to sub-Scenes in the Scene.) Therefore, the most prominent members of the scene impacted history at least as much as the total impact of the scene, divided by the number of people in it.
The Republic of Letters and British inventors in general, and the Royal Society in particular, had such an enormous influence on history, that even dividing by the number of members it remains greater than any single other individual. The reason is that they bent the log-GDP per capita curve from horizontal to vertical:
Within the Royal Society Scene, one particular individual stood out. By Shapley value reasoning, Sir Isaac Newton emerges as the Greatest Man of History. Bacon, Descartes, Hooke, Huygens, Leibniz, etc. are probably not far behind in the ranks.
The Great Scene theory also makes me appreciate Hooke much more than he usually is is. (He is not frequently cited with all these other names.) In life, his losing disputes with Newton transformed him from an exuberant curious youth to an embittered old man. However, I like Hooke. He was the first Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society, and organized weekly empirical demonstrations for its members, which of course provided the opportunity to talk and exchange ideas. Without him, the early Society might not have survived or might have become something very different. Henry Robinson, Librarian of the Royal Society in 1935:
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he was, historically, the creator of the Royal Society.
Other examples of Great Scenes
Some impactful scenes were deliberately founded clubs:
The Fabian Society (1884), this small group (never exceeding 8,400 members at its peak) shaped British social democracy through founding the London School of Economics (1895) and helping establish the Labour Party (1900). Notable Fabian Beatrice Webb’s 1909 Minority Report laid the foundation for much of the modern welfare state.
The Mont Pelerin society (1947) put neoliberalism into place. They built a transnational network of think tanks focused on market economics, which would wait decades for their influential moment. When stagflation created the right crisis in the 1970s, they struck: their monetarist theories predicted this as a possible shock and provided a solution, which turned out to work.
Others are less deliberate, more accidents of culture:
Ancient Athens: Socrates and subsequent philosophers invented the notion of attempting to reason about the world, moved us from mythos to logos.
Renaissance Florence: only had about 60,000-80,000 people, but made a lot of Great Art. For example, Michelangelo’s David. Their Machiavelli invented modern political science and consequentialist ethics.
Early 20th century Budapest: the “Martians”. A cluster of Hungarian-born Jewish physicists including Leo Szilard and John von Neumann who fled to America and became central to the Manhattan Project. They emerged from the same Budapest high schools and intellectual café culture.
Conclusion
The Gods of Straight Lines don’t drive reality. Rather, Great Scenes start cultural trends and shape possibilities.
I still don’t know exactly when straight lines are created or broken, but I believe it’s likely true that Great Groups shape which lines ; and that when many people (e.g. everyone living in a country) have similar incentives, their behavior averages out.
Appendix: some Industrial Revolution near misses
Originally I had intended this section to prove that the Royal Society was essential to the Industrial Revolution. I don’t think I can honestly do that, because the near misses didn’t quite do it because of other reasons. The evidence is still what we’d expect to see if the Industrial Enlightenment was necessary for the Industrial Revolution, but it was not the only cause.
Song China in the 13th century. They had coal mines. The coal mines had water in them. Why didn’t they invent the Newcomen engine and pump the water out? Is it because their gentleman-scholars were too focused on poetry and esoteric memes, instead of natural philosophy?
Probably not. First of all, there were some imperial officials that were interested in science: chiefly Shen Kuo. Shen did have some colleagues, so no they weren’t all focusing on memes. That said, the Scene for natural philosophy wasn’t exactly popping. Second, the mines in North and Northeast China are in arid climates, so the chief problem was spontaneous combustion and that was solved by increasing ventilation.7 As a result, they didn’t have any use for really bad heat engines, so they didn’t make one.
The Netherlands in the late 17th Century. Roughly at the same time as Britain, the Netherlands was a very energy intensive economy. Sounds good for industrialization, right? Well, the Dutch only had huge amounts of peat which was accessible near the surface and could be extracted while flooded. The only coal they had was in the very southeast corner, in Limburg, and it is very close to the surface. I do recommend reading “Peat’s Cradle” for the story of how the Netherlands’ economy almost exhausted their peat.
Joel Mokyr, “A Culture of Growth” (2017), preface.
After writing about cultural entrepreneurs, Mokyr writes about Great Man theory, how it is dismissed by modern historians but perhaps still important. Also, Hume too asserted masses are predictable but individuals unpredictable:
“A Culture of Progress” p. 61:
The degree to which history is driven by a “vital few” and their indispensability has been controversial. Most modern historians have tended to dismiss the impact of individuals on history by mocking the “intellectual prowess and persuasive capabilities of a few men” and stressing cultural change as “a confluence of available ideas,” although one is left wondering where such influential ideas might have come from in the first place. In contrast, Jonathan Hughes (1986, p. 2) wrote that “to ignore the impact of individuals on our historical development would be like studying physiology without considering the actions of the organs and cells on the body and each other.” Most economic historians today would still agree with David Hume that “what depends upon a few persons is, in great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes; what arises from a great number may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes” (Hume [1742], 1985, p. 112). In other words, Marxist and similar interpretations that minimize the role of individuals can write down aggregative dynamic models that they believe drive the behavior of masses, but making any predictions about the rise of a person like Mohammed or Hitler seems futile. Did successful entrepreneurs really matter? Perhaps the safest thing to say is that even if no single individual was truly indispensable, some persons made a clear difference in that historical developments would have been noticeably different without them, although the degree of difference remains a matter of debate.”
What seems beyond dispute is that the “great number” of people that Hume wrote of needed to be coordinated to converge on a more or less coherent set of beliefs and this coordinating role is crucial.
Bacon, everyone in the early Royal Society, Leibniz and his correspondents, plus a bunch of the later industrialists like Josiah Wedgwood. That’s probably at most 200.
I am most familiar with its use in explainability and mechanistic interpretability in AI. We’d like to determine which neurons are responsible for some behavior of an AI. The problem is that removing a single neuron, even an important one, may not affect behavior at all: often there are redundant paths of neurons that still carry the relevant information. You almost always need to take out a group to observe an effect, and Shapley values allocate credit fairly to individual neurons.
Why do we insist on forcing credit to be for single neurons when it’s for whole groups? I’m glad you asked. The chief reason is that there are A LOT of possible sub-groups, exponentially many in fact, so trimming it down to single neuron inclusion/exclusion keeps the thing manageable. Computing the forward pass of an AI with only the important neurons also needs a concrete list of neurons to use, not a list of sets of neurons.
And by opening the Circuits thread, this piece comes full circle: it was very inspired by Robert Hooke’s use of the microscope and discovery of the cell.
Concretely, if i is an individual and V(S) is the value of coalition S, then
where Z_|S| is a normalizing factor that depends only on the size S of the subset
Though you can imagine making a computer model of history, that simulates a greatly simplified version of people and how they interact.
If you have multiverse-sized budgets, you could literally simulate physics many times with different people included/excluded to figure out what their impact on history was. Anthropic reasoning and computational theories of consciousness suggest that, if you find yourself very close to a moment in history with many possible big outcomes, a hinge of history if you would, then it is likely that you are part of a big Shapley computation to determine who was material in affecting the future.
Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Divergence” (2000):
Finally, the biggest technical problem faced by Chinese coal miners, especially in the northwest, was fundamentally different from that faced by their counterparts in England. English mines tended to fillwith water, so a strong pump was needed to remove that water. Chinese coal mines had much less of a water problem; instead they were so arid that spontaneous combustion was a constant threat. It was this problem—one that required ventilation rather than powerful pumps—that preoccupied the compiler of the most important Chinese technical manual of the period; and although the problem was never fully solved, at least one contemporary historian of mining has pronounced the approaches described in that manual quite sophisticated for their time.
Pomeranz’s source for that is:
Sun Yingxing 1637: juan 11, cited in Yu Mingxia 1991: 23. Water appears to have been a lesser problem, even at the Xuzhou mines, which were in a much wetter area than the Northwest. See [Yu Mingxia 1991], 27.
> To apply Shapley values to history, the set of possible coalitions is any subset of actual individuals from history.
Why only subtract from actual people? Shouldn't we also add people from some theoretical distribution of people who might have existed but did not in our timeline? To the extent that some other person could have been born at the same time as Newton in the next town over and figured out the first great unification, that should reduce Newton's Shapley value.