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Leverage Research
@LeverageRes
Research institute specializing in early stage science and exploratory social science research. We seek to understand how scientific progress happens.
Oakland, CAleverageresearch.orgJoined December 2019

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This isn’t the only case where the speed of scientific progress seems subject to what people do. It’s just the clearest we’ve seen so far. How contingent is the process of science? How might the scientific enterprise go faster? The history of science contains many lessons.
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Ørsted himself discovered the effect while giving a university lecture in 1820, 18 years after electromagnetism had become discoverable. Could science have gone faster? What if more scientists had been reading German philosophy? It’s easy to imagine the discovery coming sooner.
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Ørsted, a Danish researcher working at the University of Copenhagen, *was* looking, however. He had been reading two German philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling, both of whom thought gave reason to expect a connection between electricity and magnetism.
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The answer is that people weren’t looking. British researchers had already investigated electric-magnetic effects, though they did this before wires could carry enough current. French researchers were focusing on mathematical formalisms, not experimentation.
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There were batteries that could produce enough current by 1802, and several people were experimenting with them. Yet it was only in 1820 that Ørsted actually discovered electromagnetism. That’s an 18 year gap — what took scientists so long?
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To discover electromagnetism, you need a wire with enough electrical current, a magnetized needle (for instance on a string), and you have to bring the needle over to the wire while the electrical current is running through it. If you do that, you’ll see the needle deflect.
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From our research into the history of science, we’ve found evidence that the scientific enterprise *can* go faster or slower, and that this depends on strange facts about the world. One great example is the discovery of electromagnetism by Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820.
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It’s possible to imagine a world where the history of science *isn’t* the result of an automatic process, clicking away, one step at a time. In that world, the speed of the scientific enterprise depends on the actions of individuals. If people do X, we go faster. If Y, slower.
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It’s easy to think of science as an automatic process — in fact, it’s easy to think of *history* as an automatic process, where progress occurs inevitably, regardless of what people choose to do. But what if that weren’t true?
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We've laid out most of the results side by side below, except the questions with large discrepancies (Qs 1,4,6,7). We'll be rerunning those, asking for people's reasons and posting results soon. +1 for @spencergreenberg's tip about asking for reasoning, as survey best practice
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We’re trying to understand what people think the *most difficult* thing that people have done recently is. We polled Twitter but worried n (<20) was too small. So we brought in Mechanical Turk with a representative sample of the US pop. (n = 101) and asked the same questions...🧵
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9. Which was more difficult? Spielberg: 80% average RT critic score, >$10b gross or Cameron: 3 of top 5 highest grossing films, >$8.5bn total gross
  • Steven Spielberg's career
    64.3%
  • Jame Cameron's career
    35.7%
14 votesFinal results
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8. Which was more difficult? Xi Jingping gains and keeps power in China or Vladimir Putin gains and keeps power in Russia
  • Xi Jingping keeping power
    68.8%
  • Putin keeping power
    31.3%
16 votesFinal results
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7. Which was more difficult? OpenAI creates GPT-4 (top AI text generator) or Midjourney creates Midjourney (top AI image generator)
  • OpenAI's GPT-4
    94.7%
  • MidJourney's image AI
    5.3%
19 votesFinal results
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6. Which was more difficult? Trump winning US election against Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Biden winning US election against Trump in 2020
  • Trump 2016 win
    73.7%
  • Biden 2020 win
    26.3%
19 votesFinal results
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5. Which was more difficult? US government successfully completing the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb) or US government successfully completing the Apollo Project (Moon landing)
  • Manhattan Project
    13.6%
  • Apollo moon landing
    86.4%
22 votesFinal results
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4. Which was more difficult? UAE building the Burj Khalifa (tallest building in the world) or Japan building the Shinkansen (first high-speed rail system aka bullet trains)
  • UAE's Burj Khalifa
    5.9%
  • Japan's bullet trains
    94.1%
17 votesFinal results
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2. Which was more difficult? George R. R. Martin writing the Game of Thrones series or J. R. R. Tolkien writing the Lord of the Rings trilogy
  • George R. R. Martin's GoT
    21.1%
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's LoTR
    78.9%
19 votesFinal results
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What is the *most difficult* thing humans have done recently? This is round #1 of a series of brackets to find out. If you think we've missed a difficult achievement, comment and it'll be added into a future bracket (if we think it's worthy). Poll threaded below...
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While much has been written about mesmerism and early hypnosis research, comparatively little has been written about muscle reading. We hope our contribution adds to the growing body of knowledge about the psychological importance and power of nonverbal communication.
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To help contextualize this research, we investigated several historical antecedents, including muscle reading, mesmerism, and early hypnosis research. To our surprise, we found many similarities between these research areas and reports from our former researchers.
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Those involved in intention research reported several extremely surprising effects, including the ability to nonverbally follow others' attention patterns, transmit and receive psychological content, and more at a level of precision that we found extremely surprising.
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Our interest in muscle reading stemmed from our experience with "intention research," an area of research that several of Leverage's psychology researchers undertook between 2017 and mid-2019 into the importance and power of subtle nonverbal communication.
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