We'll post updates on our overall work and main programs:
🔬History of Science
🧘♀️Exploratory Psychology
🚀Bottlenecks in Science and Technology
Want to learn more? Read our updates (bit.ly/LR-updates) or follow some of our team
Leverage Research
@LeverageRes
Research institute specializing in early stage science and exploratory social science research. We seek to understand how scientific progress happens.
Leverage Research’s Tweets
Leverage is also hiring a program manager for the History of Science.
Want to help us retell the history of science? Write to us at: jobs@leverageresearch.org!
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To learn more about our History of Science program, visit our website: leverageresearch.org/history-of-sci.
To read more about Ørsted, you can read our case study: leverageresearch.org/research-elect.
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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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The history of science teaches us about science, which can make it possible to do better science today.
Lesson #1: The process of science is not automatic.
A brief thread 🧵
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Read the entire original poll over here:
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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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10. Which was more difficult?
Usain Bolt's triple-triple Olympic golds or Michael Phelps' 28 Olympic golds
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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
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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
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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)
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3. Which was more difficult?
Elizabeth Holmes creating the Theranos fraud or Sam Bankman-Fried creating the FTX fraud
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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
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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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10. Which was more difficult?
Usain Bolt's triple-triple Olympic golds or Michael Phelps' 28 Olympic golds
- Usain Bolt's career42.9%
- Michael Phleps' career57.1%
14 votesFinal results
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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 career64.3%
- Jame Cameron's career35.7%
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 power68.8%
- Putin keeping power31.3%
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-494.7%
- MidJourney's image AI5.3%
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 win73.7%
- Biden 2020 win26.3%
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 Project13.6%
- Apollo moon landing86.4%
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 Khalifa5.9%
- Japan's bullet trains94.1%
17 votesFinal results
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3. Which was more difficult?
Elizabeth Holmes creating the Theranos fraud or Sam Bankman-Fried creating the FTX fraud
- Holmes' Theranos fraud70%
- Bankman-Fried's FTX fraud30%
20 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 GoT21.1%
- J. R. R. Tolkien's LoTR78.9%
19 votesFinal results
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1. Which was more difficult?
Steve Jobs creating Apple or Bill Gates creating Microsoft
- Steve Jobs' Apple84.2%
- Bill Gates' Microsoft15.8%
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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The full report on muscle reading is available at doi.org/10.53975/amud-
Our report on intention research is available at:
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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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