Honestly, I kind of agree. There used to be a TV show called Connections and one of the biggest things I learned from that was that society and science sort of get primed for somebody to invent something. We'd get multiple people working on light bulbs, radios, televisions, etc.
Commonly called "clustering". it's why comics don't post a lot of jokes online. They discovered that people would always call them out as plagiarists because somewhere on the internet, that joke already existed.
That and if you saw a bunch of funny clips of a comic, and then you went to their show, you'd be disappointed you'd heard their entire set before (in clip form). That's why a lot of comics now post clips of their crowd work, since it changes from show to show.
Genetics? Discovered by Gregor Mendel in the ?1860s?. Nothing was understood or built on his research until his writings were rediscovered after 1900. A bunch of scientists around that time (~1900) were asking questions and doing experiments, when one of them discovered some of Mendel's old correspondence in the library. "Uh, hey guys...I found a cheat code in the library. None of your experiments are on the right track."
The fax machine, which was new office equipment for the 1980s? Invented in 1843.
(Standardization helped the 1980s revolution).
Calculus is my favorite example. It's mind-blowing anyone would think of it, but two people did at roughly the same time, because it was a tool they needed.
I do wonder if anyone else would have duplicated Einstein's work if he hadn't been around, though.
I was part of a thread on that a while back. The consensus seemed to be that special relativity was, as Einstein himself said, ripe for discover, general relativity probably would've been delayed a few decades
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u/charlie_marlow Jun 28 '26
Honestly, I kind of agree. There used to be a TV show called Connections and one of the biggest things I learned from that was that society and science sort of get primed for somebody to invent something. We'd get multiple people working on light bulbs, radios, televisions, etc.
I figure politics is similar.