.Ada Palmer explains the big important difference between the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution: "Brunelleschi, who built Florence’s famous beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor and an engineer. But this... is not a servant of human progress. This is actually a saboteur of human progress - who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point so that no one else can be his peer."show more

Worth noting that scientists haven't all become perfect altruists. Rather, the community has settled on some non-obvious mechanisms that allowed scientists to get the recognition they crave while also contributing to the commons: * strict (if informal) citation rules * secrecy allowed by a team during research process, but no credit unless the results are divulged * careful time stamping of manuscript submission * much reduced credit if you discovered something before someone else but published after, even if you can prove you discovered first

@Ada_Palmer the 16th century algebraists who developed the solutions to the cubic & quartic equations - Fiore, Cardano, del Ferro, Tartaglia - were very competitive and treated their discoveries like trade secrets. likewise Kepler had to basically steal Tycho Brahe's Mars data.

@Ada_Palmer Beta Scientist: Pls cite my paper 🥹 Leonardo: This knowledge is MINE

@Ada_Palmer remember when everyone got mad at yann lecun for saying pretty much exactly this

@Ada_Palmer Nobody was a scientist at that time, neither were they artists, those terms did not exist. But too look at his work and say it is not scientific, is simply being a smart-mouth.

@Ada_Palmer Devil’s advocate: not giving away the secrets inspires folks to critically think for themselves, to come up with their own solutions

@Ada_Palmer Based Leonardo. I know exactly why he did what he did. Its you, the common, the average, the people needing the opinions of others, who antagonize the originators all the days of their lives. Burn it all. Leave them nothing.

@Ada_Palmer L take. Sharing is part of science. Not defining characteristics of it. The whole requirement of science that separates it from philosophy is testing hypothesis by falsifiable experiment.

@Ada_Palmer Yeah, these brilliant minds were at that time craftsmen, businessmen who had a very pronounced interest in keeping a monopoly. Capitalists, if you will. The scientific method would not come to pass for hundreds of years yet

@Ada_Palmer And now, we’re in the transition phase of the next big leap: open source code. It was a relatively contained one until now. Agentic coding will change that with jaw dropping speed

@Ada_Palmer This is serious mischaracterization. Sharing inventions in the open was itself an invention of how academia can be organized to make capable people more productive, useful for the society and not die out of hunger in the process. TL;DR: Leonardo had no tenure.

@Ada_Palmer I agree that Leonardo wasn’t a “scientist” in the modern sense. But the Renaissance ran on patronage, not a global scientific community. Saying he wasn’t one because he didn’t publish is like saying a DARPA physicist isn’t a scientist because their work is classified.

@Ada_Palmer Could have said selfish scientist Instead she redefines the word scientist. As if to sound smart She is a good orator nonetheless

@Ada_Palmer yeah but screw Ghiberti

@Ada_Palmer Pretty sure science is more than morality judgements, science has predecessors and science as an art and method has a rich and varied lineage. Puritan take for sure

@Ada_Palmer Feels relevant with the ASI race, but I think the labs would argue that they can't take the Scientific Revolution route since there's so much tail risk.

@Ada_Palmer You need to have David Wootton on next, he wrote The Invention of Science which is a fantastic book if you haven't read it yet

@Ada_Palmer Venetian Patent Statute (1474) 🧩 Senate of Venice enacted it in 1474. It is often considered foundation of the world’s earliest patent system. The underlying idea -of granting exclusive rights to inventors- has roots that stretch much further back than the formal legal concept.

@Ada_Palmer Under appreciated how important this point is. There was a famous exhibit, Printing and the Mind of Man at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1963. Publications that changed (western) civilization, once published. We built collections based on the catalogue, when I sold rare books.

@Ada_Palmer She is perfectly describing big tech.

@Ada_Palmer The British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the greatest engineers who has ever lived, opposed the patent system calling it evil and believed it hindered innovation rather than encouraged it and, favoured open engineering development over restrictive IP monopolies.

@Ada_Palmer Her storytelling is so simple yet hand holding.

@Ada_Palmer Still, Leonardo's quote "La sapienza è figliola della sperienza" (Wisdom/knowledge/science is the daughter of experience) is somewhat considered foundational for the modern (Galilean) concept of science, derived from experience and not from abstract philosophy.

@Ada_Palmer Maybe it is the self-discovery along the way that is important for the evolution of man, and not the end result of the discovery itself Maybe by giving the answers away we hobble the true progress of people understanding their place in all of this "Seek and ye shall receive"

@Ada_Palmer Da Vinci was more of a recondite skilled in the abstruse than a scientist.

@Ada_Palmer or Leonardo was afraid of being burned at the stake?

@Ada_Palmer Total bullshit. Tech secrecy just turns up the heat on competition — it doesn't slow down progress. Can't keep up? That's your own damn problem.

@Ada_Palmer This is an antiquated idea of science imo

@Ada_Palmer I always figured it was paranoia because he was breaking the law, dissecting bodies and being a heathen in a time would have gotten him slaughtered, literally. But sure maybe he was just an asshole.

@Ada_Palmer Before the peer review institution stalled science.

@Ada_Palmer Eye-opening perspective this! What a wonderful educative conversation this is! Thank you

@Ada_Palmer closed source, basically.

@Ada_Palmer MIT's Journal Leonardo: Leonardo da Vinci's understanding of gravity—though not wholly accurate—was centuries ahead of his time

@Ada_Palmer Envy is the machine of these people. Scientist is the one who makes science. Not the one who does science and share. This is just your personal jealous take of the semantic meaning of the word.