In the mid 1600s, Thomas Hobbes looked out the window and he saw conflict.  The Protestants were fighting the Catholics and the scale of human suffering was immense.  He lived during England’s civil war and, in order to make sense of it, built a political theory to define how people should live in relation to their government. In doing so, he developed a new concept that set the conditions for modernity and the contemporary nation state.

This concept was “rights” and his answer to the violence that he saw was the definition of a fundamental human right to self preservation. This was later picked up by John Locke who defined 3 rights: life, liberty and property.   It became a hit and is ingrained in many nation’s constitutions (talk about a viral meme).  One of the most influential ideas of our time, that feels like a natural law, was made up buy a guy disgusted by the violence he saw out his window.

Hobbes started us down a path and with that, rights became dependent and as they endured they became more immutable, more immortal and are now bedrock.  As you go down the path, it turns into a road and the further you go down a road it gets harder to turn back.

Part 1 – Rockets

Why do we send rockets into space?  One might assume that it is the optimal way to get things into orbit but it turns out the history is more contingent than that:

1. World’s most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman

2. Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time

3. A second great power dominated by secretive, superweapon-obsessed dictator

4. Nuclear/strategic calculus militating in favor of ICBMs as delivery system

5. Geographic situation of adversaries necessitating that ICBMs must have near-orbital capability

6. Manned space exploration as propaganda competition, unmoored from realistic cost/benefit discipline

Author’s Note: This article is fascinating and is worth reading in full. 

What it did do, is create a path dependency.  Once systems and resources were organized around a specific concept everything started to follow that outcome.  Put another way, once a “good enough” solution was arrived at, that was all it took. Any other alternative was a non-starter.  As the article explains:

To employ a commonly used metaphor, our current proficiency in rocket-building is the result of a hill-climbing approach; we started at one place on the technological landscape—which must be considered a random pick, given that it was chosen for dubious reasons by a maniac—and climbed the hill from there, looking for small steps that could be taken to increase the size and efficiency of the device. Sixty years and a couple of trillion dollars later, we have reached a place that is infinitesimally close to the top of that hill. Rockets are as close to perfect as they’re ever going to get. For a few more billion dollars we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it’s a physical impossibility.

Part 2 – Keyboards

It is easy to forget that typing was a skilled profession and transcription was a new innovation.  I am old enough to have typed on a typewriter and remember what it was like when the keys got jammed up.  The keys jamming was a real problem and it was helped out by the work of Christopher Sholes:

So, it is said, Sholes redesigned the arrangement to separate the most common sequences of letters like “th” or “he”. In theory then, the QWERTY system should maximize the separation of common letter pairings.

This would enable to typewriter to jam less frequently.  There is some controversy as to the accuracy of this story, but that is not my point.  My point is that I am writing on a QWERTY keyboard and you are reading on a device with a QWERTY keyboard too.  There are other alternatives, but at this point, the current keyboard works “good enough”.  Sure you can do better, but why bother?  We are path dependent based on a piece of archaic technology having a problem (keys jamming) that doesn’t exist with modern technology.

This is especially important to consider when you start trying to use “first principles” thinking to innovate.  First, make sure that you are actually innovating (not trying to re-invent the wheel).  Next, think towards how you are constrained and how far back you need to go.  Small decisions will make a big impact, so think about the shadow you cast.  Make sure to think responsibly.