Productizing the Past's Polymaths With Our Own
My colleague Gavan Tredoux's one hour podcast interview on Francis Galton
I like to read about figures from the past who didn’t have the fortune of living in our times. I like to imagine how they might make use of the latest in technology. And then, after much thinking, I try to go and build the products that they never got a chance to build. Hey, it’s a living.
To me, the past isn’t dead but a place for raiding good ideas and productizing polymaths. Call me a Straussian if you will — not that there’s anything wrong with that! — but I’ve more or less taken the view that history, particularly history of science, provides all manner of interesting material. You really should go back and read the original texts of everything you can.
Whenever I meet someone who also shares these views about the past I try to work with them, especially if they show polymathic tendencies.
And so it is with my colleague Gavan Tredoux who works with me at Traitwell and who is an amateur historian of Francis Galton. You can listen to a rather great podcast with him. Gavan’s book on Galton is very good.
It’s become fashionable to go back in time and condemn those who didn’t comport to our moral sensibilities.
This is too easy, too cheap, and too self-serving.
A more interesting question is to understand figures from the past as they understood themselves and what they might tell us about today.