The Overton Window in Fashion and Science
This is the 9th installment of 774: Weekly lessons from history about science, technology, and innovation.
Next Week:
Quick Maths
This Week:
The Overton Window in Fashion and Science
The Overton Window is the range of political ideas that are socially acceptable to propose at a given time. The Overton Window, named for Joseph Overton who theorized the idea, doesn’t account for the full range of potential political outcomes, just the smaller range that one can propose without appearing too extreme in one direction or another. A presidential candidate could certainly run on a platform of allowing the state to control all newspapers, but that proposition would seem completely unacceptable to a heavy majority of Americans, and thus falls outside of the Overton Window.
The Overton Window exists to describe government policy proposals, but the idea applies to most of human interaction. At any given time, there’s a near infinite number of things you could say, but there is a much smaller subset of things that are socially acceptable to say out loud. Additionally, your Overton Window for everyday life is in constant flux depending on where you are and who you are with. Your Overton Window for words that are acceptable to use during a job interview and going to a bar with your friends are most likely quite different. Sometimes these Overton Windows in every day life are obvious. Other times they’re more nuanced.
Ashley Mears is a sociologist from Boston College. When she was younger she was a fashion model and she now researches status and beauty. For her book, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, she spent 18 months at some of the most high end clubs in London, Cannes, Miami, and most notably New York City. In her work she dissects how clubs and club promoters profit off of young models’ “bodily capital” and the fact that rich men want to spend time around attractive women. One of the ways that clubs maintain a high status appeal, Mears says, is to ensure only the right kind of people get into the club. The “right people” basically breaks down into two groups: attractive women who raise the status of the club through their presence (the standards for attractive that Mears outlines are not intuitive) and rich men who spend exorbitant amounts of money to impress the women. The judgement of who to let in, or not, is all done at the door. Judging whether someone is attractive is easy for the bouncer. Determining someone’s wealth is slightly more difficult to do, shy of asking to see the balance of their checking account. Mears says that one of the tells of someone who tries to appear wealthy at the door, but might not actually be, is ostentation: fashion choices that overtly exude expensive tastes, but frequently indicate that a person is overcompensating. These “bridge and tunnel” people (a term notating those who aren’t affluent enough to live in Manhattan and instead come to the clubs from the other boroughs or New Jersey) are usually turned away. For the bouncers at these clubs, there’s an Overton Window of fashion that they use to determine the desirable from the undesirable, and that range is intentionally privileged information that only the “right people” will pick up on.
These kinds of Overton Windows are everywhere, and in many areas of life are helpful in maintaining order and civil interactions between people. While these ranges of acceptable behavior can be helpful in society, are there areas where they cause inefficiency? Science might be one of those places.
In 1972, the Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Györgyi wrote a letter to the journal Science in which he said that:
…scientists could be divided into two classes, Dionysians and Apollonians - in science, the Apollonian tends to develop established lines to their limit, while the Dionysion relies on intuition and is more likely to open new, unexpected lines of research.
Basically, Einstein was an Dionysian because he discovered photons, while a physics professor at MIT who deepens Einstein’s research of light particles is an Apollonian. Donald Braben, author of Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization notes that Dionysians and Apollonians are both vital to a healthy scientific community. Unfortunately, Braben says, the pioneers like Einstein are receiving far less funding than the Apollonians. Braben complains that, today, those who fund science are far too concerned with their own Overton Window. Funding proposals today are mostly given to specific projects. Proposals are written up which outline methodology, anticipated outcome, and the expected socioeconomic benefit of a potential scientific project. This does not sounds bad and, in a vacuum, it isn’t. The problem is that many of the incredible discoveries that surge science forward don’t come from projects like these. They come from more serendipitous discoveries, at times scientific accidents, by individuals and teams who are unconstrained by proposals. For example, many people know about the unlikely discovery of penicillin:
Penicillin was discovered in London in September of 1928. As the story goes, Dr. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist on duty at St. Mary’s Hospital, returned from a summer vacation in Scotland to find a messy lab bench and a good deal more.
Upon examining some colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, Dr. Fleming noted that a mold called Penicillium notatum had contaminated his Petri dishes. After carefully placing the dishes under his microscope, he was amazed to find that the mold prevented the normal growth of the staphylococci.
It took Fleming a few more weeks to grow enough of the persnickety mold so that he was able to confirm his findings. His conclusions turned out to be phenomenal: there was some factor in the Penicillium mold that not only inhibited the growth of the bacteria but, more important, might be harnessed to combat infectious diseases.
As Dr. Fleming famously wrote about that red-letter date: “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did.”
Widespread use of Penicillin came about because of an accident. Sometimes discoveries like Fleming’s are embraced. Other times these incredible discoveries receive considerable pushback. For example Joseph Lister, who pioneered the use of antiseptic usage for surgeries was derided by many to the point of being criticized directly in scientific journals. The idea of making fun of someone for suggesting we disinfect a scalpel between surgeries is comical now, but people died because of the delay between Lister’s discovery and its adoption into wide use. The issue with funding science based strictly on projects is not that those projects are fruitless, but that the kinds of discoveries that might save millions of lives frequently do not come from strictly proposed and regulated experiments.
What is the alternative to funding projects? There is an increasing number of philanthropists who fund people instead of projects. The difference is that project based funding is tied to an idea, and the researchers have a responsibility to use their funding for what they told the funding organization they would, whereas funding people is tied to promising individuals who are given the financial freedom to research areas that the wider scientific community doesn’t view as worthy of funding at the time.
During the 1980s, BP experienced immense success with this approach. They funded proposals that promoted the kind of scientific environment that left researchers unconstrained to a specific pursuit and allowed them to research more free flowing areas. Part of the proposal process for BP’s Venture Research program required applicants to specifically outline why they wouldn’t be funded by more conventional institutions. The total cost of the program cost BP £20 million ($40 million today). The funded ventures have yielded a total value of $1.25 billion. Another example is the Thiel Fellowship. Created by the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the Thiel fellowship locates promising individuals who are about to enter college. The Thiel Foundation offers them $100,000 to forgo attending college and instead independently study their interests. After 10 years of the program and a total of 226 participants in the fellowship, the net worth of all the participants is $70 billion.
Funding individuals instead of individual projects allows science and technology to side step the Overton Window of acceptable projects and enables much greater growth in surprising new areas.
References