(2025-06-15) Non-NotebookLM Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes

Going to repeat yesterday's process with some other model. (2025-06-14) Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes

Ugh which one? I'm paying for chorus.sh but that just makes it easier to work with the free ("fast and plus") models. Probably will pick either o3 (not pro), or maybe Google Gemini 2.5 pro or Claude Sonnet 4 if I can...

Ooh, I can run a couple next to each other, chose o3 and claude sonnet 4.

I made a Project which allows for multiple chats that have some shared initial context and can also look at each other.

Question: "When has a loose group of thinkers collaborated to change the thinking of society? How did they work together? Have any of these groups created technological or political change?"

o3 gave me ~10 paragraphs,

• examples: Republic of Letters, Fabian Society, Vienna Circle, Homebrew Computer Club, cypherpunks
• last paragraph: Taken together, these stories show a recurring pattern. A lightly structured forum—letters, salons, pamphlets, cafés, garages, mailing lists—allows people with compatible curiosities to exchange unfinished thoughts quickly, to iterate on each other’s drafts in public, and to keep ownership porous so that ideas can escape into the surrounding culture. Material change follows when at least a few members translate the shared worldview into artifacts: a journal, a tract, a machine, a protocol, or a legislative proposal. Once those artifacts circulate beyond the founding circle, the wider public can adopt, adapt, or oppose them, and that is when a loose network’s thinking begins to reshape politics or technology.

Claude gave

• 5 examples: The Encyclopedistes; Invisible College, American Pragmatists, Mont Pelerin, Situationist International. (Each example got a header and 3 paragarphs: an intro, a "how they worked", and an "impact".)
• last section: These successful networks shared several characteristics relevant to your interests:
  They combined intellectual development with practical application, creating both new ways of thinking and tools for spreading those ideas. They used multiple communication channels - formal publications, informal gatherings, and correspondence networks. They worked in parallel rather than requiring everyone to join the same organization, allowing for both collaboration and creative disagreement.
  Most importantly, they succeeded in creating self-propagating ideas - concepts and tools that others could adopt, modify, and spread further without requiring permission or central coordination from the original network.

"Re-examine this with a focus on groups generating invention or innovation during the past 75 years."

o3 gave the recent-subset-examples from the previous answer, adding a number of others like synthetic biology, reprap, and crypto. Ended with: Two shared habits run through these histories. First, each network created a low-cost medium—whether a mimeographed newsletter, an RFC archive, a Git repository, or a shared plasmid registry—that preserved conversation in a form newcomers could search and build on without asking permission. Second, the participants cultivated strong norms about contribution quality while remaining relaxed about affiliation. One could be a high-school student, a tenured professor, or an employee of a rival firm; the only credentials that mattered were a working prototype, an incisive critique, or a patch that passed the test suite. Those norms allowed small clusters to cohere around a common language, then diverge when goals or personalities clashed, all without halting the larger enterprise.

For someone hoping to spark the next wave of tools for thought, these cases suggest several practical levers. Put the shared artefact—code, design files, experimental protocols—at the centre so discussion converges on concrete edits. Archive every step in a public place that is easily searched. Encourage informal face-to-face or synchronous meetings for trust-building, but make sure the real progress migrates quickly into the permanent, asynchronous medium. Finally, welcome divergence; when sub-groups fork respectfully, the ecosystem gains parallel experiments whose lessons flow back through the same open channels. Over decades those practices have proved more fertile than any grant programme or traditional institution at turning loose conversation into inventions that change the world.

Claude gave me: Key Patterns for Innovation Networks

Looking at these examples, several patterns emerge that are relevant to your interests:

Shared tools and standards enable distributed collaboration - whether it's GitHub for software, RFC processes for internet protocols, or common lab techniques for genomics.

Open information sharing accelerates innovation - the most successful networks made knowledge freely available rather than hoarding it.

Loose coupling with strong shared purpose allows for both collaboration and independent innovation - people work in parallel on related problems without requiring central coordination.

Bridge-builders like Stewart Brand, Linus Torvalds, or the ARPANET pioneers create connections between different communities and enable cross-pollination of ideas.

Practical tools that others can build upon prove more influential than pure ideas - successful networks create not just concepts but implementable technologies, methods, or frameworks.

These networks succeeded in "producing and spreading thinking and communication tools" precisely because they created both the conceptual frameworks and the practical infrastructure that allowed independent thinkers to find each other, share ideas, and build upon each other's work without requiring formal organizational membership.

"how do these relate to the following inventions?" Networked Non-Market Inventions

o3 gave 6 paragraphs, ending with: What varies from case to case is only the balance between amateur energy (Homebrew, open source, Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth circles) and formal institutional sponsorship (Bell Labs, DARPA, NIH, CERN, NASA). The underlying mechanism—dense information exchange inside trust-based communities that do not depend on market pricing or secrecy—remains the same, which is precisely Johnson’s point. The inventions on your list span two centuries and a dozen scientific domains, yet almost all were assembled, tested and refined in precisely the kinds of loose, non-proprietary, idea-trading networks that the “networked / non-market” quadrant describes.

Claude gave a longer answer again. Though glommed together multiple inventions (I may ask for stories 1 at a time)... Many medical discoveries emerged from informal networks of researchers sharing findings:

• Anesthesia (developed through networks of doctors experimenting with different chemicals)
• Aspirin (Bayer researchers building on folk medicine knowledge)
• Penicillin (Fleming's discovery spread through medical networks)
• DNA as Genetic Material (Watson, Crick, and extended network including Rosalind Franklin)
• Restriction Enzymes (discovered through molecular biology research networks)

And DNA Forensics only became possible when multiple networked discoveries converged:

• DNA structure (Watson/Crick network)
• DNA replication understanding
• Restriction enzymes
• Gel electrophoresis techniques
• Computing power for analysis

Finishing with: The Modern Implications: This connects directly to your interest in "producing/spreading thinking and communication tools." The most successful innovations often emerge when:

• Diverse specialists can easily connect (like Bell Labs' interdisciplinary approach)
• Information flows freely (like academic research networks)
• People can build on each other's work (like open-source development)
• There's no immediate pressure for profitability (like university research)
• The networks I described earlier (Homebrew Computer Club, open source movement, etc.) are modern examples of the same pattern that created the scientific breakthroughs on Johnson's list. They create spaces where the "adjacent possible" can emerge through loose collaboration between independent thinkers.
  Your goal of helping "independent thinkers develop good ideas, share/find each other, then work in parallel on similar interests" is essentially about creating the conditions that enabled discoveries like Quantum Mechanics, DNA structure, and Internet protocols - spaces where brilliant people can connect informally, share half-formed ideas, and build on each other's insights without being constrained by formal organizational boundaries or immediate market pressures.

"Write me a 1-page essay each on the collaborations leading to that list of inventions." see Networked Non-Market Inventions

• hmm, cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress

"What's the best book that profiles the personalities and collaboration of the people involved in one of these inventions from the past 75 years?"

• "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner
• "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon - Excellent on the Internet's development, with great character portraits of ARPANET pioneers like Bob Taylor, Vint Cerf, and Bob Kahn.
• "Dealers of Lightning" by Michael Hiltzik - Focuses on Xerox PARC and the development of the GUI, with vivid portraits of Alan Kay, Bob Taylor (who moved from ARPANET to PARC), and other computing pioneers.
• "The Double Helix" by James Watson - A controversial but fascinating first-person account of discovering DNA's structure, though Watson's perspective is admittedly biased and has been criticized for underplaying Rosalind Franklin's contributions.

(I'm bouncing across the first 3 until 1 feels most enjoyable+useful...)