Novelty, the Most Valuable of Talents
Novelty, the most valuable of talents
I read Brandon Sanderson’s epic The Way of Kings in November, and months and multiple Sanderson books later, I find my thoughts returning to the epilogue over and over. Wit, the book’s most mysterious and philosophical character, asks a group of soldiers, “What do men consider the most valuable of talents?” When no one gives a satisfactory answer, he begins a monologue:If an artist creates a work of powerful beauty—using new and innovative techniques—she will be lauded as a master, and will launch a new movement in aesthetics. Yet what if another, working independently with that exact level of skill, were to make the same accomplishments the very next month? Would she find similar acclaim? No. She’d be called derivative.If a great thinker develops a new theory of mathematics, science, or philosophy, we will name him wise. We will sit at his feet and learn, and will record his name in history for thousands upon thousands to revere. But what if another man determines the same theory on his own, then delays in publishing his results by a mere week? Will he be remembered for his greatness? No. He will be forgotten.And so, in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect.  It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself.  The greatest talent that we think a man can have?  Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.We don’t laud brilliance — we laud brilliant novelty. Sometimes we laud novelty for its own sake, like in the arts and humanities where it’s less clear what progress looks like. And we forget those who were unfortunate enough to be too late, even if they accomplished the exact same thing completely independently. Everyone knows Charles Darwin and Alexander Graham Bell; Alfred Russel Wallace and Elisha Gray are names you’re likely to hear only in a particularly hard trivia question.But what’s most interesting to me is that while all of the above is true, there’s a specific class of situations where people don’t value novelty at all. People don’t care about novelty when there are material consequences that depend on being right about what we value.One of the most jarring things in moving from being a college student to working full-time is that words like “clever” and “novel” flipped in value overnight. As a student, “clever” is a compliment; as a practitioner, “clever” is a criticism leveled out of fear of unknown risks associated with a new approach. This frustrated me endlessly at first, as it felt like creativity was being stifled, but it’s hard to argue with its effectiveness. When ideas have a downside risk, novelty comes implicit with an unknown, and potentially large, amount of danger. A solution that’s been tried innumerable times may have limited upside, but it also has limited downside. You won’t make 10x returns in a year by investing in index funds, but you also won’t go bankrupt. An untested migraine drug might cure everyone with chronic migraines, but it also could give them all cancer. The idea of “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is true in all domains with meaningful stakes.The phrasing of Wit’s question makes all the difference here. Specifically, he says, “What do men consider the most valuable of talents?” — not “What is the most valuable of talents?”. The domains where novelty is valued the most — the arts, many social sciences, media — are the ones where value is primarily determined by people’s opinions. But if an idea’s correctness can be evaluated by the costs or benefits that result from it, then novelty has very little value at all. If you had a blue button that printed $100 bills when pressed, and a red button that gave you an electric shock when pressed, you wouldn’t try to come up with some novel new order to press them in — you’d just press the blue button until your finger bled. Novelty stands in the gap between what we value and what actually matters, and the larger that gap grows, the more important novelty becomes.This makes me wonder whether the alleged intent to seek truth is really just a sham in domains where incorrect ideas carry no costs. For example, I studied economics as an undergraduate for 4 years, and in that time it became clear to me that because most macroeconomic thinking is untestable and shielded from consequences, the ideas of macroeconomists are primarily driven by the pursuit of novelty, which comes with rewards like tenure and scholarly acclaim, rather than the pursuit of truth. Even in areas where there should be clear payoffs to the correctness of ideas, if the link is too tenuous, novelty reigns — think of the constant stream of fad diets, which have real world consequences, but not ones that are immediate enough that we stop valuing novelty. And while the dominance of novelty is limited in the hard sciences due to the fact that they need to be experimentally provable, historians of science have no such constraints. Consequently, novelty reigns in our popular value judgements about the contributions of scientists, and we end up celebrating Newton alone as the father of calculus when Leibniz accomplished the same incredible feat.Consequently, while being a practitioner who has to live with the costs of mistakes may feel soulless, it’s also perversely honest. With skin in the game, motivations are distilled into a very simple question: what will work? And while novelty will and should remain primary in fields like the arts where it truly is crucial, I hope never to hear words like those Wit ends his monologue with:What is it we value? Innovation. Originality. Novelty. But most importantly… timeliness. I fear you may be too late, my confused, unfortunate friend."