Albert-László Barabási - Network science, breakthrough orientation, and a life made around discovery
Reflecting on a wide-ranging conversation with Albert-László Barabási
Albert-László Barabási thinks in networks and his scholarship, as his life, is embodiment of the explorative, imaginative, and generative nature of networks. It would be difficult to imagine a person better suited to steward us through the innate and seemingly universal tendency of things to connect to each other and all of its implications.
Albert-László, or László as he goes by, is endlessly curious. There is a joy in his curiosity. For him science, at least by all external appearances, seems to be about a singular relationship with discovery and the way a life forms around that. And it is this that pours through a conversation with László.
He was the first guest on Season Seven of Origins Podcast.
Interesting would be too small a word for this conversation and it deserves all of the attention you can give it, yet there are a few things ringing in my head as I reflect on it. Below is an inadequate attempt to make sense of them.
László has reinvented his life on several occasions. Each time, after a period of 4-5 years of exploration, characteristic outcomes: a series of Science and Nature publications, a new domain of inquiry, and a book articulating it all. First it was physics and materials science, then it was network science, most recently it seems to be medicine. And if we listed the articles and books included in his routine morning reading and voracious note-taking, there would likely be two or three new subjects fomenting there.
Certain rhythms to his life are apparent in this conversation. His research group goes into a new subject every 5-6 years. When he starts in a new field he gives himself a period of 4-5 years of exploration. He takes six months off to translate an idea from his lab or community to make them accessible to the world. You could witness these patterns using the tools of the Science of Science, a field he has helped create. Most of these are on longer time scales than we traditionally allow in the sciences or in a scientific life. We expect immediate results. His life is living complication of an idea we seem to mindlessly accept that acceleration above all is what creates breakthroughs.
It is this notion of breakthrough that is irresistible in and perhaps organizing of his science and his life. By his own reflection he plays a 'breakthrough game,' something distinguished from the normal 'productivity game' of research. Productivity in science has become about accumulating papers and the other easily measurable artifacts of research that, as researchers and institutions have learned to game them, have ceased to become good indicators of the generation of new knowledge (that which science is supposed to be about). Most domains have their own name for this phenomenon: Goodhart’s law (political economics), Lukas critique (economics), Campbell’s law (sociology). The list could go on. The problem with metrics is that they are a flattening of a high dimensional qualities—if you have a quality indicator you have an incentive to capture the indicator rather than the quality. This is at the center of James C Scott's incisive analysis of schemes to improve the human condition, and C Thi Nguyen's unparalleled dissection of gameification. All of this left me wondering, 'What is breakthrough science and do our systems of science actually incentivize it?'
As he begins to consider new areas of inquiry, László offers his own practice of evaluation, his way of being mindful of what might lay ahead, "If you succeed, will anyone ten years from now care?" It is a value he calls 'shelf time.’
Teju Cole is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all” and I find myself thinking about the singing lines between László's words and my own life and the things that animate me. It is unfinishedness I feel, but a restless kind. Rilke wrote,
"I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it."
For all of his thinking about choosing new fields and breakthrough orientation, rhythms of a life and shelf time, it was the sum total of what he said that left me again on fire with the idea of Flourishing Studies. I wonder how breakthrough science relates to a flourishing of scientific discovery; how a breakthrough orientation might be a part of the flourishing of scientists and of science communities; how flourishing science contributes to a knowledge commons whose open and equal access, egalitarian ideals, and collective stewardship helps it become a foundation of a flourishing planet.
If we are working to create a new field of Flourishing Studies, where we can begin to think about and even to quantitatively explore flourishing in life, László's life might be replete with wisdom for it. He continually discovers areas that have not been explored with the quantitative tools of science (statistical physics, data science, etc.) and over years turns it into a quantitative science. It is this move that Flourishing Studies is attempting to make. Listening to the conversation with this frame of mind, questions for Flourishing Studies abound:
What are the questions we are going to ask first? What are the dimensions of flourishing? If most of our discourse is around merely surviving, then what do we need to discard and invent anew in order to have a more robust conception of what it means to live a full life?
What are the metrics going to be?
What data are available to answer the questions?
Martha Nussbaum writes in developing her Capabilities Approach as a theory of development, "What theoretical approach could direct attention to the most significant features of [someone in need's] situation, promote an adequate analysis of it, and make pertinent recommendations for action?" And I believe that her theory adds muscle and capacity and spaciousness to the notion of turning something into a quantitative science.
I ask a question in the end of the conversation, a question that has been a quiet attractor, that which I've been driving all of my discourse toward, an immense question not meant for a certain or final answer but a question to live, "How do we live well? What does it mean to flourish?"
This conversation left me thinking about this question and I invite you into its light.
How would you begin to think about what it means to flourish today?
Perhaps others will resonate with the anxiety that accompanies attempting to build a new thing—from the inherent and irradicable uncertainty of it to the creeping competitiveness and concern over being the one to have the idea. I'm continually calling myself back from that tendency. It is one of the reasons flourishing is such a powerful notion—it requires all of us. It uproots ideas of independence and credit and recognition and repositions them in interdependence and reverence and reciprocity.
László said, "Enjoy building it and have the courage to let it go." I needed to hear those words.
Here are some of the links from the conversation that are full of potential for your exploration:
Jane Hirshfield "Let Them Not Say"
David Lazer's 'network based decision making'