No amount of planning beats dumb luck. That saying, which I will always associate with the gubernatorial campaign of South Carolina’s James Edwards1, occurred to me while reading Damon Linker’s latest Substack post. His praise of Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public reminded me of a corollary: When it comes to books, no amount of intellectual quality is enough without dumb luck. It’s an absolute miracle Martin Gurri’s book, which is excellent, has become well known.
I know because I gave The Revolt of the Masses a crucial boost—and I only discovered it because my own book, The Power of Glamour, was languishing in obscurity (where it remains). Frustrated with the lack of attention, I spent an evening Googling “visual persuasion” in hopes of finding smart people who might find my analysis interesting enough to mention to others. My search led me to a 2010 article for the Army War College, co-authored by Gurri, titled “Our Visual Persuasion Gap.” I sent him a note: “I read your article on the visual persuasion gap and would like to send you a copy of my book. Could you send me your mailing address? Are you related to Adam?” He responded that he preferred to think that Adam was related to him—his son—and that we should trade books.
To review: 1) I wrote a book related to visual persuasion. 2) Martin Gurri has a long-standing interest in visual persuasion. 3) Gurri wrote a book relevant to visual persuasion. 4) I knew Gurri’s son. And neither of us knew the other existed.
I was impressed by his book. So when Cato Unbound invited me to write an essay on “visual persuasion and politics” and to suggest people to write responses, I recommended him. That was in July 2014. The symposium came and went. Still The Revolt of the Public didn’t break into public consciousness, even among the kind of people who read Cato Institute publications.
Then, in December 2015, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column on The Revolt of the Public. I’m sure many people read the column, but only one of them mattered to the book’s public profile:
Arnold Kling, who wrote about it on his blog in January 2016. The timing was perfect and Arnold proved an effective, well-connected evangelist. In 2018 Stripe Press issued an updated version in print, audio, and electronic formats. Since then, the book has become a touchstone for understanding the rise of populist movements. Agree or disagree, people trying to figure out our political moment have to consider Gurri’s analysis—which they know about because of dumb luck.
The importance of luck to the spread of valuable insights—and creative work in general—is widely underestimated (except in Hollywood, where it makes everyone crazy). In Works in Progress, Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the “sleeping beauties” of science: important papers that get published but remain barely cited for long periods of time.
“The term sleeping beauties was coined by Anthony van Raan, a researcher in quantitative studies of science, in 2004. In his study, he identified sleeping beauties between 1980 and 2000 based on three criteria: first, the length of their ‘sleep’ during which they received few if any citations. Second, the depth of that sleep – the average number of citations during the sleeping period. And third, the intensity of their awakening – the number of citations that came in the four years after the sleeping period ended. Equipped with (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) thresholds for these criteria, van Raan identified sleeping beauties at a rate of about 0.01 percent of all published papers in a given year.
Later studies hinted that sleeping beauties are even more common than that. A systematic study in 2015, using data from 384,649 papers published in American Physical Society journals, along with 22,379,244 papers from the search engine Web of Science, found a wide, continuous range of delayed recognition of papers in all scientific fields. This increases the estimate of the percentage of sleeping beauties at least 100-fold compared to van Raan’s.
Many of those papers became highly influential many decades after their publication – far longer than the typical time windows for measuring citation impact. For example, Herbert Freundlich’s paper ‘Concerning Adsorption in Solutions’ (though its original title is in German) was published in 1907, but began being regularly cited in the early 2000s due to its relevance to new water purification technologies. William Hummers and Richard Offeman’s ‘Preparation of Graphitic Oxide’, published in 1958, also didn’t ‘awaken’ until the 2000s: in this case because it was very relevant to the creation of the soon-to-be Nobel Prize–winning material graphene.”
She doesn’t mention one of the most important examples of a sleeping beauty: Gregor Mendel’s 1866 paper “Experiments in Plant Hybrids,” which was rediscovered in the early 20th century. From the Britannica article on Mendel:
“Other than the journal that published his paper, 15 sources are known from the 19th century in which Mendel is mentioned in the context of plant hybridization. Few of these provide a clear picture of his achievement, and most are very brief….
In 1900 Dutch botanist and geneticist Hugo de Vries, German botanist and geneticist Carl Erich Correns, and Austrian botanist Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg independently reported results of hybridization experiments similar to Mendel’s, though each later claimed not to have known of Mendel’s work while doing their own experiments. However, both de Vries and Correns had read Mendel earlier—Correns even made detailed notes on the subject—but had forgotten. De Vries had a diversity of results in 1899, but it was not until he reread Mendel in 1900 that he was able to select and organize his data into a rational system. Tschermak had not read Mendel before obtaining his results, and his first account of his data offers an interpretation in terms of hereditary potency. He described the 3:1 ratio as an “unequal valancy” (Wertigkeit). In subsequent papers he incorporated the Mendelian theory of segregation and the purity of the germ cells into his text.
In Great Britain, biologist William Bateson became the leading proponent of Mendel’s theory. Around him gathered an enthusiastic band of followers. However, Darwinian evolution was assumed to be based chiefly on the selection of small, blending variations, whereas Mendel worked with clearly nonblending variations. Bateson soon found that championing Mendel aroused opposition from Darwinians. He and his supporters were called Mendelians, and their work was considered irrelevant to evolution. It took some three decades before the Mendelian theory was sufficiently developed to find its rightful place in evolutionary theory.“
These analyses apply to scientific work that at least gets published, however obscure it may be. Who knows how many potentially valuable arguments or empirical results never make it into print?
On her Substack,
Naomi Kanakia, who reads and writes about the Great Books, argues that most literary geniuses go unpublished.
“When I say literary talent is not rare, I mean that it is not the limiting reagent when it comes to our supply of good books to read. There are many more good books, and even works of genius, being written than are currently published. This is mathematically true, obviously, since only a subset of written manuscripts are published. But I would argue that the number of great manuscripts is at least a hundred times greater than what we see, and that if publishers merely accepted every great manuscript they saw—accepted every Proust—then the shelves would bulge with greatness.
This is provocative, and what militates against it is that most of us have had the experience of reading unpublished manuscripts that aren’t that good. Or that are good, but not quite ready for prime-time. Or reading a manuscript that was good and didn’t get published, but the author published the next one.
I am apparently unique in having read not just one, but at least three, manuscripts that I thought were amongst the best of contemporary fiction, and seeing them all rejected, and knowing that none of these authors has yet had another novel published. I am not saying these writers would have been Proust, but they would surely have been in the running to be a Franzen.“
Ninety percent of everything may be crap, as Theodore Sturgeon claimed. But that doesn’t mean that the only good stuff is in the 10 percent that sees daylight.
I do suspect that good nonfiction has an easier time finding publishers, if only tiny or partisan ones, but the problem of discovery is just as difficult. Knowing the story of Martin Gurri’s now-seminal analysis makes me believe that, especially in our current sea of content, many excellent works surely go unnoticed. One of the most important things anyone engaged in intellectual enterprises can do is to find and publicize overlooked work of value.2
Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published on Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.
Banner image courtesy of author: Ideogram.ai result from prompt “Cross-stitch sampler reading ‘No Amount of Planning Beats Dumb Luck.’” Ideogram is supposed to do a better job incorporating non-gibberish words than other AI image generators. It does but it’s still not quite there. This was the most accurate result I got out of six.
- Edwards, an oral surgeon by profession, was a Republican party activist who ran in the 1974 primary against the much better known General William Westmoreland. Then, as now, South Carolina did not have party registration. Any voter could vote in either primary, but if you voted in one party’s primary you couldn’t vote in the other party’s runoff election. The Democratic primary was where the action was that year, with multiple candidates. Only the most stalwart Republicans voted in that primary and they preferred the guy they knew to the celebrity general. The Democratic primary went to a runoff between young post-Watergate reformer Charles “Pug” Ravenel and old guard Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn. Ravenel, a South Carolina native who’d only recently moved from New York, won the runoff, only to have his candidacy disqualified for not meeting residency requirements. The Democrats put Dorn in his place, but he was a weakened candidate and voters went with Edwards, making him the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Edwards used to have a sign with this motto, or some version of it, on his desk. ↩︎
- My LLC is called Intellectual Arbitrage, because much of my work involves moving scholarly facts and to popular forums that increase their value. ↩︎