PRIMITIVES

Primitives is a dinner series at the University of Chicago. We bring UChicago technologists together in a no-frills kind of way.

The premise with this project is that good ideas come from people who know how things work sitting next to people who know why they work.

We take this from Mokyr, who used it to explain why Britain industrialised faster compared to other countries. Most explanations are material (coal, resources, institutions, demography). His is that two kinds of knowledge finally met — the how (the techniques people used) and the why (the explanation for why they worked). He called it the Industrial Enlightenment. It's also his answer for why the extraordinary inventions of Song China never compounded into anything. Without the why, a technique can be copied but not improved, and some of them weren't matched in Europe for another four centuries.

What made this work was that people had somewhere to do this knowledge sharing. The Lunar Society in Birmingham put manufacturers in a room with natural philosophers. The Encyclopédie put artisanal practice into print for people to read.

We hope these dinners are a catalyst for good ideas and, without sounding too extreme, life-altering conversations. You may meet your future research lead, co-founder, investor, or employer.

Send any ideas or questions to Asher (ajiang@uchicago.edu) or Jack (jflintoft@uchicago.edu).

Upcoming dinners:
Chatham House Rules for all dinners.