Dwarkesh Podcast

Ada Palmer on Dwarkesh Patel: Why Petrarch’s Plan Backfired

Through sortition, Florence locked its leaders in a tower to resist capture; Machiavelli's casebook marks where Petrarch's 150-year plan finally paid off.

DPDwarkesh PatelhostAPAda Palmerguest

Mar 6, 2026·2h 2m·Watch on YouTube ↗

🙋 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Direct answers grounded in the episode transcript. Tap any timestamp to verify against the source.

1. 1

   How did Florence's lottery government work?

   Florence was weird because it became a merchant republic designed to make noble takeover difficult. Palmer contrasts Florence with Venice, Genoa, Bologna, Siena, and the Swiss Republic, which mostly used an ancient Roman-style oligarchic republic of hereditary senatorial families. Florence had once resembled that model, but after a near takeover, it got rid of much of its nobility and allowed only a few families to renounce their noble status. The new senate came from merchant guilds, meaning wealthy workshop and firm owners rather than ordinary laborers. The city then used sortition: eligible guild members' names went into a bag, nine men were chosen at random, and they were locked in a tower for two or three months so they could not be bribed or kidnapped. Decisions required consensus, which made the system tyrant-resistant but still a narrow oligarchy, not modern democracy.

   ▸ 28:59 in transcript
2. 2

   Why did Gutenberg go broke after inventing the printing press?

   Gutenberg went broke because mass printing arrived before mass book distribution. In Palmer's explanation, printed books were a mass-produced commodity in a world with almost no distribution networks for mass-produced commodities. Gutenberg could print 300 Bibles for the cost of one handmade book, but he was in a small landlocked German town where only priests were legally allowed to read the Bible. He sold seven and was left with hundreds he could not move. The bank that seized his press also failed, and his apprentices failed too. The model became sustainable only when printers reached Venice, the hub of Mediterranean shipping, where 300 Bibles could be split among thirty ships going to thirty different cities. Later book fairs, including Frankfurt, solved the same distribution problem by letting printers trade large print runs into mixed inventories.

   ▸ 58:12 in transcript
3. 3

   Why did Ada Palmer call Leonardo da Vinci a saboteur?

   Leonardo was a saboteur in Palmer's sense because he hid discoveries instead of publishing them. Palmer draws a boundary between an inventor or engineer and a scientist: science requires sharing results with a community so others can test them and make civilization's knowledge advance. Leonardo da Vinci, by contrast, wrote discoveries in coded mirror writing and refused to share secrets even with students and assistants. He wanted unique masterpieces that later viewers would marvel at because no one could replicate the method. Palmer links that mindset to Brunelleschi burning notes and schematics for Florence's dome so no one else could copy him. Around 1600, Francis Bacon offers a different ideal: the bee, who gathers from nature and makes something sweet and useful for humankind. The prestige standard shifts from hoarding an achievement to explaining it publicly.

   ▸ 1:09:39 in transcript
4. 4

   Where were most ancient books lost if not the Library of Alexandria?

   Most ancient books were lost when papyrus decayed and parchment was too expensive to replace it. Palmer shifts the story away from the burning of the Library of Alexandria and toward the period from about 400 to 600 A.D. Papyrus was cheap, plant-based, and central to Roman libraries, letters, taxes, and bureaucracy, but Western and Northern Europe lost access to it after Rome's fall. The replacement was parchment, which Palmer compares to writing on a dead sheep. It was so costly that a medieval book could cost as much as a house, and a large Bible could cost as much as a countryside villa. When old papyri fell apart, libraries had to choose which texts to copy. Monks doing the copying often saved works like Saint Augustine, which biased what survived from antiquity.

   ▸ 1:23:02 in transcript
5. 5

   How did the Inquisition accidentally invent peer review?

   The Inquisition invented peer review by trying to verify experiments before censoring books. Palmer corrects the prompt first: the claim is not that the Vatican had Europe's largest library, but that inquisitors ran an unusually extensive experimental laboratory in the late 17th century. After Galileo, they saw themselves as guarantors of truth and accuracy in information. That meant if a book made mechanical claims, they needed to repeat the experiments before deciding whether the claims were true. Palmer describes this as effectively inventing peer review: a second laboratory attempting to recreate the results of the first. The surprise is institutional, not moral. These were inquisitors by day, yet some went home and wrote their own scientific treatises after doing experiments for censorship review.

   ▸ 2:01:16 in transcript

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