Jason Furman's Reviews > How to Become Famous: Lost Einsteins, Forgotten Superstars, and How the Beatles Came to Be

I like to read books by my friends. But Cass writes more quickly than I can read. I confess that I only read this one out of guilt because he handed me a copy that he had just purchased for me at full price in a bookstore. But I'm really glad I did.

In lieu of a review I'm pasting the email I sent to Cass after reading it (with a few names of friends and former classmates redacted to XX's, sorry you won't know the other great actors in Harvard's Class of 1992):

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From: Jason Furman
To: Cass Sunstein
Subject: A few comments on your book
Date: June 13, 2024 9:41am

1. It is outstanding. A lovely combination of social science, speculative thinking, literary appreciation, and being inside your strange mind.

2. In the paperback you should fix the only error in the book: deleting the words “still is” after talking about the importance of Scientific American. At least on gender issues it is deeply unscientific and an embarrassment.

3. You are reasonably objective about the Yesterday thought experiment, even managing to be objective about the role of chance in such world historical geniuses as The Beatles and Bob Dylan. But I found you lost all objectivity and reason in discussing Star Wars which came across as something that surpassed and transcended all contingency to be pure, unadulterated timeless fame.

4. You don’t appear to read enough foreign language fiction, just about the only foreign reference was to Tolstoy and you didn’t provide any evidence that you read past the first sentence of Anna Karenina. In my book about how to become famous there will be an entire chapter on Cervantes and the only element of luck will be that the bullet that hit him in the Battle of Lepanto missed his head/heart by a foot. Other than that his fame was inevitable and based on the fact that Don Quixote is even better than Star Wars. I would also have Pushkin, Gogol and Kafka. And more Dickens, but I was glad to see the enthusiasm for Great Expectations even if it is not as good as Bleak House.

5. I often do the “run history 100 times” thought experiment with various things. Like Obama’s effort to pass an immigration bill (it passed in 25 of the times), XX being successful (80 of the times, part of the evidence is the “independent draws” of his success in different context that were not just the Matthew Principle), or fame.

6. I’ve had this idea, possibly infeasible, that we might be able to get at some of the issues about “objectivity” vs. information cascade/polarization/chance with LLMs. The idea would be to train a model only on data through, say, 1860. And then give it all the books published in 1861 without telling it the authors and ask it to rank them. Would Great Expectations be first? If you’re worried that it already formed its views about what greatness was based on earlier Dickens novels and their reception then cut the training off in 1836.

7. I wish you had more on scientific genius and fame. You mostly deal with “subjective” greatness but there is something objective about how much more Newton got new and right than anyone else in his time. The big issue raised by scientific fame (and possibly is related to artistic fame, although a bit less obvious), is the issue of “inevitability’ and “simultaneous discovery”. If there was no Newton we would have had calculus (in fact was simultaneously discovered), would we have had everything else and in short order? Darwin is enormously famous but mostly because he accelerated publication and wrote a bit better, we would have basically had the same theory even without him. Most of quantum mechanics seems like simultaneous discovery where if this person didn’t do it then would that person. Is Einstein different? Special relativity comes straight out of Michelson-Morley, the Lorenz Transformations, etc., hard to believe it wouldn’t have been found soon after 1905. But general relativity? Is it possible that absent Einstein we still would not have it? I’ve had the same fantasy about the LLM experiment, but might need better AI, but train it on data through 1910 and see if it figures out general relativity.

8. Next time we’re together I have to tell you about my family’s friendship with the Dylan family when I was young. It is related to fame.

9. The example I use with people on fame, chance, hard work and ability is my freshman year roommate (and still friend) Matt Damon. Matt was one of the 4 best actors in my class (along with XX, XX and XX), I’m reasonably confident in the objectiveness of that assessment, ability to do different voices, characters, etc. He was one of the 2 most focused on being a movie star in my class (our first conversation was about how he would be a movie star), tied with XX. So relative to Harvard he was a 1 in 800 talent. Harvard recruits based on exceptional talent so I’m willing to stipulate, guessing here, he was a 1 in 4,000 talent for people born in 1970. But that means there were 1,000 people who were just as good at acting born in that year and luck was the reason he did better than the other 1,000 of them (including Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Rachel Weisz).

10. I’ve always meant to read Joyce Carol Oates. But I’m a bit of a completist which would be rather dangerous in her case (or yours for that matter).

11. I enjoyed the Houdini chapter but wasn’t sure I understood the point of it.

What’s your address, I want to reciprocate by sending you a great novel about how to become famous—and reversals of fame. [NOTE - Cass will be getting a copy of [book:The Fraud|66086834] which, in part, illustrates some of the reversals in fame that he discusses in the book--with William Harrison Ainsworth getting massively eclipsed by Charles Dickens over time, a reversal from their contemporaneous positions.]