Hey Ben! I loved this. Particularly the anecdotes about Boulton and the early and late life of Edison Electric.
Since reading the Edison biography, something I’ve been thinking about is whether or not someone could start a modern-day R&D lab the way Edison did. Like I understand that it would be atypical, but I feel like someone with a particular set of skills and the ability to execute (whose mind also moves a mile a minute the way weird minds do) should be able to.
There are certain technical problems, that if solved, are either worth a ton of money as their own company or just licensing the IP to existing players in the field.
As a concrete example: What if one started an R&D lab dedicated to making superforecasting as effective as possible. You’re working on trying to figure out what you can and can’t predict, how to make your best predictors even better, and how to communicate these predictions in as clear a way as a consultant would communicate in a deck. At that point, your services could be worth huge amounts to companies trying to make projections and hedge funds trying to make trades. Or you could start a hedge fund yourself.
Why do little applied research shops like that, with clear commercial applications in a medium amount of time once some expertise is built up, not exist? Are people just not doing it or is there a structural reason? Any ideas?
There are of course tons and tons of R&D labs working on things with medium-term commercial applications, and the question is why so few of them get results as good as Edison’s. More recent examples of hyperproductive labs like Xerox PARC, DARPA, and early Google suggest that this is still entirely possible, but it also seems difficult, fragile, and unlikely to maintain extreme productivity once the founder’s attention is elsewhere. I haven’t looked into these labs very deeply, but my understanding is that they all depended on a very specific culture which has never been made fully explicit and generally can’t be replicated despite a number of attempts. This is usually a clue that someone with a rare combination of skills is engineering the social structure and troubleshooting idiosyncratic problems as they arise. (Compare to the stream of new practices in e.g. education that start off showing extreme potential but regress to the mean as soon as they scale past the visionary founder’s personal management capacity.)
I’d be skeptical of the superforecasting lab specifically, because while these labs full of tinkerers have a very good track record for producing physical tech, offhand I can’t think of a single good social tech that was developed in a lab built for that purpose. Probably better to have a few institutions try making internal prediction markets to guide real decisions, and see how it works. (IIRC Hanson has tried to get this to happen?)
Hey Ben! I loved this. Particularly the anecdotes about Boulton and the early and late life of Edison Electric.
Since reading the Edison biography, something I’ve been thinking about is whether or not someone could start a modern-day R&D lab the way Edison did. Like I understand that it would be atypical, but I feel like someone with a particular set of skills and the ability to execute (whose mind also moves a mile a minute the way weird minds do) should be able to.
There are certain technical problems, that if solved, are either worth a ton of money as their own company or just licensing the IP to existing players in the field.
As a concrete example: What if one started an R&D lab dedicated to making superforecasting as effective as possible. You’re working on trying to figure out what you can and can’t predict, how to make your best predictors even better, and how to communicate these predictions in as clear a way as a consultant would communicate in a deck. At that point, your services could be worth huge amounts to companies trying to make projections and hedge funds trying to make trades. Or you could start a hedge fund yourself.
Why do little applied research shops like that, with clear commercial applications in a medium amount of time once some expertise is built up, not exist? Are people just not doing it or is there a structural reason? Any ideas?
There are of course tons and tons of R&D labs working on things with medium-term commercial applications, and the question is why so few of them get results as good as Edison’s. More recent examples of hyperproductive labs like Xerox PARC, DARPA, and early Google suggest that this is still entirely possible, but it also seems difficult, fragile, and unlikely to maintain extreme productivity once the founder’s attention is elsewhere. I haven’t looked into these labs very deeply, but my understanding is that they all depended on a very specific culture which has never been made fully explicit and generally can’t be replicated despite a number of attempts. This is usually a clue that someone with a rare combination of skills is engineering the social structure and troubleshooting idiosyncratic problems as they arise. (Compare to the stream of new practices in e.g. education that start off showing extreme potential but regress to the mean as soon as they scale past the visionary founder’s personal management capacity.)
I’d be skeptical of the superforecasting lab specifically, because while these labs full of tinkerers have a very good track record for producing physical tech, offhand I can’t think of a single good social tech that was developed in a lab built for that purpose. Probably better to have a few institutions try making internal prediction markets to guide real decisions, and see how it works. (IIRC Hanson has tried to get this to happen?)