Great post. It’s nice to hear good news, and more evidence that humanity doesn’t actually run out of resources.
Agreed. The US is a massive country, and we barely use any of the space we have.
I like the idea, and the spirit of trying new ideas and forms of government.
That being said, Wikipedia isn’t without its own issues. The editorial hierarchy, like every bureaucracy, becomes rigid, brittle, and ossified over time. The predominant viewpoint becomes entrenched. And so on.
I very much believe that our representative democracy has grave flaws, and that a wiki-based form of direct democracy answers some of them. But how would you keep the system from being games? At some point, someone has to have the power to approve the edits, and the politicking to be that person becomes fiercer the higher the stakes involved.
Chaotic Progress
A book review in essay format I wrote to help nuance what I see as the unrealistic rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum right now.
Important to mention the HHMI funding model, which puts “trust” in PIs/evaluates them as PIs rather than as research proposals.
Also
“The MacArthur grant is a template for what this looks like on a personal level, with a shift in focus from creativity to integrity, and a bump in compensation – $625,000 is a lot of money, but that money is designed to be seed money for an activity rather than financial security. Those getting a MacArthur grant still face the specter of future financial needs. One needs an order of magnitude more than that over a lifetime to be secure while not compromising one’s interactions with society. ”
There’s a long-ish exploration of this in Grand Futures ch. 1 (Details box 7), focusing on long-term projects in general. I’m eliding some footnotes and not linking the citations, for writing speed reasons:
Ongoing projects Numerous examples such as cities (Jericho 9600 BCE and onwards), mathematics and science, land reclamation, irrigation networks, canals, roads, cultivated landscapes, Japanese shrines rebuilt every few decades , etc. The Gunditjmara eel traps at Budj Bim have been maintained and modified for at least 6,700 years [1531]. Waqfs, charitable perpetuities in Islamic countries providing public goods, once owned a significant fraction of land and sometimes lasted centuries [1703]. See section 5.2 for states and 5.3.2 for long-lived organisations. Cultural practices often value continuation, shading over into gaining value by their antiquity. Numerous monuments work like this. La tombe du soldat inconnu in Paris has been guarded and with a lit eternal flame since 1920. The Senbon Torii gates of the Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine in Kyoto have been accumulating since the 8th century. [Check this!]
The Uffington White Horse in the UK has been maintained since late prehistoric times (1740-210 BC).Future-oriented projects These projects have value that compounds over time. Examples include animal and crop breeding. Gardening. Forest planting; of special interest is the Tokugawa era reforestation of Japan [2857] and oak planting for future naval needs (e.g. New Forest 1698- and the Visingsö forest 1830-). Seed banks (e.g. Vavilov seed collection 1921-, Millennium Seed Bank Partnership 1996-, Svalbard Global Seed Vault 2008-) and archives (e.g. Arctic World Archive) aim at preserving information across time for future use or reference. The longitudinal documentary series Up (dir. Paul Almond, Michael Apted) follows the lives of 14 children since 1964 with new episodes every 7 years. Another compounding category are longitudinal or open-ended studies such as recording astronomical observations, Nile height measures using the Roda gauge (622-1922), the Central England temperature record (data from 1659-; compiled in 1950s), Celsius’ mean sea level mark at Lövgrund (1731-) [878], Rothamsted research station experiments and archives (1843-), the Morrow Plots at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1876-), the Beal seed burial experiment (1879-), the Queensland pitch drop experiment (1927-), the Harvard Study of Adult Development (1938-), the Framingham Heart Study (1948-), the Mori dark flies experiment (1954-) [1462], the Keeling CO₂ measurements (1958-), the Belyaev Fox Farm domestication experiment (1959-) [2878], the Cape Grim Air Archive (1978-), the E. coli long-term evolution experiment (1988-) [2284, 1011].
Long-term endpoint These projects may be divided into accidentally long-term because they take more time than wished for, and deliberately long-term because the only way of achieving the goal is to continue long enough. Accidentally long-term endpoints include many projects like the British Channel Tunnel, the Panama Canal or the Olmos Irrigation project have been begun, interrupted, resumed and eventually completed (tunnel first proposed in 1802, final project 1986-1990; canal first proposed 1668, final project 1881-1914; irrigation 1924, final project 2006-2011). 2nd Avenue Subway in New York (proposed 1920, started 1942, second phase expected to open 2027–2029). Cathedral building (e.g. Notre Dame 1163-1345, Milan 1386-1965, Sagrada Familia 1882-). Thesaurus Linguae Latinae began in 1894, expected to take 20 years: current expectation is completion around 2050. Many other dictionaries are ongoing, like Svenska Akademins Ordbok (begun 1787, as of 2019 having reached late ’V’). Deutsches Wörterbuch was completed in 1838-1961 and Oxford English Dictionary 1857-1928. The LIGO project began in 1983 and succeeded in 2016, although it had organisational prehistory at least going back to ∼1970 [685, Table C-8, p. 111]. The ITER fusion project began in 1988 and will complete by 2035-2040. Predator removal in New Zeeland (2015-2050).
These exemplify the intermediate kind of projects that are long-term because they are expected to be hard. As for more deliberate long-term endpoints, many time capsules [1496] and artworks have clear endpoints. Framtidsbiblioteket in Oslo is an art project that aims to collect an original work by a popular writer every year from 2014 to 2114, remaining unread and unpublished until 2114 when they will be printed on paper from 1000 Norwegian spruce trees planted in 2014.
100 Years is a film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez in 2015. Advertised in 2015 it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The Breakthrough Starshot project aims at launching laser-powered crafts to one or more nearby stars at speeds making them arrive within decades to a century. Benjamin Franklin set up two philanthropic trusts intended to last 200 years 1790-1990; unlike many other charities they survived, although spending was not always according to the formal intentions. Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule by Agnes Denes is a land art project started in 1992 and intended to last for 400 years, slowly developing into a primary forest. Play As Slow As Possible by John Cage is being played in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, starting in 2001 and intended to end in 2640. Longplayer by Jem Finer is a 1,000 year composition (1999-2999) being played in London. The Clock of the Long Now aims for 10,000 years of function. Like the other art projects the value lies less in something achieved at this point as the demonstration of a time-spanning project.I would add the (finished) ig-nobel price-worthy knuckle-cracking experiment by Donald Unger.
important links (this is really the best place for me to post/update them rn)
https://taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-chatgpt-hunger-energy-gpu-revolution/
sid mani
Tunadorable
Adam Green of markov.bio
LLM content
https://api.together.xyz/playground/chat/meta-llama/Llama-2-70b-chat-hf
310.ai
https://cen.acs.org/materials/2-d-materials/Mighty-MXenes-ready-launch/102/i9
Novelties
websim.ai
What have been the longest scientific experiments? What would be worthwhile 25-year experiments?
I want someone to write an actual post on this but would also be happy to hear some initial, short answers.
I remember reading something on this or hearing these points made in a podcast but can’t recall the source!
Counterargument #2: AI obsoletes creation of cool stuff on the Internet.
Response: on the contrary, in many possible futures (esp. with constraints on agency), AI empowers people to deliver beauty to others, by automating all except the things they are passionate about. Motivation becomes more of a bottleneck.
Also, these types of public goods are some of the things that make me most proud of the current human civilization. I’m sure many here will agree. Even if we lose that in the future, I think it still matters, even as some sort of nod to the things we used to value in the past.
Tyler Cowen did something like this for covid: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/1-million-plus-in-emergent-ventures-prizes-for-coronavirus-work.html
Counterargument #1: it might be better to incentivize people to run actual companies that deliver business value.
Response: there is so much value to be created that is hard to capture via current market structures. There are many people passionate about things that fall into this category.
There should be some kind of official recognition + prize for people providing public goods on the Internet. There exist prizes for free software and open-source projects, but this does not cover even remotely the amount of intangible value people can deliver on the Internet.
Examples include: https://avherald.com, but also a lot of open-source projects. and maybe people like patio11, gwern, Lilian Weng, or Bartosz Ciechanowski. Some YouTubers would also likely qualify, but I’m not very familiar with the medium.Theory of change: just increase the rate of reminders to people that if they are highly competent and passionate about something not directly marketable, the Internet has made it so that they can easily increase the amount of beauty in the world by making their passion a public project.
First of all, thank you for this post.
This, at least, it was useful to sit and think a bit about the matter.
As I wear the clothes of the Devil’s Advocate, I’d like to do a concurrent post to state why the arguments you put in front were not acceptable (when not actually impossible):
More geniusesWe can state without any doubt that the Earth population incredibly increased in the last decades. All I can experience, especially in the last decades, is the poor quality of the humans (at least, judging from their posts in the social networks). This means:
- more recurring grammatical/orthographic errors (people who don’t know even their home country’s language);
- people speaking about topics where they’ve got not minimal experience (hence, spreading out ignorance rather than knowledge);
- people speaking not to add something to the debate but just on a “clickbait” basis.And I mentioned only the too evident issues. There are many other issues, some related to the above.
To cut a long story short: if you can’t provide people a proper education anywhere (use of the technologies included), you are not increasing the chance of getting geniuses but the chance to widen the ignorance pool where the humanity is going to feed on.
More progressTotal investment. I wish it was so. This is (at least) a naive conception of humanity. I’m going to give you good news and bad news: good news are that the money for such investments already exist; the bad news are that the owners of their money don’t want to spend a single penny for them. So, if you want to get more investment, you have to create politically and economically the reasons for they would find profitable (or more profitable) to do so;
Specialization. Here we go to a previous issue: if you can’t provide people a proper education, you are not creating many more specialized workers but only more people who always have a worse knowledge of the basics of their job (and of the other jobs too, which means always more people wanting to have their say to “actually teach papa to screw”);
Larger markets I’m going to give you the same bad news and good news I gave you before. These markets would actually exist already now, but we’re using them in the wrong manner. Gandhi used to say: “Earth has enough resources to satisfy anybody’s need but not to satisfy anybody’s GREED. If only we could understand (and make it understandable to the right people) the difference between need and greed your hopes would be somehow possible;
More ambitious projects
Stop.
If you studied Ancient History properly you must know that the way Ancient Egypt took large masses of people to work to these more ambitious projects was force them to do that in SLAVERY. We should have put behind us that word from the Enlightenment Age (which—it is useful to remember—also made a significant contribution to the creation of the United States of America).
Are you REALLY sure that you want to turn back the clock of Time to THAT? (not to mention that, in spite of that, still today in the 21st Century we have large portions of Earth where we keep on accepting, socially or politically, slavery).
“In fact, these factors may represent not only opportunities but requirements for progress. There is evidence that simply to maintain a constant rate of exponential economic growth requires exponentially growing investment in R&D. This investment is partly financial capital, but also partly human capital—that is, we need an exponentially growing base of researchers.”
-
You keep on considering the issue in terms of QUANTITY, forgetting totally the QUALITY, which is what, in your perspective, really makes the difference.“But in the long run, an exponentially growing base of researchers is impossible without an exponentially growing population. In fact, in some models of economic growth, the long-run growth rate in per-capita GDP is directly proportional to the growth rate of the population.”
-
What kind of models of economic growth are we talking about?
With numbers at hand, in the current models of economic growth that are applied globally from those self-named “civilized countries”, the only growing thing is poverty. In favor of the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Is this your conception of “growth” and “civilization”?
All the above is also weakening Earth security.
Because the poorer are people, the lesser are valuable their lives.
And the lesser are valuable their lives, the easier would be they are going to devote them to criminal projects in exchange of some quid, whatever they may be.
Just because they’ve got actually nothing to lose (neither their own life itself).
To cut a long story short, in the current models of economic growth the only thing growing is—with poverty—the manpower of criminal organizations (terroristic ones included, that you state you wanna fight in words but in the end you are feeding in practice).
More optionsBetter matching for aesthetics, style, and taste.
Better matching to careers.
It’s the same old story: humanity will have more of these if they will be trained to.
Otherwise, the only things growing—together with poverty and the manpower of criminal organizations—are Fascisms.
There is an increasing list of countries where, foreign people are not only felt as an advantage, but rather a danger (“they come here to feed criminal activities”, “they come here to steal our jobs”, “they come here to steal our women”, etc.).
The reason is, from my point of view, quite simple. Let’s say we have a house with three rooms: this house would be comfortable to—let’s say—no more than 3-4 people (one room per person). If you wanna host some more people, you will have to increase the quality of services provided by the house, to compensate that there will be a bit lesser.
Because one of the fault of your scheme is that you completely ignore that the Earth resources are limited. You want more people but you didn’t tell us how to feed them, how to water them, how to educate them, in a world that’s already at stake to do that with the current number.
So, going on with my metaphor, we’ve got currently the three room house (that—it has to be clear—won’t have any more room, at least in the short term) with about 6 people in it, where 1 person has his/her own room and the other 5 are fighting among them to compete for the remaining 2 rooms. Let’s say that 2 of the 5 people fighting will find an agreement to get another room together in the end (hopefully, in an optimistic perspective). There are still 3 people remaining and fighting to compete for the only room left. And let’s also say that, if in a house there are three people fighting among themselves, cohabitation is not the maximum of happiness even for the other three who are trying to live in peace.
And would you want to get in some more people in such a toxic environment?
What exciting perspectives of life could you provide them?
Better matching to other people. Even on this side, it’s the same old story.
You won’t solve the problem if you increase the number of chances without increasing the quality of chances.
I can offer my personal single heterosexual man, if someone can find it useful.
What I experienced on my own skin is that our consumerist vision of society has led us to also consider interpersonal relationships as “products”. This means that we no longer want to build and spend on improving a relationship with anyone when, given the huge availability of choices, we can fuck off our partner and take another one with the same nonchalance we have in changing the brand of our washing machine soap.
And when you’ve got another partner the game starts again.
Women (I talk about them because I’m interested in women, but I guess I can tell the same thing about men) spend their lives collecting dozens of toxic relationships where they always pour on the new partners all the toxicity they have had from the previous ones, charging the righteous for the sinner. And in the end, the only thing left to do is escaping from that hell.
The result is that, in the end, neither of them both will believe in a healthy relationship anymore, but they will always think the other as an automatic dispenser of money, favors and sex (if you manage to get to sex). And when they can’t accept the other one has gone away and has the right to have a less toxic relationship, the story often ends with a murder or a suicide, when not with them both.
I think this is not the right way to achieve an increasing Earth population.
I think the time has come to provide our children with a “sentimental education” before a sexual one. Something that will teach them to respect other people and to treat people as people and things as things, and not people as things and things as people. But it’s very hard to teach to someone something you haven’t learnt for yourself yet. So, before teaching to them, we should start to learn this for us in advance!
To cut a long story short again, we have to invest more in the quality of what we’ve got instead of more quantity!More niche communities.
More niche markets.
You will have to build up in advance a world with a social, cultural and economic system that would encourage this. Until then, your project is simply not possible, when not naive or incoherent.
Because in the current one, you are doing exactly the opposite.
Deeper patterns
The existence of non-rival goods.
Economies of scale.
Network effects and Metcalfe’s law. Value in a network is generated not by nodes but by connections, and the more nodes there are total, the more connections are possible per node. Metcalfe’s law quantifies this: the number of possible connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes.
Metcalfe’s law talks about the number of nodes. You can get all the nodes you want, but if the quality is poor, they’re going to last the twinkling of an eye.
And, in the end, the number won’t be exactly what you expected!
A dynamic world
I assume that when Ehrlich and Goodall advocate for much smaller populations, they aren’t literally calling for genocide or hoping for a global catastrophe (although Ehrlich is happy with coercive fertility control programs, and other anti-humanists have expressed hope for “the right virus to come along”).
-
Nice one to talk about these good ideas.
So, if maybe they still have not taken them into consideration (I can’t believe that, but you’ll see...), now they’ll surely do!
A world with a large and growing population is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress.
-
I remain with my opinion that, before thinking of a larger population on Earth, we should work on improving the quality of life of those who are still living here, in advance.
And there are still loads of things to do just to make it become acceptable.
I’d love to change my mind if you’ve got more consistent argumentations than those you already provided in that sense.
Thanks anyway for raising the topic, which is everything but not relevant.
Best regards,
A.F.
America’s First Dual-Use Technology
This is a linkpost for https://kinetic.reviews/p/americas-first-dual-use-technology
With disintegrating 737s in the news, a lot of people are wondering how things got so bad. I’m here to rewind the clock 100+ years to reassure everyone that the aviation industry has always been beset by challenged business models, bad incentives, and shoddy aircraft.
From the first takeoff in 1903 through the late 1920s, “dual-use” aircraft were merely a promise – there was no commercial aviation market. There was, in fact, barely any U.S. market, and it was the inherent appeal of aviation that attracted both entrepreneurs and capital.1 As nascent markets for passenger transport and airmail transport emerged, so too did the first dual-use application for bombers, accelerating innovation in the early 1930s. Fighters did not lend themselves as nicely to commercial applications, and absent a procurement strategy and meaningful expenditures from either the Army or the Navy, U.S. fighters at the time of Pearl Harbor were inferior to their German and Japanese counterparts.
The mythos surrounding the Wright Brothers, Charles Lindberg, and successful mass production during WWII belies the reality of a pre-WWII aviation industry plagued by poor policies and dysfunctional relations between the government and manufacturers. The Army and Navy remained tepid – often hostile – buyers right up until the outbreak of WWII, and in partnership with Congress, they managed to inflict maximum abuse on manufacturers. During the interwar years, industry subsidized the military for both the development and production of aircraft, losing lots of money along the way. In return, manufacturers were deprived of their intellectual property rights and accused of graft and wartime profiteering. Acquisition law was so punitive towards aircraft manufacturers as late as 1939 that firms were convinced it was a conspiracy led by the automotive industry. It wasn’t.
Early on, there were some Cassandras: “In 1919 Secretary of War Baker called for a long term procurement program for military aircraft and warned Congress that “it cannot be expected that industry will long engage in an unremunerative line,” but he underestimated the aircraft manufacturers for whom the industry’s appeal defied rational calculation (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 45).”2 Indeed, the optimism-cum-masochism of early aviation entrepreneurs (e.g., Douglas, Grumman, Martin, etc.) enabled bad policy to persist.
The military-industrial complex as we know it did not exist prior to WWII, yet this period serves as a reflecting pool for the best and worst attributes of our modern defense industry.
Pre-WWI and WWI
During the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. led the world in heavier-than-air aircraft. We ceded this early lead to Europe in part because of patent disputes between the Wrights and Curtiss and in part because of late entry into WWI. However, even before the outbreak of war, Europe showed a much greater interest in the military utility of aviation. From 1909-1911, the U.S. Army owned one military aircraft. In comparison, France owned over 250 planes by 1912. By the time the U.S. entered the war, its domestic aircraft industry was so far behind that of its peers that the U.S. almost exclusively used foreign combat aircraft of French or British design, with the American Expeditionary Force flying the French SPAD. (The U.S. Combat Aircraft Industry, 1909-2000).
The first true test of U.S. industry-government relations was an abject failure. In 1917, Congress passed a Hail Mary, $640 million “Aero Bill,” which at the time was the largest congressional appropriation ever.3 Industry was meant to fulfill the government’s vision of mass production of aircraft, but aircraft of the era were truly “crafts” made of wood and fabric and not ready for the assembly line. This problem was exacerbated by the decision to have industry manufacture foreign designs, as there were no cutting-edge American combat designs ready for mass production.
Building a foreign fighter and retooling a factory around it proved too challenging. The U.S. licensed the SPAD design from France and contracted Curtiss Aeroplane to manufacture it, but the firm was wholly unequipped to produce the thousands of fighters expected and nearly went bankrupt trying to do so. Its early units of SPADs were immediately declared “worse than useless,” and the Army Signal Corp told Curtiss to produce the British Bristol instead. But when Curtiss failed to produce a light enough version of the Bristol, it was back to the SPAD – this time, a new variant (The Politics of Aircraft, pgs 33-36).
Glenn L. Martin refused to commit to unreasonable production expectations, explaining it was only possible for his firm to manufacture three planes a day. He was blacklisted from the war effort until summer 1918 when the Army had him build prototypes of his excellent MB-1 bomber.
At the end of the war, the government did not receive anywhere near the value of aircraft for the money spent. Rather than consider that high technology aircraft were incompatible with mass production under the conditions, President Wilson, Congress, the media, and much of the War Department concluded the failed effort was a big business conspiracy to raid the wartime coffers of the government. It was the last time the industry operated largely unregulated.
The Interwar Years: The Myth of the Fungible Engineer
After WWI, the government decided it would no longer license foreign designs, but it did not learn any lessons about the difficulty of having one firm produce a different firm’s plane. In the interwar years, the root cause of industry’s struggles was the government’s decision to separate design contracts from production contracts.4 Ostensibly, this was to ensure there was competition at every phase of the acquisition, ensuring the best deal for Uncle Sam. In reality, the attempts to cleave R&D from production were disastrous for all parties. Here is how the process worked:
Firms would respond to government specifications with their paper designs and the estimated cost to build the prototype. The government would select two to four firms to build a prototype and have a fly-off. The government then acquired the design rights to the winning firm’s prototype. Firms consistently lost money on prototyping in the hope of making a profit on the production contract – provided they could win it, that is.
The government then held a separate competition to determine which firm(s) would produce the winner’s prototype. Production competitions were almost solely based on price. This meant the firm who had the winning prototype was at a huge disadvantage because it needed to amortize its design costs, so its production bid inevitably came in higher. The firm that won the contract for production received just the winner’s prototype and had to reverse engineer the blueprints; although as we will see, having the blueprints would have been of little use.
The government treated aircraft as standardized goods to be manufactured, but aircraft were not widgets. This decision to hold pure-price manufacturing competitions resulted in manufacturing failures that make Boeing’s recent plane window blowout look positively quaint (emphasis mine):
1) Martin sold his aforementioned excellent MB-1 prototype bomber to the Army at a loss. “In 1919 [he] was underbid by three contractors on the bomber’s production. Martin was given twenty to build anyway but lost money on the reduced volume, suspended the bomber’s development, and in disgust, declined to deal with the army until 1931. L.W.F. Engineering built fifty, Aeromarine built twenty-five, and Curtiss built fifty. The bombers in the field proved to be completely different airplanes of widely varying quality (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
2) “In 1923 Curtiss lost $182,000 on a $175,000 development contract for the successful navy Curtiss Scout …In the competition to build 40 Scouts, Curtiss submitted a bid of $32,000 per plane, but Glenn Martin won the contract at $23,000 apiece. Martin complained that the plane came with no blueprints but admitted that they would have been useless in his shop anyway. His staff drew up new blueprints and in the process produced an entirely new plane inferior in performance to the Curtiss design (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 62).”
3) In 1919, the Ordnance Engineering Company developed Orenco-D, “the best pursuit in that day,” but Curtiss won production for 50 of the planes. “Ordnance Engineering liquidated; and the fifty planes built by Curtiss had to be destroyed as unsafe (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 59).”
4) “The demise of Thomas-Morse, the designer of a reasonably successful indigenous fighter design (based on the French SPAD), can be directly traced to the award of the production contract in 1921 to Boeing, which had little ability to design an advanced fighter but which underbid Morse on the production contract.”
And so the myth of the fungible engineer was born.
The myth holds that any worker is the same as any worker, and any production line is the same as any other production line. It’s a fundamentally un-American concept and reveals a captured, collectivist mindset. The belief that the sum total of innovation could be captured in a prototype or blueprint rather than in a network of humans doing exceptional things was demonstrably false. It didn’t matter that the government owned the most innovative aircraft designs – absent the designers, the prototypes were unlikely to be faithfully manufactured at scale.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging the myth of the fungible engineer is in a dynamic industry undergoing rapid technological change. With aircraft, a prototype was almost immediately rendered obsolete upon selection. Had the firm with the winning design been the one to manufacture it, it would have been able to incorporate new innovations during the manufacturing process. But the firm most able to manufacture the winning prototype was the least likely to win. The implications for innovation are clear: Firms were incentivized to keep a bare-bones design staff to minimize R&D expense, since there was no money to be made in designing the most innovative airplane.
To quote Freedom’s Forge author Arthur Herman, “it’s through making things that we learn what can be made better, which is why the most productive companies also tend to be the most innovative.” In what appears to be an oxymoron, aircraft manufacturers were deprived of the opportunity to manufacture their aircraft. And because aviation is a relatively low volume industry, missing out on the limited military production orders of the interwar years had a high opportunity cost. As
Brian Potter writes on production learning curves:
If you’ve produced 1,000,000 of something, whether you make another 500 or 5,000 will make almost no difference in learning curve terms. But if you’ve only made 50 of something, making another 500 makes a huge difference in the level of cost reduction that can be achieved. Thus, if you only plan to sell a few hundred of something, a relatively small number of sales will have a large impact on how efficiently you’re producing and how profitable you are.
Separately competing design from production was a short-sighted acquisition strategy, although the taxpayer temporarily got a great deal. The government was paying less than the full cost for a prototype, and then it paid less than the full cost for production. Industry was subsidizing the government! But it was unsustainable for industry to operate unprofitably, and more importantly, it resulted in the warfighter getting a bad product. Note how the health of industry and national security share an intimate relationship.
Not everyone had blinders on. The legendary U.S. Navy Admiral Moffett, then director of the Bureau of Aeronautics and credited with introducing the aircraft carrier, believed “the distinction between design and production was meaningless and an obstacle to procurement” and “procurement laws dishonored the government.” Although price competition on manufacturing orders was the default, there were some loopholes that allowed for “negotiated contracts,” where a contracting officer (CO) could award the manufacturing contract to the firm with the winning prototype without a full competition. Moffett pushed for the use of negotiated contracts whenever possible, but extreme risk aversion from COs prevented them from being used with any regularity (The Politics of Aircraft, pg 86).
This piece is supposed to be focused on the origin story of the myth of the fungible engineer, but I can’t help but do a quick diversion on the origin story of the CYA, risk-averse, CO. Many will read the above manufacturing failures and ask how it’s possible that the COs – faced with such incontrovertible proof – would still pursue price competition over negotiated contracts. Were they simply useful idiots?
A closer examination of incentive structure reveals they were just acting rationally. Congressional scrutiny, allegations of wartime fraud, charges of favoritism or collusion, and an extra-long contract review process loomed large for the CO who went with the negotiated contract. It was much easier to pick the firm that could do it the cheapest – actually receiving the plane purchased was of secondary concern.
Things haven’t changed much, and we continue to encourage COs to adhere to process at the expense of outcome. As Pete Modigliani and Matt MacGregor write in their recent summary of the DoD Inspector General’s Audit of Cost-Plus-Award-Fee Contracts:
To conclude, in reviewing $32B of contracts, COs regularly did not follow policies, but still effectively managed the contracts for most of them, with a 0.015% of improper payments not fully justified in the contract files. As a result, DoD IG recommends increased oversight and controls. And people wonder why many COs are risk averse.
The Fungible Engineer is Alive and [Un]Well
I wish we could say we learned from this chapter in history, but the myth of the fungible engineer is the central tenet in acquisition today. We see it manifested in two ways. First, the government largely acquires software with a labor-based, butts-in-seats model that does not account for individual exceptionalism. From Trae Stephens still-relevant 2016 piece “Innovation Deficit: Why DC is Losing Silicon Valley”
The average Request for Proposal (RFP) involving software development services requires estimates on count of full-time equivalents (FTEs) who will be engaged in the effort, a “basis of estimate” (BOE) modeling FTEs, their labor categories, and the FTE blend deployed against RFP requirements and delivery dates (e.g. requirement “x” needs 2.5 engineers for 6 months to complete). This process massively disadvantages efficient and more talented teams. Because the talent gap between average and excellent is so large, it would generally be better to have one Lebron-level coder than to have 100 average ones.
Second, the government continues to equate ownership of source code, diagrams, and prototypes with innovation – once again, not realizing it is the networked people surrounding these artifacts that breathe life into them. While it is no longer an option for Boeing to bid on the production of Lockheed’s fighter, the pre-WWII mindset around the value of owning atoms has extended to owning bits. A recent report from the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) enumerates in meticulous detail different solicitations from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) effectively boxing out commercial software by requiring aggressive ownership of IP – and these examples are just from a single government agency.5
Running and maintaining a software system is much closer to producing an aircraft at scale than it is to designing and delivering a prototype for a fly-off. Despite its proliferation of software factories, the government still has not internalized this point. For a thought experiment: if the government acquired the code base of OpenAI and turned it over to [insert favorite Systems Integrator], do you think said Systems Integrator would continue on OpenAI’s trajectory of building a next generation AI company? Relatedly, as any entrepreneur raising venture capital money for his/her startup will tell you, leading your pitch with a list of patents is not a winning strategy.
One final point. Right after WWII, there was a race by the Allies to seize as much knowledge from the Germans as possible. America’s “acquisition” of one Werner von Braun via Operation Paperclip was by far the most successful of these technology transfers. But America and the UK also pursued an expensive strategy of microfilming and translating millions of documents, which was not successful. France, who didn’t have the resources or political capital to pursue this strategy, instead embedded trainees into German research centers, maintaining the intangible value of a scientist’s network. This people-centric strategy was very successful for the French at a fraction of the cost.6
America has a deep bench of Founding Fathers and entrepreneurs we celebrate. China only has Mao, maybe Xi. They had to disappear Jack Ma because the CCP does not accommodate outliers. Our acquisition system should reject the myth of the fungible engineer and instead reflect the time-honored American tradition of elevating the individual over the collective.
I’m only comfortable with more humans if we make serious efforts to increase the percent of vegans/vegetarians, or reduce the amount of meat needed by human, given how wasteful meat is to land use.
[limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok, but people would still need to eat way less meat than they do now]
maybe, just maybe, cultured meat will come just enough time to save us. But the probability range of this is still too high for comfort.
I very strongly believe any pro-fertility incentives must be coupled with incentives to decrease meat consumption/increase vegetarianism (or increase % of power from nuclear, given that excess solar energy will also destroy habitat).
EO Wilson once advocated that 50% of the world is set aside for wilderness. Maybe that’s a bit too ambitious, but I think 35% would be good enough to preserve enough biodiversity. Taiwan/Hong Kong/Japan are all densely populated and have roughly that % of wilderness/forest (they also rely a lot on seafood, which does not destroy wilderness , but is still inherently a limited resource given overfishing). People get huge health/happiness benefits from nature exposure too, esp when the nature is close to where they live
“If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people”—EO Wilson
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2204892120 is one of the most depressing findings ever.
How do you optimize your life for serendipity?
Ken Stanley has a new social network and I asked the question here: https://app.heymaven.com/discover/25623
But progress studies forum should have more people who can answer this (esp b/c serendipity and progress are both close allies)
“If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people”—EO Wilson
[though limited hunting of deer/pigeons/waterfowl could be ok]