I head incubation projects for a social good incubator run by Steve Levitt at UChicago. I also publish the Engineering Innovation Newsletter on Substack.
If I could make wishes come true, I’d be president of MIT or run the NSF. But my tier 2 dream would be to help run a large academic lab or applied R&D lab one day.
https://freaktakes.substack.com/s/engineering-innovation
This is interesting. I guess I anecdotally have started doing this but my memory (like everyone’s) can be quite faulty/hazy. Maybe I’ll start keeping a running spreadsheet that I mark up as I read.
So it’s unclear, to me at least, whether this would grow or shrink the number of academic jobs. The number of “budgetary shot callers” would shrink by a lot since far fewer professors would have a bank account/grant to direct. But many of these teams would still require PhDs to be doing real research.
To many, that sometimes sounds like a demotion. But I think that’s a knee-jerk way to look at it. You can liken many of the new roles to what it was like being one of the many many smart PhDs/professors who worked on something like the Manhattan Project or in the GE Lab. You had probably a sort of comparable amount of freedom since your mind was respected by your “bosses” and they let you explore how to find things out on your own, but you did your research while also productively working within a “team” rather than a loose collection of individuals with different goals entirely.
Of course there are certain jobs that PhDs currently do, such as writing software, that would probably be efficient to hand over to non-PhDs in many cases. But the whole operation would also work more efficiently with the unified budget and possibly have more money for PhD researchers as well. So I find it hard to tell whether jobs would be harder or easier to come by.
I’m sure there are many changes to publishing/conferences that have been positive over the last 50 or so years. And I’d love to hear about those, too? But I’m primarily curious in what things we used to do pretty well that you think we’ve lost. If we come upon anything interesting I’d be happy to do a fleshed out research piece on it at some point.
I don’t but I’m sure they could exist. My expertise with sources in this area is not as in depth as economics or physics history. The reason I was happy to go about publishing is because Grant Miller is known in econ world to be quite expert/careful and good at what he does. So I did have a certain faith that if in the three decades between Mckinlays writing and their papers he’d have rooted out and addressed the primary counterarguments in their two part research.
And of course I’m always open-minded to update my views as things come out now as well
Your point on the proper, theory-led goals of water sanitation is interesting. I think there’s maybe a decent way for us to figure this out.
The copy of Turneaure and Russel’s water sanitation textbook I used was from around 1940. But the first edition of that was from 1901. If we could find some analogous top-tier sources utilized just before some insights from germ theory we could probably figure out how much of the best-practices in planning changed from before/after the pervasion of the theory.
Do you think that would be fair or did I miss something? Because I’d believe you very well might be right. What I wrote was a fair representation of my sources but this is an area where I am very aware that my sources are few. So I don’t hold these beliefs nearly as confidently as my views related to something like physics in the early 1900s where my reading has been far more exhaustive.
Hey everyone! I was really excited to share this piece and get everyone’s thoughts on the general area, possible extensions, caveats I didn’t think of, etc.
Life sciences is not my particular area of expertise, so I was particularly excited to see what everyone thinks about all of this/if you know interesting books and work I can look in to to learn more.
Right?! I was so fascinated by that. I’d never realized what so many of the Moore’s Law type charts weren’t showing until I saw this one. I think it could be a really great project to try to crowdsource more of these charts as a community. For old and new tech. It would really give us a great peak into where we’re at and how things have changed over time.
I’m not really sure how to go about it because I’m not yet well-connected/don’t have a big following, but there are surely people on the forum more plugged in than me who would know the right people who could contribute some of these charts.
I wonder if another way to think about a piece of this problem is “how do we expand one’s scientific/creative productivity peak.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I want to live 200 years as much as anybody here. So I want us to push for that also!
But it also does seem like a majority of our most progress-inducing ideas are not just coming from a severe minority of people, but happening in a severely limited age range of those people’s lives. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, etc. all have been known to be susceptible to this problem.
So, I could imagine a world where we extend lifespans without really expanding this productivity peak at all. And, there could be some good in that. But I’d also be quite interested if a piece of longevity focused on expanding our productivity peak. Under certain assumptions, I could see that doing just as much or more good for progress even if our life expectancy stayed fixed.
Thoughts?
It’s probably worth noting that this could also just be because this pipeline doesn’t seem to exist. Like I know Peter Thiel comments that today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the mailroom of the white house.
Today, I could probably email HP the specs and proof of concept of a brand new kind of printer that printed an order of magnitude cheaper, was way easier to connect to, etc. And there’s little chance they’d see it or respond. I think discounting the possibility that this just doesn’t happen often because corporate bureaucracies aren’t set up to handle it probably shouldn’t be taken off the table.
And if the argument is more along the lines of “why have we not heard of a single person because surely it would have happened once?” The answer could likely be that once in a blue moon someone like IBM or NASA does take an idea from an absolute rando who they don’t hire to implement it, but then they NDA that rando and we don’t hear about him.
So this is interesting because I have no clue if it exists. But it did!! This was the one and only thing the small R&D departments of large companies did in the US in the very early 1900s.
Tons and tons of home inventors/amateurs would submit patents/specs to them to look over. The department would assess their scientific/technical validity and think about if they could profitably use the invention.
If they could, they’d come to an agreement with the inventor who sent it in. And it was efficient because there was no expectation for the inventor to also start the business that built on their patent. The company that already had the scale and ability to do that just bought your idea and then you could go on to the next one.
This equilibrium started to dissipate some time around like 1920-ish very roughly as more and more companies built internal R&D teams that did actual research/contracted with university professors to do it.
I talk more about some of this here: https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/is-americas-applied-and-basic-research?s=w
But in general, I completely agree with you that this is a criminal market oversight if it doesn’t exist. And, more than that, it would just be cool and fun.
Thanks! I’ll read them this weekend! Have a good weekend!
If one wanted to start flirting with how to disentangle the lost collaborator effect from the lost capture effect, do you think there are any decent ways to do that?
I imagine whatever it is will be imperfect. But maybe there’s some pseudo-randomness to certain positions of status/power coming to an end that are independent from one’s research capacity.
Like maybe you’re only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you’re forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.
Maybe?
When I was considering that line of reasoning that you just made, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take the change because it was unclear to me if that was a negative spillover that affected their capacity to do or work just that the field moved on in the absence of a superstar.
Because in Pierre’s (god I love him, he’s a godsend) Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? there seems to be an interesting dynamic. Upon an untimely death, collaborators’ pubs went down and newcomers’ pubs went up. In that case, an alternative model of the situation could be “the old famous group of researchers had a certain capture/influence over publishing in the area that was broken by the untimely death of one of them.”
In essence, I wasn’t sure what to think because, as you pointed out, their direct collaborators were hurt. But it seems like the fields where a superstar dies also get an injection of new ideas. So I withheld judgment on what I thought might be happening because it felt up in the air.
But I’m open to hearing more evidence! I like being swayed. It’s fun.
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?
Hmmmmm this is particularly interesting because, if the setback was really a recruiting problem, it breaks the problem down in a way I hadn’t thought about. Because when most people deal with this question they treat it as kind of a “are there currently good people there? Yes or no?” But your question implies a different formulation.
Not just “are there good people at the department right now?” But also, “how likely is that department to treat good people well/retain them if they do good work?”
This is quite interesting. Because if we could start to find some rough answers to how important the expectations piece is, that could possibly shed some light on how to:
Recruit top scientists to departments/orgs/research areas that are not currently top-tier but looking to build up towards the future
And the more impactful, less zero-sum topic of maybe there are ways to use whatever we learn to get more talented potential researchers into academic departments in the first place.
I’m sure we all know people who gave up possible top-flight academic careers for the private sector not just because of the paycheck, but also because they didn’t really have any faith in the academic institutions/ecosystem as a whole treating them well.
Would love to know anyone’s thoughts or if there are interesting papers to start running down this rabbit hole on!
This first paper, by B&G, is such a fascinating piece of data collection work. You’re absolutely right. Do you have any rough guesses on how much of the issue is building a course of research on niche capital itself vs. the kind of person who does that kind of thing. I’m sure they both have an effect. I ask because I would be not shocked if the hypothesis, “People usually only pursue a course of research that requires specialized equipment if they are extremely dedicated to that problem over all others/that is an area of clear comparative advantage to them and they don’t believe they can contribute as much to other areas.”
That might be mere conjecture though and I’m not one to lend too much credibility to personal hunches without evidence. Do you think there’s any work that can help us think through that question? Even if tangentially. As much as it can feel like it sometimes, a paper does not exist for everything.
Hey Kris!
Some other books I’ve been looking at in my reading that get at this even if they are not about running labs well.
Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology
Watson’s Double Helix
Feynman’s CalTech Oral Histories that cover most of his career
Some of the Chapter’s in Philip Alexander’s book on MIT
I heard from Michael Nielsen that Barish’s oral history was supposed to be frank and good but have not read it yet
If those aren’t quite what you’re looking for just lmk why and I might have some others!