More evidence that, until quite recently, it paid to make a good movie to get a big audience, but that’s no longer the case. For several years, critics ratings for the top ten movies have steadily diverged from audience ratings. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-28/critics-and-fans-have-never-disagreed-more-about-movies
mattclancy
Karma: 58
The Curse of Plenty
Science is getting harder
Are Technologies Inevitable?
Thanks! I think there is also a pessimistic read, which is that these dynamics affect the direction of cultural creation; specifically, commercial creators will be pulled towards doing franchise-like work for anything expensive. Original and outlier work will have to happen on smaller budgets, where a smaller return can justify the investment. Whereas we used to get “expensive + original”, now we’ll probably have to content ourselves with “cheap + original.”
Organized Academic Reference List for Managing Innovation
Thanks for doing this!
What is the most important domain for which talent is just not very important?
Rick Rubin noticing the same problem in this Conversations with Tyler, on older vs. newer music in the era of streaming.
When something comes out by an artist that you love, it doesn’t have the same gravitas that it once had because it’s on this conveyor belt of music that’s always going by. Even the thing you love, you listen to it, but then there’s something new right behind it, coming right behind it, always something new coming right behind it. I don’t know how the music of today can get to the point of the canon of the music of the past based on that short term, the fact that the music goes by so quickly. Even the things we love, the shelf life is very short now.
AMA: Matt Clancy, Open Philanthropy
We have some big picture stuff pretty nailed down. To start, long-run improvements in material living standards have long been understood to arise primarily from improvements to technology, which emerge from R&D. It’s also pretty settled that much of the value of R&D spills over to people who are not the performer of R&D, and this means that in a laissez-faire system, R&D will be supplied at less than desirable levels. This problem is especially acute for fundamental science, which is primarily aimed at understanding how the world works. Most economists think the government is going to have to play a role in supporting, for example, fundamental scientific research.
Given that a laissez-faire system is going to undersupply R&D, what’s the best set of policy interventions? Here, there’s a lot more debate and uncertainty. For example, in this 2019 paper by Bloom, Van Reenen, and Williams, they try to describe some of the main policy tools available to influence innovation. In a table at the end of the paper, they evaluate the quality and conclusiveness of the evidence for different policies.Settled issues, with high quality evidence:
Skilled migration is good
R&D tax credits work
Stuff we’re less sure about, either because evidence conflicts a bit, or we lack very good evidence:
Direct R&D grants
Patent boxes
Impact of universities on STEM supply
Stuff that we’re very unsure about:
Impact of providing incentives to universities
Effects of intellectual property rights
Mission oriented policies (like DARPA)
Among other things it’s important that people think that of themselves as having the agency to solve big problems; that innovation and entrepreneurship—basically just pioneering new paths—is one of the things that it’s normal to do with your life. I have written a bit about that here and here.
You can try to do that at scale by trying to impact pop culture, and I don’t doubt that works to some degree. But I think the challenge is you are trying to convince someone that people like you can innovate too; and there is an inherent distance between what’s in pop culture and yourself for most people, simply because most people are not the subject of movies, TV shows, profiles, etc. More effective if it’s your brother or classmate or coworker who models the innovative career path, since it’s a small leap to think “if they can do it, why not me?”
The biggest single thing is the government simply pays for a very large chunk of science! In 2019, the federal government paid for 41% of US scientific research.[1] That was more than the private sector (33%), university system (13%), or the philanthropic sector (10%). It’s true that if the US government stepped back these other sectors would probably step forward to shoulder some of the burden, but I doubt they would cover the majority of the short-fall.
More broadly, I think science and innovation is pretty hard to predict. That means we ideally want an innovation ecosystem that explores and tries lots of different approaches, even if some of those approaches don’t seem to hold the highest promise at there outset. One way you can get that is to have a private sector that is open to new entrants and startups who want to try different stuff than the incumbents. But those new firms are still going to be ultimately chasing the same signal as everyone else, namely profit, which might limit the extent to which this ecosystem explores the potential space of technological possibility.
So I think it’s useful to have some innovating organizations who are pursuing goals entirely untethered from market success. The government is one viable solution to this problem of getting a bit more exploration into the innovation ecosystem. I haven’t seen a study that tries to rigorously quantify the value of, e.g., NASA or DARPA, in terms of their spillovers to the rest of the economy, but I would be surprised if they don’t come out looking like good investments.
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From table RD-3 of the NSF science and engineering report, taking basic research as a proxy for science.
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Where are we strong?
Across the sweep of history, the contemporary USA has got to be in the top 5% for it’s cultural support for innovation. But I think that’s mostly because the default state through human history has been so bad, rather than that we are so good![1] But it could be a lot worse! Elon Musk was person of the year in 2021!
It’s true that a lot of people are down on innovation, but I think to some degree that has to be an inevitable part of the kind of free society you want where lots of different perspectives (itself important for innovation!) are welcome and collide. A world with universal acclaim for innovation and progress would itself be kind of stifling. But that’s not to say we have the balance right already.
Where are there opportunities for improvement?
In my experience, different regions of the USA differ a lot in terms of what you ambitious people think they should do with their energies, and indeed how ambitious they should be. In some places, the ambitious thing to do might be to go to an Ivy League school, and then to be funneled into finance or medicine or something. In others, it’s to found a startup. In my own home state, neither of these was particularly emphasized. I think it would be great if people had a bit more exposure to what ambition means in different places, to broaden their own views about what a good life means. Not everyone would opt to be an innovator, but I think at present a lot of people who should probably are not because they simply don’t consider it much.
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Joe Henrich’s book The Secret of our Success has some really interesting examples of traditional societies where if you tried to be innovative and more efficient than your peers, you would end up subtly killing yourself. In a world where humanity’s causal knowledge about how the world works is weak, innovation probably is dangerous to the individual, and so society’s rationally encouraged doing things the traditional way.
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My basic view is that modern communication technology makes it pretty easy to communicate and exchange ideas with people, as long as you already have a relationship with those people. It’s less well suited for forming relationships because it’s not so good at helping you discover people outside what you think you’re interested in (because we tend to go to websites catering to our interests), and because it’s a bit harder to build deep trust without face to face meetings.
In-person events based around groups that have common interests but don’t already know each other can be really useful for forging deeper relationships, and the internet means those relationships can remain productive at a distance. They can also be useful for meeting new people, if these meetings are packed with people you don’t already know and the meetings force you to interact with new people (for example, by making you queue for a buffet, find a table with an opening, sit next to someone on a bus to a second location, circulate around and look at posters, etc.).
Maybe big conferences aren’t that good for this kind of thing, as Feynman and Eric speculate? At a big conference, you’re more likely to know more people and so you might end up just hanging out with them and not meeting new people. And perhaps, knowing you unlikely to run into any given person a second time, it just doesn’t feel as important to introduce yourself and get to know them? Or maybe it just takes two or three minor encounters to really build a relationship for many people.
For more on academic conferences, I wrote something here.
I think three different things might be true:
Scientific and technological progress is getting harder
But the pace of progress is steady because we try harder
Nostalgia bias, the esoteric nature of modern advances, and general human crankiness makes people falsely believe the rate of progress is slowing more than it actually is
I’m pretty confident about #1 and #3, less sure about #2. We certainly are trying harder, but maybe not enough to keep the overall rate of progress steady. I go back and forth on this, but at least think the case for a slowing rate of progress is not nearly as strong as the case for #1.
Why is #1 true? I think it’s a combination of things. To a large degree, this just seems to be an inevitable feature of advancing knowledge; the burden of knowledge gets heavy, and maybe we also pluck some of the low hanging fruit. But a non-negligible part of the slowdown is probably due to the way we organize and conduct R&D. Improving that would have really high benefits, even if we’re probably not going to go back to the era when a handful of gentleman scientists could make giant advances.
I will cheat and list two ideas, plus one irrelevant one.
First, let’s start with some large-scale descriptive statistics of practices!
How do different labs organize and manage their staff?
How do different editors manage their journal and peer review process?
How do different grant reviewers pick grants?
The goal is to see if there are obvious best practices; what kinds of stuff is correlated with good outcomes? This would be some kind of large-scale survey.
Second, I’ve always wanted to know more about the political economy of R&D. How do governments decide how much to spend on R&D? I’m not sure the best way to study this though.
Third, my dream research project, after we have sorted out the more important stuff, is to use the decadal Sight and Sound Greatest Movies of All Time poll to study how people’s perception of artistic greatness changes over time. Do people change their minds? Or is it all about new (younger) critics embracing newer films?
Probably the most concrete topic I’ve written the most about is the geographic distribution of an R&D workforce. I think one of my main takeaways is to not assume that everyone working together in the same building is as good as it gets, in terms of innovation, though it depends on the industry. Reasons to consider a more distributed workforce:
You can hire people who are a better fit for a specific role if you are set up for a remote workforce
A distributed workforce is exposed to a greater diversity of information environments
Modern communication technology makes it feasible to collaborate effectively at a distance, so that in person communication is no longer so crucial
That said, a distributed workforce offers its own challenges. You have to be more intentional about facilitating random meetings among different parts of the org for one, or you risk excessive siloing. And I think occasional in-person meetups are also important.
If you think nothing matters as much as getting the right people, then this is all the more important!
Some of my favorite papers on corporate innovation is the works of Ashish Arora and his colleagues, who are actively working on this stuff.
It’s been great that people I respect like the project, but the most important thing about it becoming popular is that I now get paid to do it. People sometimes say if you get paid to do something you previously did for fun, it kind of ruins it for you because it becomes work. That hasn’t been my experience, probably because (1) I don’t stress about view counts or anything anymore, and (2) I work on it a few hours each M-Th, but it’s not my entire professional life (much less my whole identity).
The main thing that has changed as the project has become bigger is that it’s more ambitious than it was at the outset. Mostly you can see that in the length of the articles, but also a bit in the work I put into the site infrastructure. I still write what I think is interesting, though other stuff I’m working on at the Institute for Progress and now at Open Philanthropy has some influence on what I think is interesting.
Probably the hardest part is knowing how much cool stuff is out there that I don’t have time to get to!
Yeah, this is a hugely important topic that is tough to appreciate from outside. I’m fond of this quote by Duncan Watts:
”For 20 years I thought my job was, as a basic scientist, publish papers and throw them over the wall for someone else to apply. I now realise that there’s no one on the other side of the wall. Just a huge pile of papers that we’ve all thrown over.”
The conventional wisdom is that, at least in the USA, you need a think tank apparatus that specializes in digesting academic literature and packaging it for policy-making. That’s one of the roles that the Institute for Progress plays on the metascience front. Also, this general topic is something I hope to look into more as a New Things Under the Sun post.
Agree that franchises are fundamentally about branding!
But I think it’s not just that it took movie studios a long time to learn that branding was effective. I think the strategy only became very effective in the new environment where there were lots of choices for consumers. One way to think of it is to assume that consumers rely on two pieces of information when making a judgment about which movie they will most enjoy: word-of-mouth and similarity to other movies they’ve seen and enjoyed.
When the number of movies is small, enough people see every movie that word-of-mouth is a very reliable guide to the quality of a movie. Here, I’m thinking word-of-mouth is from people you already know well, and so you can judge their taste. Like in a small town, everyone knows the artisanal coffee shop, and so Starbucks isn’t desirable. But when the number of movies is really large, word-of-mouth is not very reliable. You never know more than one or two people who have seen any movie, and even fewer who have seen more than one that you’re choosing between.
In the latter environment, you start to give more weight to the similarity of a movie to other movies you’ve seen. And that creates a feedback loop, because if more people start choosing to go to movies based on their similarity to other movies, then you can only get accurate word-of-mouth information about those kinds of movies (franchises). In the second environment, it starts to pay more to make movies that are similar to existing movies, even if they not be as good as the best original movies. In the second equilibrium, the problem is that the really good original movies can’t be identified, and so they languish at the box office.