Thread by @eriktorenberg

Some takeaways from conversations w/ @jasoncrawford, @ArtirKel, and @Ben_Reinhardt on progress, particularly on how 1) funding models, 2) regulation, and 3) culture influence progress 👇

1- Funding Models:

There are a lot of different funding models (NIH grants, DARPA...)

A lot of research is done in universities, yet it's a relatively new phenomenon.

There was a golden era for corporate research w/ Bell Labs & Xerox, but then & gov't stepped in.

The US famously doesn't have a national coordinated innovation policy.

In some ways this is a good thing, since means there is more diversity of thought and funding, more opportunities for someone to say "yes" to scientists and fund their projects.

That said, some people believe our funding sources (e.g. NIH) have become way too centralized, & if we could have just more decentralized versions, we'd have more creativity

Beyond decentralization, need uncorrelated work to maximize chances of discovery

It might be better to break down the NIH into smaller units, or distribute more who makes decisions over the money.

Without competition between different approaches, how would we know what works best?

One man's nonsense might be the building block for tomorrow man's cancer cure

Think of it as a few tiny Manhattan Projects, maybe 20-200M$ each, way bigger than an academic grant and potentially fundable by philanthropists.

People in these orgs wouldn't just aim to publish papers or get tenure, but they'd have specific goals and well-defined metrics.

At the same time, it's nice to have the idea of "no-strings attached" to enable people to take risks in research without fear of. looking dumb.

Imagine scientists getting funded to do anything they want for the next 10 years, no matter what.

Problem: scientists spend up to 50% of their time applying for grants

Fast Grants seem to show that it is possible to go fast while funding high quality research

Ultimately money has to come from somewhere, and any incentives have tradeoffs

fastgrants.org

B/c at the end of the day, we want funding mechanisms to be fair and accountable.

But anytime you have a fair and accountable process,
there's there's going to be a lot of paperwork and diligence that needs to go along with it as well as gameifiable metrics .

If we could change anything about academia?

- Get rid of peer review
- Get rid of accountability around grants
- Get rid of departments
- Get rid of administrators
- Breaking research out of academia

If this is controversial, blame @Ben_Reinhardt not me. :P

2: Regulation

We've accumulated a bureaucratic, regulatory state

Any time there's a disaster, we start adding rules

The intent is good, but the cure's sometimes worse than the disease

Fast forward 100 years after FDA, & now it costs well over $1B to develop a successful drug

Anecdotally, China seems to regulate technologies several years after introducing them

What if we did the same?

We'll regulate technologies, but we need to actually see what their effects are first

We'll thoroughly warn customers of risks etc, but let them opt in or out of it

If you look at the history of technology, most technologies came with new risks; most of them needed new safety mechanisms to be invented with it.

When we invented the X-ray, for example we also realized it could be harmful for our health.

Safety concerns are real, but we need to understand there are always tradeoffs to regulation.

We need to acknowledge that there is a tradeoff between safety and speed, efficiency, progress, and long term breakthroughs.

3- Culture:

The idea of progress itself is a relatively new

Before then, most cultures had the opposite idea of ancestor worship: that our ancestors were the greatest people who ever lived, that all the important knowledge was revealed to them, & all we should do is study them.

It was understandable back in the Middle Ages to look at the pyramids, or the ruins left from the ancient Romans & believe they were the peak of civilization

Ancestor worship had to be challenged and overturned to have the scientific & industrial revolutions & be forward looking

Compare Chinese & U.S. sci-fi:

In China, they show enormous geo-engineering projects

It's an indication of the ambition to do enormous projects form the country

In the U.S. it's mostly dystopian stuff (e.g. Black Mirror)

This effects what careers people go into

Stagnation?

People say we've had a lot of progress in the world of bits, but not a lot in the world of atoms.

Isn't it just naturally how progress goes? We don't make a lot of progress in every area at every time.

We used to have progress in multiple spaces at the same time.

The way we get exponential growth over long periods of time is by piling S-curves on top of each other, by jumping to a new S-curve as soon as one starts to slow down.

We need clarity around how we find new S-curves, how many are going on at once, how big are they overall, etc

Is science slowing down?

Some fields are growing at a good pace (life sciences), others are stagnant (physics)

But overall it seems it's slowing down.

theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

GDP growth seems to be slower than it used to, why might this be? Well, if we agree that science is slowing down that's one culprit, but there are others some people have proposed: everything from regulation to demographic decline.

amazon.com/dp/B071W7JCKW/…

Demographics: Now we have less young people and less population growth, that means fewer workers but also less people having ideas that could increase productivity.

In most models in economics that's the key driver of long term progress: People having ideas.

Why is science slowing down? Why is growth slowing down in some sectors but not others?

A progress studies approach would look at these problems, look at their history, what happened, look at current developments, look at incentives, & propose solutions.

theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

Unclear how much of it is natural (low hanging fruit) vs cultural vs regulatory vs us not having a major external threat (e.g. WWII or Cold War, for now) vs us not having a shared goal (e.g. Manifest Destiny)

Also unclear what comes first, the motivation or the innovation

How to compare progress movement vs transhumanism?

Transhumanism is a futuristic movement.

There's two main questions when it comes to progress:
•How can we go from 0 to 1 in some areas
•How can we distribute what already exists to more people

How do we instill an appreciation for progress?

The place to start is to tell the actual history. The history of progress has been lost. People take progress for granted, most people don't know, or they know in a weak sense how much life is better now than it was 100 yrs ago

They just wake up in the morning on their foam mattress, and they roll out of bed to take a hot shower. And then they get fresh fruit out of the refrigerator and make fresh ground coffee, sit on the laptop and hop on the train to go into work in an air conditioned building...

And they sit in their comfy chair, listening to their favorite music in their bluetooth headphones streaming through spotify....

200 yrs ago, you'd have been hauling water from the well to take a bath, and the water might be contaminated and you might get cholera

You'd walk to work or ride a horse, and your job was probably on a farm (16 hr days all year round in all weather), and you prob didn't have access to fresh fruit year round, and if you wanted music, you'd have to perform it yourself.

"These contrasts are not vivid for people....

The way we live today is a gift handed down by our ancestors, a gift that we should be grateful for. We should approach the world with more of that sense of gratitude and awe."