Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering

People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible

Manufacturing is important and often ignored

The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia

All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going

Academic culture prizes individual recognition

Younger professors have to spend more time getting money

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup

Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.

The idea that academia is for crazy exploration and companies are for low risk exploration is bullshit

Three myths about scientific peer review

A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

What was the real incentive for people to work on the DARPA Grand Challenge?

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

NS Notes on Officers Techniques

Necrobotics illustrates how academia forces engineering

The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

There are very few senior individual contributors in academia

Is it more impactful to find and train undiscovered diamonds or to unlock well-positioned but constrained researchers?

Wolfgang Merkt conversation 12 Oct 2021

An institution riffing on the ARPA Model could enable paradigm shifts that are not happening

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Funding structures lead to several layers of indirection on what even gets proposed

Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?

Running list of relevant science news?

# §Academia Constraints
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

- [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]
- [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]]
- [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]
-  [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]
- [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]]
- [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
- [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]
- [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]]
- [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]
- [[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]]
- [[Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]
- [[A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility]]
- [[Physical experiments are expensive]]
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]
- [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]]
- [[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]]
- [[Going outside of the approved process can be a black mark against people in academia]]
- [[People proposing work that they have already done is a sign that feedback loops are broken]]
- [[Necrobotics illustrates how academia forces engineering]]
- [[Labs implicitly judge research through the sense of dollars per paper]]

### Related
- [[§Startup Constraints]]
- [[§Corporate R&D Constraints]]
- [[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]]
- [[Market Failures in Science]]

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§Academia Constraints

Timesharing could be extended from digital infrastructure to physical infrastructure

Marissa Convo 1/5/2020

# A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility
This creates a slight chicken and egg problem and makes scientists more at the mercy of the [[Distributed Innovation Suppression Complex]] because if the institution doesn’t like you, you’re less likely to have a lab which makes it harder to show you’re right. 

### Related
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]] 
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]]
- [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
- [[§Academia Constraints]]



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The ability to say ‘huh that’s funny’ is important for discovering new phenomena

The government grant process depends on politics and committees

Formal process lets people outside the organization trust in the process instead of the people

Legibility poisoning

Workshops could be a way to start small building a private ARPA

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

Fast decisions involve few people

Every program at DARPA is intensely technically scrutinized by the tech council

Trusted hierarchies are not always the best way to do centralized coordination

The only time you can get philanthropies to do interesting things is at the beginning

People often confuse whether they are or should be creating prescriptive vs descriptive work

Productive Nanosystems - A Technology Roadmap

The good idea fairy is the failure mode of a single decision maker

Unaccountability leads to progress

NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis

National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research

Analyze by who can tap the breaks and who can open the throttle

Coauthors are committees

Paradigm shifts require extraordinary individuals

Peer review is a great system for preventing waste

Alexey Guzey conversation 17 Aug 2022

# Decisions made by committees lead to median results
Something something game theory

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1408219906319937536?s=20



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# Distributed Innovation Suppression Complex
From [[Eric Weinstein]]

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Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities

University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia

dijekstraStrengthsAcademicEnterprise1994

# Professors do three or more jobs
- Teach students
- Mentor graduate students
- Help run the academic department
- Manage a research group
- Apply for money 
- Do research



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Stagnation

Fair games are self-limiting

Human capital theory of stagnation

# Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers
[[Professors do three or more jobs]] but at the end of the day they are directly judged on their lab’s research output and both directly and directly on how much grant money they bring in. The professor’s lab’s research depends not just on the professor’s ability to do research but (arguably more) on their ability to manage, attract good grad students ([[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]), and bring in enough money to keep the lab well funded. The professor’s name and reputation goes on everything that comes out of the lab, so there is incentive to have the biggest lab you can without compromising quality (and possibly there’s even a Pareto-front where you compromise quality a little to 

Therefore, the most successful professors are usually the ones who are the best grant writers and managers. A professor’s success is not entirely decoupled from their ability to do research because [[People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing]]. 

The more a field depends on large labs and expensive equipment, the less professors do actual research because they need to recruit and fund graduate students. [[Science has become more capital and labor intensive over time]]

### Related
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]



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# Younger professors have to spend more time getting money
Which is ironic because they statistically will have the most new ideas. 

Younger professors have less of a track record and less of a relationship with people who give out grants ([[Professors have long term relationships with their NSF program officers]]) so they need to spend more effort getting those grants and the size of the grants they get is usually smaller. Spending more effort getting smaller grants means that they need to spend proportionally more of their time raising money instead of doing research. 

### Related
- [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]]
- [[§Academia Constraints]]
- [[Szilard point]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]



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Benʼs working notes

A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility

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