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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People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power

People are using institutions as platforms

Context affects the types of ideas people have and the work they do to pursue those ideas

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

Being Elite should be painful

Week of 26 July 2020

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

# §Institutions and Games
### What are Institutions
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]
- [[There are two levels of institution]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]
- [[Individual actions reflect on Institutions]]
- [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]
- [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]
- Institutions have [[Institutional scar tissue]]
- [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]
- [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]

### Institutions working well or badly
- [[Market failures are actually failures of the existing institutions to allow markets to work]]
-  [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]
- [[“Have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Lowering barriers to entry is clutch for healthy institutions]]

### Games
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Fair games are self-limiting]]
- [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]]
- [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]]
- [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]
- [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]
- [[Relative vs absolute games]] ::needs work::
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]]
- [[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]]

### Different Games in the World
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

### Questions
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]]
- [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]
- [[Why aren’t people building more institutions?]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]

### References
- [[Venkatesh Rao thread on institution building]]
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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§Academia Constraints

The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting

§Institutions and Games

Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Motivation is not context-free

Human capital theory of stagnation

Research requires intrinsic motivation

Bottling Lightning

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

Researchers distend the meaning of discovery because of academic incentives

# Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge
People keep track of their ‘score’ in citations, published papers, grant money, awards.

### Related
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Academia 



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Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics

gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012

Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic

One of the most failure-prone points in technological development is when a technology needs to move from an organization that focuses on R+D to one that focuses on marketing and manufacturing

We can cleanly attribute philosophical ideas to people but we cannot do the same with science or technology

# Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic
Is there a mapping between concept and implementation halves of heuretics and TRLs? [[Conception lives in the realm of TRL 1-3]]

Since [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]] the work necessary to make the knowledge impactful is devalued.  Those priorities are not necessarily ‘bad’ but it does require explicit acknowledgement that there is a lot more work necessary to make a full heuretic. [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]].  The focus on conception means that *academia does not create complete heuretics.* Incomplete heuretics make transferring the technology out of academia deceptively hard ([[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]].) Taking over an incomplete heuretic requires a lot more context.  [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]. 

The need for context may suggest that it’s important to have whomever is taking over involved in the process *during the conception.* Organizations that successfully do transfers seem to do this:
- [[TandemLaunch]] talks to people in the lab before
-  [[Calvin Nguyen]]’s entrepreneur-in-lab idea is trying to embed the person who would do the transfer 
- Most successful companies that spin out of labs either have someone who did the research as a cofounder 
	- Are there counterexamples to this? [[Are there examples of successful technology transfer out of a lab without close collaboration between someone in the lab and the external organization?]]

A corollary to the increased need for context around a concept-only heuretic is that copying an incomplete heuretic is much harder than copying a complete one. Throwing things over the wall doesn’t work unless you have clean interfaces and [[only complete heuretics have clean interfaces]] and therefore the conception half of a heuretic can’t be thrown over a wall. This absence of clean interfaces may be a big reason why [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]]! 🤯

Another corollary is that chaining together conception-only-heuretics will *absolutely require* talking to people in order to get enough context and that it *can’t* be done automatically by reading papers. ([[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]]) 

### Related
- [[Technology Readiness and the Valley of Death]] - specifically the “ilities" 



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Fair games have legible rules

Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# All institutions are coupled to at least one game
[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]] through a set of spoken or unspoken rules. Those rules create a game. ([[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]].) 

The bigger more missions an institution has, the more games it will also have. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].

Additionally, [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]] - without them there is no boundary between who is part of the institution and who is not (and thus, who should be expected to know and adhere to the rules of the game.) Often there is a separate gatekeeping game to start playing the institutional game. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. 

### Some Examples
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]



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Q3 2022

Coordination and Coercion in Research Funding

Week of 4 Jul 2022

7 Jul 2022

8 Jul 2022

# Bottling Lightning 
# Bottling Lightning 
### Feedback
From [[Andy Matuschak]]:
> Intrinsic motivation isn’t an unmoved mover

I found myself pretty unpersuaded by this section. It’s definitely true that incentives will change behavior. And it’s true that people who are motivated by achievement and status will find those motivations molded by context. But those are extrinsic motivations. I’m willing to buy that intrinsic motivation is also somewhat affected, but I’d guess the effect is inconsistent and sometimes weak. More often I think people just end up lying to themselves about their true interests—and diminishing themselves as a result. Can you make a stronger case here?

> In completely unconstrained research, once the work is started, management does no steering, like Donald Braben’s approach in the venture research program he ran for BP.

Does that even count as research management? If not, and if we think Braben did good work, and if funding were 100x’d, would we do everything Braben-style? In what situations would we not? You sort of gesture at this incompleteness later in this section, but too vaguely—what can you really say about it?

> Work that needs more active management runs into a tricky situation.

What kind of work is that? Can we know a priori? ::Here::

> As an exercise, I tried mapping current institutions onto the constrained-opinionatedness axes to see which flavors of management are more or less represented.

I think VC is often much more controlling than you depict! e.g. strongly pushing founders to adopt more ambitious growth goals strongly determines many downstream behaviors/outcomes.

### Work

As I’ve been building PARPA, I run into several consistent attitudes towards how research should be conducted and funded that I think are counterproductive.  

Let’s start with two pieces of accepted wisdom about research that often find themselves in tension. (If you buy both conclusions, feel free to skip to the next section!) 

1. Great [[Research requires intrinsic motivation]]

There are three core reasons why great research requires massive motivation:

Great research hinges on people thinking about problems all the time: from Archimedes realizing that buoyancy came from displacing fluids in the bath to Kary Mullis’[famous night drive where the idea of PCR came to him.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unusual-origin-of-the-polymeras).  These discoveries require questions to be constantly percolating in the back of a researcher's mind. 9-5 just doesn't cut it.  

Great research often requires risks to reputation, careers, or physical wellbeing. Newton stuck a rod into his own eye to experiment with how lens deformation affected vision. Edwin Land invented polaroid in part through breaking and entering: climbing through a window via a 6th floor ledge in order to use a Columbia lab’s powerful magnet.

Thirdly, researchers on the knowledge frontier are often ridiculed, scorned, or persecuted: both from within their communities or outside of them.  [^1]

The timescale of glory, even for *successful* research, is often tens of years, if not lifetimes. Add that to the fact that the goal of great research is rarely to become rich and it’s clear that a good chunk of that massive motivation needs to be intrinsic. 

The importance of intrinsic motivation has created a common perception (both among researchers and non-researchers) that the ideal state for doing research is, as [[Vannevar Bush]] bush put it in “Science, The Endless Frontier”: `free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.` But at the same time …

2. [[Research management matters]]

Most researchers bristle at the idea of being managed. But management happens *all the time* in research. Many triumphs of research, especially in the 20th century, depended on good management. 

At some point, unless the work for a project can be done by a single person, someone needs to play a coordinating function. As uncomfortable as it is to say, coordinating involves getting people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.  Everything from [[LIGO]] to [[Xerox PARC]] to any [[DARPA]] program to any academic lab with postdocs and grad students had leaders nudging people to do more of some things and less of others. These nudges can be at various levels of abstraction and involve various levels of coercion, but at the end of the day, coordination involves causing two or more people to work together when they would not otherwise do so. In other words, research management matters. 

And yet, isn’t it a bad idea to tell people what to do (to put it bluntly) if great research requires massive intrinsic motivation? 

This tension, I think, is resolved by two facts: intrinsic motivation isn’t an unmoved mover and management isn’t just telling people what to do.

### Intrinsic motivation isn’t an unmoved mover
Take the case of a successful university professor: they obviously have some real curiosity and scientific question that got them into the field and kept them going. However, in order to become successful, they needed to figure out which aspects of their curiosity could be satisfied on a tenure-clock timescale and were interesting to other people. Remember, [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]. The game has two parts: the knowledge needs to be *new* and it needs to be interesting to other people. Additionally, the professor can only really do work that is fundable. As a result the professor feeds the aspects of their intrinsic motivation that are the right mixture of novel+interesting+achievable+fundable and, at best, puts the rest on hold or pokes at it on the side. The way we think is constantly shaped by our context, so these neglected interested bits often whither. It’s not that the professor is *not* intrinsically motivated by their work, it’s that over time their intrinsic motivation becomes shaped by the game they are playing.  

The effect also probably works in reverse, where the selective pressures of the game mean that people whose intrinsic motivations do not have the right shape leave or are kicked out. 

This broader phenomenon of games shifting intrinsic motivation is in no way limited to academia or research. You see the same phenomenon in Silicon Valley, where the game shapes intrinsic motivations to start companies, VC funds, etc. I suspect that many people whose (true) biggest motivation in life is to start a company would have felt the same (true) level of motivation to lead a company of knights 1000 years ago.

The upshot is that what people think they *can* do has a significant effect on what they intrinsically want to do.[^2]
 
### Management isn’t just telling people what to do
Robert Oppenheimer was Einstein’s manager at the Institute for Advanced Study. Did Oppenheimer tell Einstein what to do in any way? Of course not. He was fucking Einstein. Good managers give people who do well with autonomy a ton of it. You might say that these managers aren’t actually managing! But they are for the simple reason that giving the autonomy is a *choice* they’re making. There are many other knobs that managers can turn and roles they fill besides being simply arbiters of resources and autonomy. Making sure the right people talk to each other, nudging towards more productive paths, setting goals, and giving a group of people a sense of what is celebrated are just a few of the moves managers have at their disposal.[^3] Management is, in fact, part of the research process itself.  

While management isn’t just telling people what to do, management does mean that there is always the *potential* to constrain autonomy. This potential is more acute the more someone needs more resources to accomplish their goals than they control directly. 

### Enter funding organizations
Taken together, the role of management in the research process and the malleability of the intrinsic motivations that drive great researchers leads to a surprising conclusion: *funding organizations are not exogenous to the research process*. 

The default perception of organizations that fund research, from the NSF to private foundations to an individual running a microgrant program, is that organizations that give other organizations money to do research are exogenous to the research process, anointing some projects and condemning others to resource starvation and death. To the contrary, funding organizations are managing research whether they admit it or not. People consciously or subconsciously shape their projects and agendas to what they think can get funded. Over time this shaping affects intrinsic motivations themselves and even the shape of whole fields. 

This shaping The type of work that experiments  that many government grants prioritize spending on grad students over equipment, to name one example. An abundance of funding in areas like AI and health-related research has shifted 
::need more here::

If funding organizations are indeed research managers, the question of how to do research management well is underdiscussed. Most discussions are stuck at “Freedom good. Constraints bad.” That certainly sounds good and has some truth to it but doesn’t address questions like “how do you decide who to give that freedom to?” or “what happens when more than one person needs to coordinate in a way that isn’t 100% aligned with their own interests?”  I’m still actively learning, but one useful way I’ve found to think about research management is along two axes that lend themselves to a nice consultant-y 2x2: **active constraints** and **opinionatedness**. 

**Active constraints** are the extent of management’s intervention in the research process once a project has begun. This intervention can be everything from demanding reports to sitting down at the bench and pipetting themselves. In completely unconstrained research, once the work is started, management does no steering, like [[Donald Braben]]’s approach in the venture research program he ran for BP. If a researcher wants to take the money and do something completely different than what they initially said they would, so be it. By contrast, [[Elon Musk]]’s past management of the Tesla autopilot team — talking about hardware and algorithms and firing a big chunk of them when they weren’t making satisfactory progress is a good example of large active constraints. Most government granting agencies sit somewhere in between, constraining, to some extent, how money can be spent and requiring progress reports, but steering clear of nitty-gritties and allowing some directional shifts as long as they’re still within scope. 

A more actively constraining management style requires more intuition around the work being done.[^4] Generally, the people with the best intuitions in a research area are some of the best researchers in that area. As a result, more active management requires convincing the best people in an area to be managers. In order for *that* to happen, those people need to believe that being a manager will advance their research agenda more than other options, creating a tricky problem when an area needs tight coordination to advance but the only people who are skilled enough to do that coordination don’t want to play that role.[^5] 

**Opinionatedness** is how opinionated management is about the research work to be done. [[J.C.R. Licklider]] had a clear vision of what human-computer synthesis would look like. He brought only people who shared that vision into his ARPA program that would lead to most of our modern personal computing paradigms. [[George Heilmeier]], another legendary research manager, had a very different approach from Licklider , despite also directing the same organization[^6]. Indeed, the two clashed so hard that Licklider quit. As long as PMs could answer his[famous catechism](https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism), Heilmeier had few opinions about what specific work should happen as long as it was broadly in the scope of National Defense.

Together, the research management styles of Braben, Musk, Licklider, and Heilmeier form the four quadrants of the 2x2. All of these folks managed research to great success: there are Nobel prizes and iconic technologies that would not have existed without them. Yet, their management styles are diametrically opposed. We have no choice but to conclude that each of their approaches are effective for *different flavors of research*.

As an exercise, I tried mapping current institutions onto these axes to see which flavors of management are more or less represented. My particular mappings are hand-wavy and inaccurate but I will stand by the broad facts that there are large swaths of open space and heavy representation by grants and small, tightly-coordinated orgs.[^7]  Types of research that mesh well with management styles in the heavily represented areas are not just more likely to succeed, but act as basins of attractions for people’s intrinsic motivation. 

In summary:
1. Research management matters BUT it doesn’t mean just telling people what to do.
2. Intrinsic motivation is critical for great research BUT it is malleable. 
3. As a result of #1 and #2, funding organizations are part of the research process, whether they like it or not. 
4. There is no “correct” way to manage research: different management styles push different sorts of research. 
5. Current funding organizations cluster heavily around a few management styles.  

These points offer several ways to upgrade how we think about funding and managing research and potentially point to areas where there are gaps in the management ecosystem. 

[^1]: Obviously not all great research requires 24 hr obsession, massive risks, and pariahism. 
[^2]: The malleability of intrinsic motivation is why [[Tyler Cowen]]’s point about the power of raising other’s aspirations ([[cowenHighreturnActivityRaising2018]]) works. 
[^3]: I realize that for many of you this is obvious, but people often seem to forget or ignore it in the context of research. 
[^4]:  [[People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing]]
[^5]: There are many reasons why a skilled practitioner might not want to play a coordinating role: they like their current role (being a tenured professor or FAANG employee are both quite pleasant for example); the institutional structure they would need to coordinate from might come with insufficient resources or other constraints that they think will prevent them from achieving their vision; or they might just dislike the work it entails (coordinating people can be incredibly frustrating). 
[^6]: Arguably DARPA was a drastically different organization before and after 1972, but the core DNA was the same. [[ARPA became DARPA in 1972 because of the increased scrutiny on military spending both in the government and outside of it]]. 
[^7]: Obviously not all grants are the same and there are many differences between FROs and startups. Institutions exist on *many* more axes and this is just a (albeit interesting) projection onto two of them.  



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Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation

There are three main theories of stagnation

# Human capital theory of stagnation
The human capital theory of stagnation is that specialization among researchers and the incentives they experience have increased coordination costs and led to effort allocation that has decreased the rate of breakthroughs.  

We do know that specialization and division of labor drives Smithian growth. ([[Smithian Growth vs Schumpetarian Growth]]) The scientific economy is subject to those same forces and researchers have become increasingly specialized. However, this specialization may be contributing to [[Stagnation]] in several ways. 

One argument goes that since [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]] and new innovations don’t actually require fewer knowledge areas than they did in the past. Combined with specialization, this requirement means that innovations need increasingly large teams of people working closely, which leads to higher coordination costs per invention in order for each specialist to understand the others enough to contribute usefully.  Both [[The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’ Is Innovation Getting Harder?]] and [[odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995]] hint at this argument. 

Another fact is that the number of researchers has exploded along with the specialization. However,  despite the internet, the explosion of researcher numbers and specializations means that their ability to find the right person to collaborate with has not kept up. So while there might exist a productive division of labor on a problem, it takes a ton of effort to *find* the person to collaborate with.  [[The Economics of Scientific Collaboration]] touches on this theory. 

[[odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995]] argues that the exploding number of researchers means that they just *can’t* operate a mode they did in the past. The explosion of research has led innovations becoming effectively a commodity and expectations of continuously improving systems. These outcomes in turn both make scientists fungible and expected to churn out improvement at a certain rate that need to work with existing systems. My personal take is that these incentives aren’t conducive to deep work or paradigm-shifting innovations.

Other incentives on scientists have also pushed them to work on more incremental shorter term projects. [[bhattacharyaStagnationScientificIncentives2020]] argues out that two of the biggest incentives driving this incrementalism are citation-obsession and grant-giving processes. The number of papers a research has published and the number of citations those papers garnered are a key metric for measuring a professor’s performance when considering tenure, hiring, and prestige. Thus, anybody playing the academic research game (which includes people in universities, national labs have incentives to publish things that will get a lot of citations.  ([[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]. ) Keep in mind that these citation incentives also include National Labs ([[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]) and many people in corporate R&D labs, as papers are the primary shared currency between those worlds.  

In order for something to be publishable, work needs to be sufficiently novel ([[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]), so individuals are pushed away from grungy engineering efforts to implement already-described ideas. A publication also needs to get through peer review ([[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]]) which punishes excessive divergence from current paradigms [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]].

In order to get lots of citations, a publication needs to hit a sweet spot where it is both new but not far outside of current paradigms. Of course, if you publish a paper that kicks off a new paradigm, it will get many citations. However, paradigm-shifting papers also are likely to get close to zero citations if they’re even published (note the above point about peer review filtering for ideas that are in-paradigm.) This tradeoff sets up a choice between a high risk, high reward option and a lower-risk medium reward option. The fact that there are two options doesn’t necessarily lead to stagnation, but combined with citation-obsession and the incentives of grad school, the potential downsides of the high-risk option are too great.
Remember, most academic researchers are grad students who would like to graduate and get a good job in a finite amount of time and [[There is an increasingly wide gap between the number of graduate students training for PhDs and academic positions for them to fill]]. 

The majority of grants are given out by foundations or government agencies.  In these situations, [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]. There is relatively little upside to funding wildly successful research, but substantial downside to wasting someone else’s money. This [[Asymmetric career risk]] for grant givers mean that researchers applying for those grants need to convince the grant giver that 

Navigating the publication-grant game is a skillset in and of itself, which means that [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]. It’s hand-wavey, but you could see how a research world that rewards good managers more than good researchers might lead to a shift of human capital that could impact the sorts of innovations that happen. 

On top of all of this, [[Academic culture prizes individual recognition]] which is one of many contributors to [[The (idea) valley of death]] that prevents many innovations that require a bunch of grungy work to scale up from making an impact. 
	
Overall, the human capital theory of stagnation feels like stagnation by a thousand cuts. However, the uniting cause seems to be the massive growth in the number of people doing research and the resulting cascade of locally rational adaptations. If this is the case, fixing each of these issues one at a time may be like playing whack-a-mole and you definitely can’t decimate the number of people doing research.

The human capital theory of stagnation (especially the flavor in [[bhattacharyaStagnationScientificIncentives2020]]) is closely tied to the [[Systemic decay theory of stagnation]] because the systems drive individual’s incentives and would *ideally* be acting to attenuate individual incentives that harm the system on-net. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].  Specifically, citation-obsession and grant-gaming are results of the bureaucratization of research. 

Arguably the [[Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation]] could be driving the specialization because as new knowledge gets harder to find, people are forced to specialize more and more. I’m not sure if it’s possible to tease apart how much of the specialization is driven by the nature of research itself and how much is driven by sociological forces.

There’s also a general sense that (partially driven by specialization) people don’t know how to build things anymore. That is, if someone had an idea about a flying car in the 50’s he might be able to just talk to his neighbor who knew how to build cars and airplanes and they could whip together a prototype. [[Definite Optimism as Human Capital]]. 

### Counterarguments
[[Is Science Slowing Down? - SSC]] argues convincingly that logarithmic technological progress should be the null hypothesis (remember, we have no immortal god-emperor Eisenhower or immortal god-emperor Marcus Aurelius.)  In this frame, the human capital theory of stagnation is simply how [[The gods of straight lines]] are enforcing that logarithmic growth. 

A more mundane counterargument is that there is actually a lot of good science being published and funded. Sure, it could be better, but on the margin, people who would do crazy research are still doing that research and if they’re good at it, they can still find money to do it. 

### Related 
- [[odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995]]
- [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]
- [[neumannOneProcess2020]]



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Research management matters

Catalytic funding needs to launch into an existing ecosystem to be effective

All funding organizations are research organizations

The changes in the academic system between the 2020s and the 1960s means that ARPA program managers cannot fully emulate Licklider

Andy Matuschak conversation 7 Jun 2022

Andy Matuschak conversation 22 Feb 2022

Andy Matuschak conversation 8 April 2022 around funders

# Motivation is not context-free
Some (I believe) uncontroversial points: 
1. Incentives change behavior. 
2. People who are motivated by achievement and status will find those motivations molded by the context they’re in. If the culture you’re in bestows status on those who driving their enemies before them, you will feel motivated to drive your enemies before you. If the culture you’re in bestows status on rockstars, you will feel especially strong motivation to pick up the guitar. 

Some questions based on these points alone:
- Are status and achievement intrinsic or extrinsic motivations? 
	- This question may be dragging us into semantics over whether the *desire* for status is intrinsic but the status itself is intrinsic. 
	- Obviously nobody has a single motivation — even people who are strongly driven to do some esoteric thing that nobody appreciates can bias towards status
- What fraction of all people are motivated by status and achievement? What fraction of people doing research are motivated by it?

I’m going to slice through a Gordon knot by asserting that [[Trying to dissect intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations is a fools errand]]. 

You could argue over whether the desire for achievement and status are intrinsic 

But what about people who are motivated by other things — we could list some: curiosity about how the world works, the desire to see something become reality, (hopefully positive) impact on the world. 

There is one model of intrinsic motivation in which your deepest interests have an ineffable quality — purity, perhaps. Or maybe it’s not quite that but it is that there is some unchangeable “real” motivation. In this model your intrinsic motivation is often obscured by external incentives — shiny objects, what others say we *should* do, and life constraints that force us away from it. BUT if you introspect deeply enough, you can rediscover that incorruptible core. I might call this the [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]-Ian view. 

It has become easy to mock this view: the cartoonish versions of it are the massive body of work around “finding your passion” “unleashing your inner child” “getting in touch with yourself,” midlife crises, etc. But at it’s core, it’s still how a lot of people conceive of great research.  

[[newportGoodTheyCan2012]]
[[alexanderLotteryFascinations2013]] 
To some extent this mirrors the nature/nuture debate, which as far as I can tell boils down to “it’s a complex feedback loop that makes it impossible to point to first-mover causalities.” [[Bryan Caplan]] would argue that parenting is basically irrelevant (See [[caplanSelfishReasonsHave2012]])

It’s easy to mock

This can seem cynical and does seem to deny the fact that there are some people who follow some North Star that nobody else can see or explain. 

If you give someone knowledge 

The question of what someone would do with infinite resources is a good intuition pump on the role of intrinsic motivations. Let’s ignore the 

The easiest way to get good at a game is to convince yourself that you’re interested in it. This shift is one of the ways that [[The way people think drastically changes depending on their context]]. As a result, the idea of “intrinsic motivation” becomes very tricky. 

Take the case of a successful university professor: they obviously have some real curiosity and scientific question that got them into the field and kept them going. However, in order to become successful, they needed to figure out which aspects of their curiosity could be executed on on a tenure-clock timescale and were interesting to other people. Remember, [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]. The game has two parts: it’s not *just* about creating new knowledge — it also needs to be interesting to other people. As a result the professor feeds the aspects of their intrinsic motivation that are the right mixture of novel+interesting+achievable and surprises the rest. It’s not that the professor is *not* intrinsically motivated by their work, it’s that over time their intrinsic motivation becomes shaped by the game they are playing. 

The effect also probably works in reverse, where the selective pressures of the game mean that people whose intrinsic motivations do not have the right shape leave or are kicked out. 

As a result, professors often stop feeling “intrinsically motivated” to do work that falls outside of the academic game they have been playing, even if their past self would have been stoked to do it, given the agency. Of course, the poll in [[collisonWhatWeLearned2021]] stands as a counterpoint —  78% of poll respondents say that their research program would drastically change if their funding were unrestricted. My (slightly cynical) hunch is that in this case they would stop feeling the need to do work that appeals to funding agencies but would still be heavily in the academic game of creating novel insights that are interesting to the community — they would still be embedded in a game, just a different one. 

A corollary to this is that completely unrestricted funding to do whatever they want (which is what everybody wants right?) will still be biased in activity space by the academic game. This bias is why, despite the fact that you could argue that you are trying to manage a creative process, [[Research management matters]]. The academic game has also shifted over time to become more competitive, increasing the selective pressures on professorial intrinsic motivation, arguably making heavy-handed game shifting ([[Funding can be seen as buying time from some game to enable someone to play another game]] )even more important. (See [[The changes in the academic system between the 2020s and the 1960s means that ARPA program managers cannot fully emulate Licklider]])

The phenomena of games shifting intrinsic motivation is in no way limited to academia or research. You see the same phenomenon in Silicon Valley, where the game shapes intrinsic motivations to start companies, VC funds, etc. 



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Shadows of the Future

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales

People want to be loved and be lovely

Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

How does money work in PARPA?

Reaper functions beat culture decks

Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?

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

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

The idea that you need to make a lot of money in software before you can work on sweet sci fi shit is false

‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society

# People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power
These games are usually on very long time scales.  [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]].  These long time scales make it so that people and organizations need to create proxy games. [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]

These games are how [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], so it follows that [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]].

- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]

For anybody who has played [[Magic - The Gathering]], it’s analogous to different win conditions. Some decks are trying to reduce opponents life to zero, but then some decks are trying to deck their opponent. 

### Related
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Internet people are playing a game to maximize engagement]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]
- [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]]
- [[Who Wants to Play the Status Game? | The Point Magazine]]
- [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[§Institutions and Games]]



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When is push or pull appropriate for innovation orgs?

Decreased trust is crippling research

Hunting vs Farming Ideas

Researchers see their work in many different ways

Science should be less open unless you want to dig deep and engage

# Research requires intrinsic motivation
`Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.`
- From [[bushScienceEndlessFrontier1945]]

Good research[^1] requires massive intrinsic motivation. “Massive intrinsic motivation” unpacks into two pieces: (1) researchers must have massive motivation and (2) it’s important that motivation is intrinsic. A lot has been written about #1 — great research is a punishing, demanding, creative pursuit that can’t just between the hours of 9 and 5 and requires your full self. Maybe I’ll write about that later but it seems pretty straightforward. Instead, I want to examine why research seems to stand out, even among creative pursuits, in its demand for intrinsic motivation. 

To some extent, this intrinsic motivation is important because research doesn’t lead to the other things that incentivize people. 

Unlike startups, investing, or business in general, research is not aiming to make you rich. Note that this is not always true - some people do go into research with the intention of making a lot of money. While equally prioritizing knowledge and value creation+capture can work in some domains, [[It is hard to capture value from research]].

Doing great research does not translate into status the way that art does. It’s ineffable, but even a highly regarded researcher feels lower status than even middling tier artists. A starving artist has a certain aesthetic appeal while a poor unknown researcher is just pathetic. Perhaps it’s because everybody feels like art is something accessible while the edge of knowledge is often out of sight and out of mind - ie. People don’t care. Of course, this is not the case if a researcher goes out of their way to elevate their own status, but again I would argue that the knowledge is no longer the priority and the research itself will suffer. 

Unlike politics, research does not cash out into power. Researchers certainly  can be powerful of course. 

So research ends up as an activity that is a poor path to external things that people seek - wealth, status, and power - and yet requires just as much if not more dedication, discomfort, and creativity. 

What this note doesn’t address is *where intrinsic motivation comes from*. The common view is that intrinsic motivation comes from some magical platonic source. But in reality [[Motivation is not context-free]].

### Related
- [[Contemporary research has multiple failure modes]]
- The need for massive intrinsic motivation stands at odds with the fact that [[Research has become a commodity]].
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]
- [[Research requires more trust than other disciplines]]

[^1]: Of course, there’s the question “what is research?”  Here I think I mean “the quest for new knowledge.” That’s obviously a [[Nebulous]] concept, and the *reason* you want that new knowledge can be very different. There’s a sense though, that the knowledge is the priority over other factors. 

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Stagnation

Fair games are self-limiting

# 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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Peer review has failed as an institution

The way to get around journals is to focus on non-paper artifacts

Einstein would have been stuck in a patent office - failures of paradigm-shifting science

People do fundable work

Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

DARPA provides a derisking role for people in other organizations

The systemization of science since the 1950s treats all fields the same

Peer review gives peers veto power over each other

A system of credit and funding for non-Scientific Paper artifacts should be artifact-type agnostic

Using citations to measure science is insidious

# The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting
You could argue that this is a good mechanism that forces people to work on relevant work. On the other hand it enforces memesis. ([[Memetic Theory explains a lot of human nature]])

Put in a more extreme way [[Peer review gives peers veto power over each other]]. If something is too heretical, it just won’t make it through peer review. 

Even if there is funding available to do crazy shit you wouldn’t do it if you couldn’t get the results published and cited because [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]].

![](../BearImages/D70F62F9-2CA8-4B86-851D-505094A86D26-61320-000774DAF820EE3A/FD1B16C6-91A1-44CF-98EC-44CDE6D5AD96.png)

As a [[Stagnation]] theory this could be attributed t 

### Related
- [[Peer review doesn’t catch duplications]]
- [[Peer review has failed as an institution]]
- [[True Peer Peer Review]]
- [[People do fundable work]]

### References
- [[Peer Review- Rodney Brooks]]
- [[Is peer review a good idea - paper]]
- [[Problems With Peer Review And Alternatives]]
- [[Three myths about scientific peer review]]



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Benʼs working notes

Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge

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