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

Running list of relevant science news?

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going

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

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

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

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

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

NS Notes on Officers Techniques

Three myths about scientific peer review

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

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

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

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

Wolfgang Merkt conversation 12 Oct 2021

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?

The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

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?

# §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]]

### 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

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

People are using institutions as platforms

Being Elite should be painful

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

Week of 26 July 2020

# §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]]
- [[Finite and Infinite Games]]



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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

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

Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Human capital theory of stagnation

Research requires intrinsic motivation

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

# 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

The Idea Factory

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

Calvin Nguyen

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

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

Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic

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

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

# 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. ([[Finite and Infinite Games]].) 

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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Jason Crawford

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. [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]] 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 [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]]) 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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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Shadows of the Future

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

People want to be loved and be lovely

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Yuval Levin

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

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

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?

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

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

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

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
- [[Finite and Infinite Games]]
- [[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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J.C.R. Licklider

Alan Kay

When is push or pull appropriate for innovation orgs?

Decreased trust is crippling research

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 [[Intrinsic 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

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

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

Maverick work is lonely and DARPA provides peers and community

People do fundable work

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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Ben's working notes

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

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