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

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction

# Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office
Technically any IP created at the university belongs to the university. This was originally intended to *lower* friction for professors (see [[bushPiecesAction1970]]) Apparently the one place this is not true is in Denmark, where professors own IP they create directly. 

As a consequence, if you are going to aggregate technology from multiple universities, you need to deal with multiple tech transfer offices.

### Related 
- [[Freely available data resources to track US university technology transfer]]
- [[Mick Stadler writes a letter in 1976 on effective transfer mechanisms]]
- [[Most tech transfer offices are not profitable]]



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Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office

# Freely available data resources to track US university technology transfer
No good data on tech transfer offices. The data there are don’t tell you useful things.

Efforts to create more liquid licensing markets
- Flintbox - became a big list rather than a market
- iBridge

`the Bayh-Dole Act, which controls much U.S. federal agency patent work, makes university reports of technology transfer activity involving inventions made in federal work secret, as well as the terms of those deals.`

`Things get much worse if a number of universities have researchers working in the same area, which is the case when federal agencies decide to spread work around geographically. Then a bunch of inventions get made, get claimed each by host universities, and then each goes out to license exclusively (very few universities start with a default of not claiming ownership or licensing non-exclusively when they do). Now a common area of technology development has been fragmented into scores of IP globules.`

`A university might report, over 20 years, cumulative 3,000 inventions and 600 patents and 1,000 licenses in that time, and $200M in income, but 95% of the revenue might come from a single invention, or 5. You would never know it from an annual report of 150 inventions, 30 patents, 50 licenses, and $10M of licensing income. `
### Published
July 2020
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
## Link



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Value capture does not always need to happen through IP

# Mick Stadler writes a letter in 1976 on effective transfer mechanisms
Transfer must provide eight services
1. Fulfill needs of inventor - alternatives if technology is unlicensable
2. Mechanism needs to provide the means to understand the economics and problems inherent in commercialization and emphasize the patent as the vehicle necessary for the industrial interface
Conventional wisdom is that `patents provide monopoly positions without which companies will not develop inventions into commercial products and without such products public research money is wasted`  - this prevents using patented things for anything except money
`Mostly, patent exclusivity isolates a university, teaches industry to ignore university research or avoid it, and leaves universities to cultivate relationships with patent speculators`
3. The mechanism must be cost-effective for everybody involved.
`In the present approach of default exclusive licensing, even the best universities (or luckiest) find a lucrative winner once a decade, or once every 2,000 inventions. While spending $20+ (or $40+ or $60+) million on patenting and more on salaries and space in the hope of winning big ten years or more down the road might end up being a net positive, it is hardly “cost-effective.”`
`inventors were directed to ask Research Corporation to manage their inventions.  As an external agent, Research Corporation could be selective and pay for those inventions that it did see a future for within its expertise and relationships. The companies obtaining access via Research Corporation would pay royalties and those royalties would cover the cost of patenting–`
4. The mechanism must provide help to university patent administrators

Current university patent offices can’t specialize in helping things get licensed

5. The mechanism should provide an evaluation by a specialist who sees dozens or hundreds of disclosures in an area per year
`. If they all want to be rich, and they use patents to block everyone else, then they create gridlock for two decades. All the worse if the federal government smells a hot area of inquiry and throws lots of money at it, spread around to many organizations in many regions, dispersing talent, fragmenting rights, and then humping everyone up to all *commercialize* their little gobbets of inventive froth using patent monopolies. `

6. The mechanism should provide for the widest possible dissemination of the university’s technology. License agreements are only one way to transfer technology. Joint ventures, research contracts, fellowships, consulting agreements are other ways. 
`having ten companies to provide instruction to over a new discovery rather than one, or picking only one, changes–crucially–the default strategy for widest possible dissemination. One adopts social network strategies. One builds on NIPIA–non-IP intangible assets–such as lots of relationships (not IP, but NIPIA)`

`Perhaps then you begin to see how damaging a default position is to deal first in patent monopolies. One suppresses the early adopting user communities. One turns away companies that would otherwise form working relationships. One creates a bureaucratic mess, an impossible, damaging mess. Multiply this same mess across thirty universities all working in the same area, none of them willing to give up the vanity of making millions from their little piece of action by somehow dominating an entire industry with a patent.`

`Behind all this is the tyranny of the university patent royalty sharing schedule. University licensing offices get set up to run on licensing income. They end up trying to divert relationships into licensing relationships. Shut down free. Shut down consulting. Shut down faculty starting companies on their own. Shut down students getting jobs in industry to practice what they have learned in inventive labs. Force all this to go through a bureaucracy of low-volume administrators stuck on exclusive licenses. That way, the licensing income will (so the fool’s theory goes) go up and technology transfer will have demonstrated its financial importance to the university as a source of research funding. That was–in a rather different form–the idea in 1960 when the University of California formed its own patent licensing office. But now federal funding dominates university research, and whatever licensing money goes to research after costs is scraps and so uninteresting that universities mostly don’t bother to track what research it supports or what comes from that research. And never report publicly. Whatever the idea was in 1960, it’s a dumb, empty idea now, a zombie idea that apparently refuses to die and eats university patent administrators’ brains.`

7. The mechanism should provide government agencies with a Eans for communiicating with universities on policy and regulations pertinent to patents.
`Part of the problem, at least, is that university administrators do not necessary represent the “university.” If a university has a diversity of means to transfer technology, then those involved in research ought also to have some voice in transfer. Even here, however, things get hairy–researchers seem to want more research funding more than they want to switch over to focus on teaching others just how to use what they have discovered. It may well be that federal agencies should require university researchers to take a break from federal funding after six years for at least three years, get a life, and to get more federal dollars, show what they have done with their non-federal life. Research, transfer, then do more research. Not research more, and more, and more for ever. Research ought not be a sinecure. Call it term limits for federally funded research.`

8. Finally, the mechanism should provide insights for the university in helping to establish an industrial interface. 
`Otherwise, a university ends up operating as a contract research organization that sweeps up all IP rights for the benefit of its clients, but then in an ugly twist turns on that client and demands payment for the IP as if the client had not just funded the research that generated the IP`

`Providing guidance in dealing with industry contracting means more, then, than passing around template agreements.`[[Nobody has any idea what the affordances of human systems are]]

`Institutional attorneys mainly want stuff to not happen. They get blamed for anything that goes wrong and rarely get the recognition for moving things along outside “the box.” Other administrators want things to happen only one way–they want the appearance of order.`

### Published
## Questions
- Are there examples of things that would be useful for a company to do research but were prevented by patents?
- Are there examples of “patents all blocking each other per quote in part 5?
- 
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Gerald Barnett]]
## Link
[Mick Stadler writes a letter in 1976 on “effective transfer mechanisms”–1 | Research Enterprise](https://researchenterprise.org/2020/06/18/mick-stadler-writes-a-letter-in-1976-on-effective-transfer-mechanisms-1/)



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Innovation requires multiple people

Licensing is a bad primary income strategy for PARPA

Meta-Tech Transfer Office

University of Waterloo assigns all IP ownership to the creators of that IP

University Patent Thickets - Article

# Most tech transfer offices are not profitable
The exceptions are your usual suspects - MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley.
[[Does more valuable research actually happen on the coasts or are there just better commercialization mechanisms there?]]

[Even MIT only does $34M in licensing revenue revenue](https://web.mit.edu/facts/industry.html#:~:text=In%20fiscal%20year%202019%2C%20the,million%20in%20total%20licensing%20revenue.) (in contrast to companies founded by MIT grads doing[$1.9T in revenue](https://web.mit.edu/facts/entrepreneurship.html))  - this contrast backs up the fact that [[It is hard to capture value from research]] and [[Current value capture mechanisms are crude]]. 

[In 2010 Stanford did $65.1M in licensing revenue](https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/12/21/stanfords-ideas-generate-65-1-million-in-revenues/#:~:text=Stanford's%20total%20earnings%20from%20inventions,Association%20of%20University%20Technology%20Managers.). Over four decades it got $1.1B, with half of that just from Google and Recombinant DNA. 

Gatorade earned University of Florida $80 million since 1973. 

Some explanations for this:
-  [[Coastal schools have a deep market around commercializing technology]] 
- [[The reason you see so much commercialization coming out of coastal universities is because they have a flywheel of lower transaction costs]]

See [[Katie Saund Email 20/2/2019]] - `(a) at the global TT summit earlier this year, only 2 of the top 30 TT professionals at the meeting said generating revenue was a goal of the TT office but 30/30 said economic development was a goal and (b) I talked with the director at NC State’s TT office which is entirely self funded — they keep all IP revenue. They seem to have just enough money for staff and overhead, but not enough for innovative programs because they needed to get grant funding for those in the last couple years. This is just crazy to me— that’s so little revenue coming into the university! `

### Related
- [[Think universities are making lots of money from inventions? Think again]]

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Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation

There are three main theories of stagnation

Human capital theory of stagnation

Regulations have increased by an order of magnitude

# Systemic decay theory of stagnation
The systemic decay theory of stagnation is a loose collection of assertions that changes in institutions - government, universities, culture - are responsible for [[Stagnation]].

[[storrshallWhereMyFlying2021]] points to ever-increasing regulation as the knife in the throat of innovation. Regulation doesn’t need to explicitly ban innovations - it just needs to make the hurdles they have to clear to be adopted so high that they never make it out of the lab/prototype stage.  [[Regulations create paradigm lock-in]], and outside of economic metrics ([[collisonScienceGettingLess2018]]) the nebulous but real evidence for stagnation is that we are not seeing as many paradigm shifts in atom-based technology. Additionally, there are several technologies we can point to that are not commonplace primarily because of regulations (nuclear power, most genetically modified things, many helpful drugs) so how many *don’t* we know about. [[Arguably cars wouldn’t exist under the current regulatory regime]]. 

Some people blame the fact that [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]] at least in part because of the tight coupling between government funding and academia. Most politicians see government spending on research as an investment  and applied research has a much clearer ROI. I find this argument a little weak because lots of non-applied research still happens in universities. Yes, a smaller fraction is unfettered discovery, but I haven’t seen any compelling reason to believe that the fraction matters.

While the composition of university research might not be to blame, there are a lot of theories that center around the coupled dependence on and mismanagement of government funding for research. Everything from risk aversion ([[Evaluating transformative research programmes: A case study of the NSF Small Grants for Exploratory Research programme]]) to the bureaucratic apparatus that makes it extremely painful to apply for grants ([[Giving Away Money Costs More Than You Think]]), for the most part only gives small or absolutely huge grants. [[storrshallWhereMyFlying2021]] goes so far as to point out that GDP growth is in fact inversely correlated with non-military government R&D funding. Most foundations are not much better. 

One contributing factor might be the death of corporate R&D. We can point to so many impactful innovations that came out of corporate R&D in the middle of the 20th century. [[aroraChangingStructureAmerican2020]] notes that incumbent companies have shifted towards expanding markets by mergers and acquisitions.[^1] This strategy shift means that most innovations need to either work within all the constraints of a startup ([[§Startup Constraints]]). 

There’s a mini-nebula of theories around [[The (idea) valley of death]].  What would ideally be a communication-rich channel going both ways between people trying to innovate and improve on existing technologies and the people who use and sell them is instead a high friction, leaky pipeline with very little feedback. [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]], but a proof of concept is often not enough to derisk a for-profit company.  [[drexlerRadicalAbundanceHow2013]]  argues that many innovations don’t happen because  [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]], which is necessary and underrated for building actual functional products.  There is another class of theories that the valley of death has widened because globalization and other forces have separated manufacturing from research. [[Definite Optimism as Human Capital]]. 

The discussions around The Valley of Death invariably touch on the patent system. These theories go that [[The relationship of government, academia, and technology fundamentally changed in 1980 with the Bayh-Dole act]]. Now technology transfer offices are all trying to grab their share of the profit (despite the fact that [[Most tech transfer offices are not profitable]]), making it hard to combine patents into impactful innovations, demanding a large enough share in companies that it makes it hard for some to get funded, and generally increasing the friction to turn university research into useful products. [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]. Corporations also abuse the patent system - taking out defensive patents that mean paradigm shifts that require several new pieces are all potential lawsuits. 

The patent issues point to a more [[Nebulous]] systemic problem: declining [[Slack - concept]] across institutions: Academia, Incumbent Corporations, and Startups. This idea is a massive rabbit hole so I will touch on it only briefly, but in general [[Systems must take performance hits to get out of local optima]] but without enough slack, any system (or individual) that takes a performance hit will get competed out of existence. The oversaturation of academia with people, potential returns to investing in software, patent obsession, regulations, and decline of R&D labs may all have contributed to this declining slack.[^2] 

Declining slack is coupled to an *even more* [[Nebulous]] issue: culture. In part, the world is so competitive because the pie doesn’t feel like it’s growing anymore in the first place, so it’s unclear which way the causality runs between [[Stagnation]] and culture. Peter Thiel’s critique is mostly a cultural one ([[Back to the Future (Thiel)]]) that we don’t make and support big, precise plans ([[Definiteness means that you have a long-term plan]] and generally don’t have a definite optimistic stance, embracing indefinite optimism which leads to incremental improvements and short-term optimization. [[To make new things you need to take risks]] and there’s a sense that we are just more risk averse (see the previous paragraph about regulation.) Perhaps related is the phenomena of increasing leader age  across institutions. And there’s a sense that with the decline of religion and nationalism we aren’t striving for anything bigger than ourselves or our lifetimes. 

### Relationship to other stagnation arguments

The systemic decay theory is almost the dual of the [[Human capital theory of stagnation]], which stands to reason: systems both are composed of individuals and drive their incentives. The difference may be in the flavor of solutions that each theory suggests - whether you focus on shifting individual incentives or institution building/reform. Even then, the lines are blurry.

All of these varied causes could be *why* [[Low Hanging fruit theory of stagnation]] is correct. Perhaps there is a limit to how coordinated humans can be and we’ve picked most of the fruit that can be easily grasped within those constraints. Similarly, all of these effects could be *because* we’ve run out magical growth pixie dust. 

### Counterarguments
I need to do more work to understand the counterarguments more deeply. They boil down to the fact that as a society we *are* spending a lot of money and manpower on research. It’s not like *nothing* new is being created, and we’ve tried a lot of things that just haven’t worked. 

(A situation in which you’re pouring in effort but nothing is coming out sounds consistent with massive friction: [[Our ability to do things in atomland is dying a death by 1000 cuts]])

### Related
- [[Notes on the changing structure of American Innovation]]
- [[What changed from the high-quality corporate labs in the past?]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]
- [[Low hanging fruit implicitly assumes a linear development model]]
- [[Stagnation]]
- 

### Works not cited in the body
- [[aroraChangingNatureCorporate2015]]

[^1]: [[AI research is an exception to the decline of corporate R+D]]
[^2]: Note that I’m not saying competition is bad. Simply that more competition is not always better. [[alexanderStudiesSlack2020]].



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Parney Albright conversation 17 Jan 2023

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 only see the science based public stuff from the middle of the century because the engineering was classified

# Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction
Even in containerized software, which is basically the most modular and legible thing in the world, there is a ton of friction handing a project from one team to another team.  “Hell is other people’s code.” [[‘Off the shelf’ technology is code for TRL 9 and maybe 8]]. 

Technology transfer makes sense in a world where if you can look at a drawing on a piece of paper and know everything about it, which was the case until the late 19th century. 

We can abstractly think of you handing the “IP” - patent documentation to me but in order for me to actually do anything with it, so much more needs to be done. Patents aren’t even written by the people who created the technology anymore! Perhaps an extreme analogy but patents represent technology the way the dollar represents gold. The way in which a patent is insufficient to transfer a technology is analogous to how [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]]

[[A patent describes the key new concept]] but usually doesn’t touch many implementation details. Since [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]], it means that patents actually underdetermine a heuretic. This underdetermination means that raw “IP” is useful for suing someone who successfully copies the idea (because to copy the whole of it they need to copy the new concept piece), but it is not particularly useful for copying the heuretic itself. See [[Dupont was unable to replicate viscose rayon]]. [[aroraChangingStructureAmerican2020]] cites this phenomenon as one of the drivers of the creation of corporate labs. The implementation piece is (I suspect) one reason why large companies acquire startups for their technology instead of just buying the technology itself. [[A technology company is a package of human capital and IP]]. 

### Related
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]
- [[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]]
- [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]
- [[Most tech transfer offices are not profitable]]
- [[Are there examples of successful technology transfer out of a lab without close collaboration between someone in the lab and the external organization?]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]



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Professors have struck a faustian bargain with universities

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot

You can transform between technology constraints, regulatory constraints, and cultural constraints

T-Shaped Individuals

Anti-submarine research in the First World War shows the value of trusted hierarchies

During World War II the US government successfully provided a trusted hierarchy

Vannevar bush used the term ‘Tyro’ to refer to someone who mucks up a system by breaking hierarchy

Value capture is important for incentivizing and funding research

Boris Hanin conversation 30 Aug 2021

Science and the Government - Paper

Notes on the changing structure of American Innovation

Pieces of the Action book club Aug 6 2022

# bushPiecesAction1970
### Originally published: 1970
2
- 1919: 3/10 US citizens on farms, 1975: 1/10 on farms
3
- Notes that people have said before all industry seems to be in the hands of a few companies and no innovator could break their grip
- NRA was originally National Recovery Agency
6
- Learning history can be valuable insofar as it can prevent mistakes but it’s not worth slavishly memorizing

7
- Autobiography isn’t a ordered sequence of events - just things he thinks worth remarking on
- Penicillin could have commercialized ten years before it was if enough effort was put in (p8)  see [[The History of Pfizer and Penicillin, and Lessons for Coronavirus]] for more.

- Avoided allowing science to become political in one way or another (p8)
- Need something to be proud of 
- Lots of worry about population outgrowing ability to feed them - by year 2000 (p9) 
- Thinks that profit+advertising can have a good effect (p10)
- Claims we are not far from the advent of general antiviral agents (p11)
- Overall military both sucks but is quite good (p28)
- Military full of [[Parkinson’s Law]]
- Attributes English defeat of Spanish to superior military tech (p29)
- Example of Louis Mountbatten as an individual taking initiative against organizational lethargy to get higher-quality guns on aircraft in WWII 
- Radar was also pushed through despite the British military system? (P30)
- Not at peace nor in major war (p31)
- [[National Defense Research Committee (NRDC)]] was started a year before WWII and started as a civilian organization 
- NRDC became part of the [[Office of Scientific and Research and Development (OSRD)]] when WWII started.
- NRDC reported directly to the president
- Cites [[Scientists Against Time]] as the official history of the OSRD
- NRDC had objections but was the only way to get a broad program launched “at adequate scale” (p32)
- Talks about good vigorous battles from which friends emerged (p32)
- They decided to build the NRDC as a “pyramidal organization, with broad delegation downward and full facility for programs to move up.”  (P37)
- - Emphasizes importance that they got both the best scientists and the best young military officers.
- Important that they put all government and business relations in a totally separate org that reported straight to chairman
- Important that they would contract directly with Universities rather than individuals in universities (p38) 
- Contracting directly with universities set a precedent for the future
- The original goal of contracting with the university was to aggregate administration and remove burden from the lab groups 
- Claims that the innovation in funding structure stabilized relationship between government and universities. (P39)
- Original ask for NRDC was $5m (in 1938 dollars)
- [[Frank Jewitt]] thought there was no way they could spend $5m effectively
- Organization was such that Chairman had nothing to do with internal affairs (p40)
- Chairman’s job was to handle external liasoning only
- FDR set direction, never interfered, and had Bush’s back. (P45)
- Newton was a good leader but a bad manager (p48)
- NDRC reviewed project in one week and the director could authorize the next day
- Conditions for starting new project - clearly defined object, research men selected, location identified 
- OSRD had bottom-up project proposals
- OSRD had three main operational patterns 
	1. Used existing labs and groups whenever possible
	2. Sometimes created new groups (p49)
	3. Central coordination of programs happening in a large number of labs
- CMR sometimes tested on people
- Bush saw himself as the link between the scientists and the president, not the expert
- Attributes the elevation of the scientist over the engineer to needing to interface with British and Military attitudes towards engineers (p54)
- Bush opposed going to the moon because any failure would happen so publicly (p55)
- Ultimately bush thought the moon landing like Lindbergh refocused humanity on success and striving
- Would only keep tech in control of the group that developed it if he had a really good Liaison Officer (p56)
- Key Fission experiments repeated within 48 hrs (p57)
- Everybody trusted the comms structure, which allowed FDR to listen to bush even though bush was not the authority on the science and the scientists trusted bush to present their cases well (p60)
- [[Alfred Loomis]] could have gone around Bush’s back and talked to his cousin who was Secretary of State but didn’t.
- Set up Military Policy Committee as sort of a “board” for the [[Manhattan District]] with [[Wesley Groves]] as the “CEO” (p62)
- MPC had no formal records
- Boards are valuable because they ideally are sounding boards for people in lonely positions of a lot of authority
- [[bushScienceEndlessFrontier1945]] came out of deliberations to figure out what post war science looked like (p64)
- [[Frank Jewitt]] thought that the organization system would allow the federal government to control the universities
- [[Harry Truman]] wanted the president to be in direct control of the [[National Science Foundation - NSF]] and Bush convinced him otherwise (p65)
- When [[National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics]] became [[Department of Homeland Security Laboratories]] it got Truman’s structure of the president in direct control with no board. (P66)
- The form of organizations is important and the people in the organization are more important. (P68)
- In WWI the civilian groups devoted to submarine studies could only recommend and the military commanders would not get excited about embryonic developments. (P72)
- If there were a committee of both civilians and military in WWI they would have figured out to just put sub detectors on wooden ships and ignore the iron ships. (P74)
- Lots of groups were trying different ways of torpedo detection without knowing about each other in WWI and some were better than Bush’s and he would have seen how they could be combined. 
- No centralizing group who could compare parallel ideas
- US navy was stuck doing stupid anti submarine tactics because 
	1. Decisions made at the top by non technical people
	2. Once decisions were made they were not reviewed or commented on
- Three stories about antisubmarine weapons (p83)
- Important that nobody knew or care about the inventor of a weapon
- Nobody was looking for personal credit 
- OSRD had a central patent department
- Thought it would be absurd for MIT to own patents
- Patents became public (p84)
- Notes that he is a big believer in patents
- Patents are what allows venture capital to exist
- Story about persistent ramming seeking torpedo
- Examples of innovations that appeared outside the organization that found them useful (p100)
- Civilians need enough independence to explore the bizarre (p102)
- Dukw was one of the few military innovations that found direct civilian use (p106)
- Proximity fuzes were basic in concept but super hard to execute (p107)
- First proximity fuzes made five-inch antiaircraft batteries ~7x better (p109)
- Goudsmit argues that democratic countries have a huge advantage in science because they take advantage of everybody (as opposed to Nazis kicking out all the jews) (p115)
- Amateurs and professionals (p122)
- Story about trust and the red book (p134)
	- [[Opacity is important because it allows people to be open about failure]]
- “Tyro inventor” instead of crackpot (p135)
	- [[Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot]]
- Cute example of dealing with all the people sending in ideas to the OSRD (p138)
- Clear lines of communication (p142)
	- [[Precise communication enables other people to make decisions]]
- Sometimes you need to challenge authority and something you need to obey it - duality of command (p146)
- Military commanders sometimes made it explicit whether they could be challenged or not by the position of their hat (146)
- Tyros are people who go in and muck up in a system ([[Vannevar bush used the term ‘Tyro’ to refer to someone who mucks up a system by breaking hierarchy]])
### Chapter V — Of Inventions and Inventors
- We need to pioneer by creating new things (p149)
- Industrial progress depends on the ingenuity of individuals who can generate new ideas (p150)
- The nature of inventions is not well understood (150)
- Inventions have no value by themselves (150)
- Orville wright invented tons of things that led to nothing
- Many people wrongly think that formulating an idea entails an invention (p152)
- Invented hydraulic motor with no metal-on-metal contact and nobody wanted to use it (p154)
- 
- In industry where everything is standardized, it’s hard to make big changes (154)
- Government doesn’t judge whether a thing is useful when it issues a patent (155)
- Inventions need to be coupled with promotion, financing, development engineering marketing etc (155)
- Talks about blackouts (p161)
- Describes two systems of industry - active competition and regulated monopoly (p162)
- [[Theory can cut down on the exploration space for tinkering]] - Edison is pure tinkering without any theory to guide it (171)
- [[Transistor]] vs [[Vacuum Tube]] creation (172)
- Lots of people create a lot of things out of curiosity and not for fame or fortune (173)
- Many things do not need to be commercialized but sometimes the move is to commercialize it - no one size fits all rule (p175)
- Researchers were encouraged to publish results in good industrial labs 
- Previously labs worried that if a researcher was well known they would re hired away
- Researchers in Russian uni acted like American university students in 1927 (p177)
- Story about Russian inventor whose people didn’t tell him he was wrong with conclusion that you can’t invent usefully without feedback. (P181)
- Hannibal ford’s work was not well known because he didn’t travel in academic circles (p185)
- Reliability as a bottleneck (186)
- Revisiting Memexes (190)
- - Patent law is for the venture capitalists not the inventors (p196)
- It should be possible to create refrigerators with the Peltier effect - no compressors (p197)
- Idea of a patent commission that could resolve patent disputes (p203)
### Chapter VI — Of Energies, Engines, and Hobbies
- Rules out electric cars as awesome but electric batteries suck (p215)
- Says that steam cars are possible again 
- Stirling of Stirling engine was a Scottish clergyman (p220)
- Proposal for a hot air engine depended on light enough materials that could resist heat (p220)
	- [[Constraints and affordances are more useful to think about than problems]]
- - War enabled ways of making oxygen super cheap which enabled steel to be much cheaper - possibly offset entire cost of research program (p221)
- Gas turbines have become much better but rotes are still expensive (p223)
- Hydrofoil craft could be useful (p227)
- Prediction of wind-driven hydrofoil craft (p228)
- Industries with lots of different products and the need to constantly create different products (pharmeceuticals) don’t stagnate, while industries with a single product (railroads, autos) do stagnate (p229)
- The head of an auto company doesn’t have a lot of incentive to replace engines with a drastically better one because the delta is small and the risks are high (p230) 
- - A few patents is often not enough to get a group of people to try to create a completely new alternative to an existing system. (P230)
- Commercial system doesn’t work well when a few large companies make a single products and have no huge incentive to change. 
- Government entering the market is not the solution to the problem of a few large firms with singular products - see post office.
- Instead government should subsidize disruptive efforts.
- If government ordered 10,000 steam automobiles per year - it would give enough $$ to the industry. 
	- [[Advanced Market Commitment Thread]]
- New way of painting - scraping off paint around a backlit piece of glass (p232)
### Chapter VII — Of Teachers and Teaching
- People worrying about supersonic booms (p236)
- Case studies of actual  engineering are not used enough in engineering schools (p256)
- Education’s purpose is for one generation to pass on experience to the next (p258)
- [[Metis vs Epistime]] (263)
- Both the theoretical and the practical (264)
- Satisfactions come primarily from associations (269)
- Education has a duality between the practical and preparation for a role as a human in the world (p270)

### Chapter VIII — Of Leaders and Leadership
- Herbert Hoover asked a young Bush to read his speech (276)
- The president (and leaders in general) have a job of inspiring and trying to push other people to greatness. (P310)
- Method of picking president is absurd (310)

## Questions
- Has science become a political football and a form of patronage?
- Could he be right and profit + advertising could change opinions towards *anything?* Good or bad
- Why did Bush think that we were close to having general antiviral agents and why don’t we have them now?
- [[How do you systematize going against the system?]]
- How do you know what the right scale for a program is? 

- What does it mean for something to be a “pyramidal organization, with broad delegation downward and full facility for programs to move up.” 
- Pros and cons of patents becoming public?
- Is the increasing meaninglessness of patents making venture capital less able to fund atom land tech?
- Why hasn’t anybody used Bush’s hydraulic motor?
- Why don’t we seem to have unanticipated blackouts in the US anymore
- Why don’t we have peltier effect refrigerators ?
- What if you could encode patents in a way that they could be verified on a blockchain
- What happened to the rurgence of steam cars
- What makes gas turbine rotes expensive?
- Why don’t we have hydrofoil craft? What are the constraints?

## Thoughts
- Vituperative - new word - Bitter and abrasive
- State of “we are not now at peace nor are we engaged in a major war” seems to have been the case from 1969->2020 and feels reminiscent of Rome.
- Dose response to programs is nonlinear
- The change to who they gave money to was a big change and may have killed patronage ([[Alexey Guzey]]
- Change in funding structure put universities in part on the path they’re on now - related to [[Palladium Podcast: Bachelor’s Degrees Are The New Citizenship]]
- The stabilized relationship between governments and universities has metastasized. 
- FDR was a good manager - under noted
- Mastitis - new word - inflammation of breast tissue
- Project spin up speed - [[Patrick Collison]]’s FAST
- Government rarely creates new research groups - maybe in national labs
- NRDC was an organizational/process innovation
- Good example of [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]] managing the transfer on p56
- Good example of bad transfer management in WWI anti sub tech. 
- The marketplace of ideas need efficient comparisons (see anecdote about parallel sub detection efforts) one way to create this is via a centralizing group. There may be other ways. 
- Wars are the only time that everybody has a massive stake in the outcome of a huge organization ([[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]] stake v Rank)
- Example on p102 related to [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]] artists and soldiers
- Commander hat position is another example of physical signaling
- catamount - new word - medium sized wild cat like a puma
- We’ve lost the concept of regulated monopolies 
- Cosmopolitanism has been around for a while
- Hannibal fords story illustrates that academia could be both an amplifier (conductive layer) but then keep out people not in it
- Bitland and atom land feeding into each other and improving 
- Lachrymose - tearful or given to weeping
- Tons of inventors seem to be clergymen - secure well paying job with idle time that smart people go into
- Material science enables everything
- There are few incentives to create quantum leaps inside of existing systems 
- Government’s role should be to prop up underdogs.
- Cites [[Problems in Human Engineering]]
- Cites [[The Teaching of Human Relations by the Case Demonstration Method]]
- Passing on experience is no longer seen as the primary purpose of education or even on people’s radars
- 

## Quotes
> For the title of this book, I have drawn on the wealth of the vocabulary of the youth of our times. Theirs is a pungent stock of words, and action marks most of them. 

> That process has built us an overall governmental structure which is a monstrosity, with overlapping authority, swelled bureaucracies, agencies with no base at all, muddled lines of command.

> He had to the full that loyalty which is one of the heartening characteristics of the Irish. (About John Victory)

> I saw myself as a link between the president and American science and technology, and not as an oracle or an expert on all matters scientific.

> This was done by a letter signed by FDR. In his book *Roosevelt and Hopkins,* Sherwood cites it and says “Bush probably wrote that letter himself.” Of course I did.

> What, after all, is an organization? It is merely the formalization of a set of human relations among men with a common objective. 

> In my youth I had been taught that the most independent being in existence was a hog on ice, and I emulated a hog on ice.

> For the conventional naval officer this would have been like sending a banker into an art school to see if the students knew how to paint.

> Innovations are very likely to appear outside the organization which could find them useful, and there was no system for insuring that they would not simply be brushed aside.

> His full story would be an epic; I hope he will write it. (On Palmer B Putnam)

> They had a program to propose, a plan for bringing the idea to working form. They by no means ignored the enormous technical difficulties involved; but they had ideas on how to approach them.

> Of course this hazard could be avoided by a careful youngster, but youngsters are not notably careful.

> People exclaim in rapture, or its counterfeit, about a tangle of badly assembled junk, jumped pieces of metal. I raise no complaint. I find more real beauty in a well designed and fabricated crankshaft. Let them go their ways in peace.

## Related
- Cites [[bushScienceNotEnough1965]]
- Cites [[
- My twitter thread on this: [Ben Reinhardt on Twitter: “1/ Did you know that Vannevar Bush (you know, the guy who helped enable everything from radar to the Manhattan project, the NSF to memexes) wrote an autobiography? Turns out that yes he did, it’s been out of print since the 70’s, and it’s *excellent* BOOK REPORT THREAD”](https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1222898745815126017)
## Authors
- [[Vannevar Bush]]
## Link

[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/bushPiecesAction1970)

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Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office

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