Knowledge frontier

Hall—Héroult process

# Bayer Process
The process of turning [[Bauxite]] into [[Aluminum oxide]]

Invented:[[1888]] by [[Carl Bayer]]

Replaced [[Le Châtlier process for alumina recovery]]

### Related
- [[Bessemer Process]]

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Lever of Riches

Materials and manufacturing underpin civilization

Bayer Process

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

What was Robert Mushet’s thought process when he figured out how to improve steel?

# Bessemer Process
- Created by [[Henry Bessemer]]
- [[Lever of Riches]]



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William Oughtred

Institutions shape how individuals interact

Joel Mokyr

Bessemer Process

Structural Constraints

§Type I and Type II Progress

Many inventions and discoveries seem to come from clerics

Technology Solves Problems

Macroinventions are the tail end of the impact power law distribution clashing with our intuition

Knowledge of how markets and innovation work has made us jaded

Government monopolizing any role is dangerous

Federated systems make it so disruptive changes cannot be completely damped out

In the long run Type II progress cannot exist without Type I progress

Permissioned and Permissionless Progress

Higher capital costs encourage larger firms

Type I and Type II Progress - publishing version

It is important to have many pathways for the same ideas to become reality

Why didn’t new husbandry techniques occur until 1500?

Do patents work better when firms are smaller or more uniform size?

Tea clippers vs Steamships

Consistent areas that matter for human progress

People who are directly affected by the change often impede progress

Early 21st century software engineering resembles 17th century mechanics

Are we not creating some things because of cultural values  the same way the Greeks and Romans did?

Fibonnaci both discovered the Fibonacci sequence and imported arabic numerals

Has anybody come up with a good theory of risk aversion focused on innovation?

How does Mokyr’s Invention and Innovation compare/contrast with Invention and Discovery?

How does the definition of invention in Lever of Riches compare with the definition in Cycles of Invention and discovery?

How much does hope matter for technological progress?

If new knowledge is combinations of other pieces of knowledge, can macro inventions in the mokyr sense exist?

Is the gap between best practice and average practice described in lever of riches during the renaissance still the case?

Urbanization of humanity has not been monotonic

What are the implications of the definition of invention in Lever of Riches?

What does it mean to be 100 years behind technologically?

Which inventions does the dispensability axiom not hold for?

Why didn’t the romans create lateen sails?

Why was Europe slow to adopt paper?

Why was the breast wheel not invented until the industrial revolution?

Why was the separation of silver from copper ores so important?

Why were rails necessary for railroads (ie. Why didn’t they just invent giant steam powered carriages?)

Why weren’t buttons invented in Asia?

“Applied knowledge” might be a better term than “commercialization”

# Lever of Riches 
- p6 “technical change is like God. It is much discussed, worshipped by some, rejected by others, but little understood” - Thomson, an economic historian 
- p9 Herjee asserts that technological change cannot be explained by standard economic theory of rational choices subject to known constraints
-  “Technological change involves an attack by an individual on a constraint that everyone else takes as given”
- Francis bacon asserted that there were two kinds of inventions
	- Inventions that required all the current state of knowledge
	- Inventions that could have been invented at any time. Hard to know whether these were pushed by unique external circumstances 
		- Wheelbarrow
		- Stirrup
- Mokyr asserts that telling the difference between the two is hard
- p10 Mokyr defines inventions as “an increment in the set of the total technological knowledge of a given society, which is the union of all sets of individual technical knowledge”
- Unapplied knowledge makes no difference to economic welfare
- “At any moment there is a large gap between average and best practice technology; reducing this gap by disseminating the techniques used by producers at the cutting edge of knowledge is technological progress without invention.”
- “without further increments in knowledge, technological diffusion and the closing of the gap between practices will run into diminishing returns and eventually exhaust itself”
P11
- Invention and Innovation are compliments 
- Invention is an individual act and depends on things that affect individuals
- Innovation is a group act and depends on things that affect inter-individual interactions 
- Technological invention involves getting the environment to yield secrets and then manipulating those secrets.
- Three conditions for technologically creative society
	- Challengers: resourceful people who are willing and able to challenge environment for their own improvement
	- Incentives for the challengers to do their work
	- Openness to new things
P12
- Conception of a technology is important even though there is a learning process where costs decline
P13
- Microinventions are the “small incremental steps that improve adapt and streamline existing techniques already in use, reducing costs, improving form and function.
- Macroinventions are where “a radical new idea without clear precedent emerges more or less ab nihilo”
- A dispensability axiom is of the form “if X had not Y, it would have been done by Z”
- The dispensability axiom holds for some inventions but not others
	- incandescent Lightbulb
	- telephone
- Mokyr claims the dispensability axiom does not hold for many inventions
P14
- Analogy - both privates and generals are important but saying “Napoleon won the battle” is a useful shorthand
P15
- Whiggish interpretations of history are ones where it is a story of progress
- People’s ability to manipulate nature has increased
- Costs of bundles of goods have decreased
P19
- Greeks and Romans had different views of technological success and progress and did well on their metrics
- Early Iron Age (1100-500BC) saw a ton of invention 
	- iron
	- lathes, saws, pegs
	- shears
	- scythes
	- axes
	- picks
	- shovels
	- rotary quern
	- Ships 
	- wagons
P21
- Hellinistic inventors pioneered “machines”
	- lever 
	- wedge 
	- screw
- Simple machines were used in war but few other places, even though the same principles were used thousands of years later
P22
- Hero of Alexandria created
	- Aeolipile - steam engine used to open temple doors
	- Coin operated vending machine for holy water
	- Dioptra - similar to modern transit for surveying
	- combined theodolite with the level
- Ctesibius (3rd c bc) 
	- hydraulic organ
	- metal springs
	- water clock
	- force pump
P23
- “The binding constraint on metallurgical technology was the inability of ancient blacksmiths to produce iron at temperatures high enough for casting”
P26
- Celts invented many things
	- Harvesting machines
	- Barrels
	- enameling
	- spoked wheel
	- soap
	- advanced ironworking
	- pegs to function as bearings
-p31
- Middle Ages culture continued to not prioritize invention
	- “The upper classes devoted themselves to the subtle art of hacking each other to pieces with even greater dedication than the romans had”
- p32 
- Pulverizing soil prevents evaporation and brings subsoil minerals to the surface via capillary action
P41
- Shifting the sail spar over the mast during tacking prevented the romans from building larger ships using fore and aft riggings
- Lateen sails solved that problem and allowed ships to sail 65 degrees off the wind
- Penetration of paper into norther Europe was slow (took until 13th c.)  even though Muslim world was using it a lot
P48
- Claims “A process to separate silver from copper ores by means of lead, developed around 1450, was the most important discovery of this age”
P50
- Diagram of weight driven clock
P51
- Clocks created a the concept of communicable facts and concepts (“I-see-what-you-see” information diffusion)
P54
- Buttons created in 1230’s in Germany
- Buttons never invented in asia
P55
- Innovations (esp chemical) were created with no theory of how it worked and for the most part with an intention to do alchemy.
	- `Progress was attained by thousands of forgotten tinkerers and craftsmen, often replicating each other, many of them wasting their creative energy in the fruitless pursuit of alchemy and other dead ends`
P58
- Many inventions were imagined in 1500-1750 that couldn’t be executed on
- New husbandry techniques led to increased output in 1500-1750
P59
- The “dutch” plow was patented in England :troll:
P65
- Technical literature emerged from how-to books after 1450 - first time engineers were writing for other engineers
P66
- technical literature described machines that were state of the art more complex or expensive than most people could build
- hard to adapt machines between sites because of lack of skilled labor
P69
- British bounty for building an accurate clock that could be used on a ship to find longitude had a bounty of 20000 lbs in 1714. 
- The bounty wasn’t claimed until 1762 by John Harrison
P72
- 17th century instrument making involved apprenticeship, making their own tools. Art not science.
`Instrument making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an art, not a standardized technique. Most imporvements were the result of serendipity and trial-and-error searches. Learning and training took place mostly through apprenticing and informal contact. Mechanics had to build their own parts and often the gap between the visionary who saw what might be done and the craftsman whose material and tools limited what could be done was too wide to be bridged.`
P73
- The renaissance was unique because people doing science also created technology. 
- Before the rennaisance there was a distinction between thinkers and makers.
- After the renaissance there was the distinction between scientists and engineers.
P74
- Arabic numerals were introduced by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa in the book *Liber Abaci* in 1202.
- [[William Oughtred]], the Rector of Albury in England created the slide rule in 1621
P76
- 1588 - Giambastia della Porta created an egg incubator which he stopped after the inquisition clamped down. The technology was continued by a dutchmen and a frenchmen.
- Huegonauts were technically skilled and were kicked out of France which led to one helping Huygens invest the steam engine in Holland.
P77
- Manufacturing moved to the countryside in 1500-1750 because of guild restrictions on technological progress.
P83 
- There is no settled definition of the industrial revolution
- Wrigley proposes that it was a substitution of inorganic for organic materials
- Cipolla proposes that it is an increase in energy inputs and a focus on steam
- Paulinyi proposes that the industrial revolution was a focus on machines instead of hand tools
- Many different things were improved that actually had few things in common
- Some industries changed a lot and some not at all
- Technological innovation revolved around individuals in the industrial revolution
- <quote about characteristics of innovators> 
91
- The breast wheel was more efficient than the overshot and undershot waterwheels
P93
- Cort combined a number of innovations together to create a better process for making iron in 1784
P95
- `The product that resisted innovation most stubbornly was steel` 🥰
P98
- The self-acting mule was adopted extremely slowly despite obvious advantages because 
	- they were expensive and sources of capital were scarce
	- self actors were good for lower quality yarn until 1860
	- Non-self acting mules needed skilled ‘minders’ who would not need to be skilled
p106
- The foudrinier machine reduced the time to make a piece of paper from 3 weeks to 3 minutes
P109
- Gas lamps had little direct impact on wellbeing but a huge impact on wellbeing
- The first commercialization of gas lighting was a single factory owned by the company that bought the patent to the lamp
- Aimé Argand put together the different pieces of knowledge for the gas lamp in the early 1780’s
- Argand died poor because there was no way to prevent imitation of his lamp 
P110
- Mining output in the industrial revolution increased because there were more resources devoted to it, not better tech. The demand curve did not change shape.
- Ballooning (1783) had few economic impacts but large effects
P113 
- In the 1800’s`The number of technological breakthroughs that were purely empyrical did not decline though their relative importance did `
P114
- Increasing returns to scale (which happened in the 19th century) changes the way we think about research, development, diffusion, and adoption.
P115
- Structural constraints occur when you have multiple pieces interacting in a complex system
- Before the 19th century, most technology stood as discrete chunks. After the 19th century it became a complex system.
- Paul David asserts that in complex systems, certain components will hold back the whole system because those components need to comply with existing standards.
- Ships are some of the first examples of these complex systems. 
P116
- Pooling resources to purchase high capital cost equipment gave rise to larger firms
- [[Henry Bessemer]] figured out the [[Bessemer Process]] for making cheap steel through inspiration from another source.
P117
- The bessemer process was simultaneously invented.
- Mokyrs explanation for simultaneous invention is that `a problem was defined jointly by a perceived market need and by the tstate of the art as defined by previous inventions and accumulation of knowledge` and that the two inventors may have had 2nd or 3rd degree connection
P121
- systematic research was needed to make new chemicals
- the people doing this systematic research needed to be protected from short term demands for practical results
- State sponsored research in the mid 19th century in Saxony  was necessary for better results because of the need for long term systematic research
- This was especially focused on agriculture 
129
- tea clippers were the peak of sailing ship design and could achieve speeds of 15 knots
- steam ships displaced sailing ships on short routes but needed longer to overcome all their problems
P 130
- `The optimal design of the bicycle was difficult because the attributes of the bicycle spanned a number of dimensions: speed, comfort, safety, elegance, and price were all considered and had to be traded off against each other.`
P 133
- Parsons and Gustav de Laval simultaneously invented the steam turbine solved the problem that reciprocating compound steam engines could only develop so much speed.
- More than 200 patents had been filed for steam turbines already.
- Mokyr uses this as a warning against generalizing that things emerge when the time is right.
P 144 
- Wireless telegraphy is an example of science leading to invention
- Telegraphy was implied by Maxwell’s laws
P 146
- The “Leonardo problem” is that `Gadgets and devices can be conceived that are known to be possible but cannot be built efficiently because supporting technologies are lacking`
P 147
- claims that only technological progress can support sustained growth because it doesn’t suffer from diminishing returns
P151
- Pushes back on the idea that “necessity is the mother of invention” and cites counterexamples and authorities who agree.
P152
- Mokyr rejects the fact that higher incomes determine which technologies are created
- Culture matters because there are high costs to adopting technology and the more the cultural barriers the less people will be to bear those costs
P155
- A ‘Crusoe Game’ pits players against nature (Neumann and Morgenson) 
- Technology is a Crusoe game at first  
- White: `A group can conceive nothing that is not first conceived by a person`
- Rudolf Diesel: two phases of technological progress - first the creative inventive part and then the part to drive adoption
P158
- Risk aversion plays a role in where technological progress happens but there are no good theories for it
P169
- Examples of successful inventions based on incorrect theory
	- Hot air balloons
	- Chlorine bleaching
	- Steel making
P178
- Technology is often resisted because the benefits are diffuse and the harms are acute 
P180
- most autocratic rulers in history have been anti technology
P182
- Asserts that government sets the cultural attitude towards non conformists
P189
- Argues that islam and judaism adopted the attitude that challenging previous knowledge was sacriligeous 
P196
- Constantine and Diocletian tied people to the work of the forefathers 
- Mokyr attributes the reforms of C and D to declining technological progress in late Rome
- Often argued that a gap between the people who work with their hands and presteige hurts progress
197
- Management and ownership were separated in the classical period which led to misaligned incentives and lack of invention
202
- Asserts that western christianity had something to do with technological change
- Gave the attitude that nature was given by God to man to do what he pleased with it 
- Technology requires a slight ‘crime against nature’
203
- Monastic orders created a small bridge between the upper classes and the people who do stuff 
P205
- once you expose creative people to labor they start making ways for that labor to go away
P227
- The argument that Chinese frame of mind is not suitable to technological advancement is weak - there was tech advancement that stopped without a huge change of culture
P232
- Needham argued that Chinese default is homeostasis and western default is instability 
- This difference may be because of cultural attitudes towards the people who are *hurt* by technological change
P233
- In china, large tech changes that would change the social order were avoided
P233
- In the west the state supported very few non-military inventions before the industrial revolution
234
- In china needed government support to do any innovation in mining (and other areas) 
- Chinese bureaucracy came to play a huge role in tech progress
	- This is possibly because of the coordination needed for rice farming and irrigation
P234
- Chinese state monopolized trade in goods and infrastructure and intervened directly in the economy
- By contrast, European government was just another player in the economy 
P237
- Innovation run by beaurocrats is dependent on their goodwill
- Valuing stability will inevitably come into conflict with technology and if there is an absolute government that values stability it will tamp technology
P241
- At the end of the 17th century Britain was technologically “100 years behind” the continent
- Many technologies converge on mining (chemistry, civil engineering, metallurgy) which makes it a good tech barometer
P243
- Britain had a unique set of human capital shaped by social structures: middle class and many closed doors to nonconformists 
P244
- Many of the British invented devices during the industrial revolution were dumb luck
P245
- Strong transportation networks in Britain made the markets large which increased incentives to invent things
- But large markets aren’t sufficient (per the example of china)
P251
- Patent systems encourage marginal inventions because they only give you the benefit for a finite time so you won’t get most of the value from a huge thing whose impact will only be latter
P254
- One reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain may be because there were not as many entrpreneurs (distinct from inventors) on the continent
- Two positive feedback loops - imitation effect where people wanted to get rich the way other people have and complementarily effect, where when more things were created more things could be created
P266
- There is some game theory that says there is a positive feedback loop that makes it less likely new technology will be adopted every time a new technology is not adopted
- Cardwell’s Law
P284
- you could model technological change as a biological process
P288
- What is progress?
- Economist definition is “the capacity of the productive sector to meet human needs relative to resources”
- This throws some questions on whether there was progress before 1850
291
- `A macroinvention is an invention without clear cut parantage, representing a clear break from previous technique`
- Although all technology has precursors, you need to evaluate the precursors on how successful they are
P296
- Technology advances at different rates in different areas
- Rapid change is less likely in complex systems (ships, mines farms)
- Rapid technological advancement is more likely when it is not location specific
P303
- History deals with what people have done - counterfactuals are hard
- Failures in tech don’t
- `By the nature of technology we rarely miss what was not invented`
### Author
[[Joel Mokyr]]


                            

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The Idea Factory

Manufacturing is important and often ignored

fillerFundamentalManufacturingProcess2020

Top of mind

What processes can be drastically changed with new manufacturing tools and capabilities?

Potential PARPA Programs

7 Jul 2021

Alex Ray

Overview of Material Science Breakthroughs that Unlocked other Breakthroughs

New materials are the bedrock of human progress

Carliss Baldwin

16 Jul 2021

David Smith

What if PARPA focused on materials and manufacturing?

17 Jul 2021

Smart people no longer do base-layer work

18 Jul 2021

New materials can radically change technological constraints and enable previously unthought of applications

Metal-organic frameworks

14 Jul 2021

The NSF could partner with philanthropy to unlock new general purpose technology

# Materials and manufacturing underpin civilization
From [[The Idea Factory]]:
`To Baker, chemistry was the discipline that made a global communications network possible. He would often cite examples. By substituting the lead sheathing on telephone cables with a synthetic plastic created by Bell chemists, the Bell System saved “more than the total research budget of Bell Labs for the decade in which the innovation was worked out.” At one point Baker commissioned a study on the switch to plastic sheathing to satisfy his curiosity. The study concluded that the hangover saved the company about $2.5 Billion. It also determined that if phone engineers had continue to sheathe telephone cable with lead, “it would require 80% of the total lead produced in the US"`

In the abstract, materials are just different ways of arranging atoms (and things with mass smaller than atoms). Manufacturing is our ability to directly rearrange those atoms. So this is a very broad statement. 

Arguably *many* innovations fall under materials and manufacturing. To explicitly identify things that aren’t materials or manufacturing: **farming** (because we’re intermediating the atom rearrangement through organisms[^1]), **communications and computing** (manipulating information instead of atoms), **energy production** (manipulating energy not atoms), **transportation** (moving the atoms from one place to another place instead of how they’re arranged), **medicine** (keeping all the atoms in our bodies in good working order). [^2] 

It’s true that progress in each of these areas affects all the other areas. Increased farming capability enables cheaper food which enables more leisure which enables more science which unlocks other areas. More energy and different energy sources enable the production of fertilizers, new materials, and modes of manufacturing. Improved control systems enable reusable rockets and farm robots. Improved transportation enables specialization that pushes the frontier of other areas. However, I can’t get over the sense that the way that materials and manufacturing enable progress in other areas is different. 

An aggressive assertion is that if you trace[^3] bottleneck-removing constituent technologies[^4] deep enough, the key breakthrough is always related to new materials or manufacturing. At the same time, there’s no ‘de novo’ innovation: it’s [[Phenomena-based cycles]] and [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]] all the way down — refined aluminum enables jet planes but cheap electricity enabled refined aluminum, etc. 

So are materials and manufacturing processes actually special? Some things that feel distinct about materials and manufacturing: materials and manufacturing are abstracted from most people’s lives in a way that other areas are not; materials in particular (but also manufacturing to some extent) enable *qualitative* capability changes in ways that other areas do not; if you take an Baldwinian (ie. Drawing on the work of [[Carliss Baldwin]]) view of technological modularity[^5] materials are almost always the lowest-level module and manufacturing is how those modules are assembled. 

Materials and manufacturing are removed from most people’s[^6] every day lives in a way that no other area is. We think about the energy grid every time we pay an electric bill or the power goes out; most people interact with some form of transportation every day, even if it is just hearing a car; we all carry around internet-connected electric brains; and even though farming feels the most analogous to manufacturing people think much more about how their food is made and where it comes from (organic! Grass fed! Local! No GMOs!) than about how their widget is manufactured. This abstraction has some potential downside: it has perhaps led to a situation where [[Smart people no longer do base-layer work]] and [[Manufacturing is important and often ignored]]. 

Physical technologies are fundamentally limited by the materials they’re made of.[^7] As a result, [[New materials can create discrete changes in technological constraints and enable previously unthought-of applications]]. For example, given a boat’s fixed power to weight ratio, water foils (basically underwater wings that lift a boat’s hull out of the water to drastically decrease drag and chop) need a certain strength-to-weight ratio. It’s not a cost thing, it’s a physics thing. The creation of carbon fiber gave us a material with the right strength to weight ratio. Similarly, new manufacturing techniques like 3D printing can allow us to create combinations of shapes and properties that were literally impossible before. [[New manufacturing paradigms can remove bottlenecks for other paradigms]]. *Materials and manufacturing shift technologies from impossible to possible* (as opposed to merely very difficult and expensive to cheap and easy). Perhaps another way of looking at this is that progress in materials and manufacturing can address bottlenecks imposed by physics in ways that other areas cannot. 

Contrary to what I once thought, I don’t think you can break apart materials and manufacturing to say which is more “fundamental.” Manufacturing processes don’t do much unless they enable us to exploit a new material, but a new material is worthless unless we can manufacture it at a point in quality-price-capability space where it’s actually useful. Steel wasn’t particularly game changing beyond super-expensive swords before the [[Bessemer Process]].  The relationship between materials and manufacturing feels a bit like the relationship between discovery and invention, science and technology. You *invent* a manufacturing process — it has a purpose, it solves a problem. You *discover* a material — it doesn’t really solve a problem until it is turned into a product (even if that product is just the material itself?). 
![](BearImages/65DFAA37-21AC-4185-BDFC-A6FCA9BAE777-519-00018A8C644E126C/FI6IBB_WUAYINaB.png)

- [[Overview of Material Science Breakthroughs that Unlocked other Breakthroughs]]



### Examples and Possibilities
- [[Overview of Material Science Breakthroughs that Unlocked other Breakthroughs]] 
- [[Generative Materials are a possible cross disciplinary place]]
- [[Single strand carbon-fiber parts]]
- [[Why haven’t people started building airplanes with ceramic engines?]]
- [[Utility Fog - A Universal Physical Substance]]

### Related
- [[What if PARPA focused on materials and manufacturing?]]
- [[Ian Brooke Conversation 21 Jun 2021]]
- [[Material Genome Initiative (MGI)]]
- [[Material Science]]
- [[Top material science departments in the world]]
- [[Progress and prospects for accelerating materials science with automated and autonomous workflows]]

[^1]: Of course, it gets fuzzy when you use organisms as part of a manufacturing process . [[Manufacturing and farming lie on a continuum]]
[^2]: This list is roughly similar to [[Jason Crawford]]’s list in [[Charting Progress]]
[^3]: See [[arthurLogicInvention2005]]
[^4]: See [[Technological convergence: from airplane design to drug design]]
[^5]: See [[Modularity in the Design of Complex Engineering Systems]]
[^6]: The temptation is to use the word ‘consumer’ here but I absolutely despise that term. 
[^7]: And for now, all digital technologies manifest on physical substrates. 



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J.C.R. Licklider

How does money work in PARPA?

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

Mark Johnson Conversation 4 Jan 2021

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

Thinking out loud about PARPA’s mission statement

PARPAs ideal legal structure comprises both a nonprofit and a for profit

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

ICT Outline

# Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup
There are many heuretics (discoveries/inventions/innovations/ideas etc.) that don’t fall within the constraints of the institutions we expect to support them. “Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not-product focused enough for a startup” is shorthand for one class of these heuretics. Note that there are many others! 

First, let’s address some misconceptions about what falls into this category.  Wacky ideas and long-term projects are two things that many people assume don’t get supported in universities or startups. This is not true.
	- Long-term projects get support *if* they hit consistent milestones *and* they’ll be able to capture a lot of the value they create if they succeed. 
	- Wacky ideas get support *as long* as they don’t threaten paradigms too badly *or* someone thinks they can make money off of them. 
	- Research projects that require a lot of people or coordination *as long as* the final product is a paper they can all put their names on. See the LHC. 
	- Research projects that require some engineering effort *as long as* the engineering effort resembles something that has been done before: building a bigger telescope/particle collider/linear accelerator/space probe, etc.

The reasons that ideas are not paper-worthy or product-worthy *make sense* given the incentive frameworks in their relative institutions.  [[Most people are not malicious or stupid]]. 

### What makes something not paper-worthy?
‘Paper-worthy’ is meant as shorthand for ’things academics are incentivized to do.’ So things that are not paper worthy are those that don’t obey [[§Academia Constraints]].  It’s important to explicitly call those implications out because that call-out can shine a light on where to dig for hidden gold. 

1. **An idea isn’t paper worthy if not considered “novel enough” or “not a contribution to the literature” by peer reviewers.** [[The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia]] and weeds out many classes of ideas. 

A non-exhaustive list of what gets shot down by peer review: 
- New approaches to old “solved” problems, 
- Better implementations of an existing idea that’s already been implemented, 
- Efficiency improvements along a different metric than the ones the field normally cares about, 
- Scaling existing techniques, 
- Creating something for a very specific application as opposed to a general principle/purpose, 
- Further work on things that have already gotten to proofs of concept
- System integration of several already-existing ideas.

For more see:  [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]]. [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]].  [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]. 

2. **An idea generally isn’t worth writing a paper about if it’s not expected to get a lot of citations.** Even if it’s published, low-citation ideas languish in obscurity. It’s valid to ask ‘are there things that are valuable that don’t get a lot of citations?’ 

I would argue yes, valuable projects that wouldn’t get many citations include:
	- Projects that are intermediate steps to a larger vision without a strong conclusion besides “we did a thing!”
	- Engineering work in a theory-heavy field or theory work in an engineering-heavy field.  More generally, work in a field that the field doesn’t think is valuable. 
	- Ideas that are far enough out of mainstream won’t get many citations because people don’t have the bandwidth to dig in and see if it’s worthwhile and the default answer is “no” (see #3 below) 
	
3. **It’s hard to publish ideas that are too outside of the approved way of doing things.** [[Paradigms outline a set of questions and the rules around answering them]].  Ideas can go too far outside of accepted paradigms when when you’re asking different questions, or measures success differently than standard ways. [[Antedisciplinary Science]] often falls into this trap as well, when it’s too much like discipline X to be published in a journal for discipline Y but it’s too much like discipline Y to be published in a journal for discipline X.  This situation is of course tricky because many (most?) ideas that go outside of paradigms are legitimate crackpottery. [[Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot]]. 

4.  **It’s hard to write a paper if you can’t even get the money to do the research to write the paper.**
The requirement to align with current funding priorities is particularly pernicious because [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]. Additionally, one reason to write papers is to continue playing the game, so if a paper doesn’t hint at your continued ability to do work that aligns with funding priorities, you’re incentivized not to work on it. [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]].

5.  **A project is unlikely to lead to a paper if it’s not within scope for a PhD student or untenured professor.** 
[[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]. In exchange for cheap labor, grad students expect to produce research within a 4-7 year time frame that can help them move on to the next rung of the academic career ladder. (Despite the fact that [[There is an increasingly wide gap between the number of graduate students training for PhDs and academic positions for them to fill]].) While a tenured professor might be willing to work on something crazy that will take 10 years and might be a complete dud, no grad student would rationally work on it.  The incentive for PhD students to produce high-impact papers for the sake of their careers serve to amplify all the other constraints, and add the timescale constraint. Additionally, PhD students in science get most of their funding via research grants, so research they work on is especially susceptible to #4. 

6. **Projects that produce a lot of structured data or reusable code don’t led themselves to papers.** Academic papers are built around the paradigm of scientific inquiry, where collecting data and writing code are only in service to producing an abstract model or theory - the more generalizable the better. There is little reward to producing high quality, reusable datasets or code, despite the value they can create. 

7. **A project is unlikely to lead to a paper if it involves a lot of coordination.** Academia emphasizes individual agency. This is a good thing, but if a project cannot be effectively modularized it will end up requiring a lot of grungy coordination work that doesn’t count as a contribution unless you’re in charge of the project. A big reason to go into academia in the first place is to avoid having a boss and because you like doing your own thing, your own way. Obviously there are exceptions like the LHC, but that is a situation where the experimental particle physicists are locked into a paradigm and have no other option. 

Coordination aversion hits hard projects that don’t fit into a particular disciplinary bucket or require integration between components built in different labs. Projects of a particular scale require coordination by their very nature. See[[A new structure for scalable research]] for a much deeper dive.  

### What makes something not product-focused enough for a startup
‘Product-focused’ is meant as shorthand for ’things startups are incentivized to do.’ So things that are not product-worthy are those that don’t obey [[§Startup Constraints]].  It’s important to explicitly call those implications out because that call-out can shine a light on where to dig for hidden gold. 

1. **There’s no convincing story for how the project’s output produce a massive and competitive ROI on a reasonable timescale for a VC-funded startup** 
*Massive ROI* Venture capitalists need to believe that any investment in their portfolio could potentially return the fund. 
*Competitive ROI* Investing isn’t just about absolute returns - any investment is in leu of another investment. So if the stock market is absolutely crushing it, there’s less incentive to invest in higher risk technology. Even within the VC realm, many atom-based technologies have the same risk or higher than a software startup but expected return is lower (especially when you take timeline into account) or farther in the future. From the cold hard numbers SaaS is often just a better investment.  
*Timescale* [[J.C.R. Licklider]] started work on the ARPA project to build what we would consider “modern computing” in 1962 and perhaps the first real ‘value capture’ event based on it was Apple’s IPO in 1980. [[Venture capitalists need to fund things that increase valuation in a few years and return in 5-7 years]] so this trajectory would have been untenable as a startup. Venture timescales often lead to projects being pushed to focus on a specific application or being acquired before achieving the technical goals they set out to hit. There is nothing wrong with either of these routes per se, but they can lead to technologies failing to live up to their potential. 
2. **It will take a lot of development work to sell anything for a bootstrapped startup**
Startups do not *need* to raise money from VCs. However, that does mean that if the founders are not extremely wealthy ([[SpaceX]], [[Blue Origin]]) the startup needs revenue early on. If the project will take a lot of development work before it can sell anything the startup needs to get revenue somewhere. Some bootstrapped startups use consulting work to create revenue to fund development. Unless it’s wildly profitable, the consulting approach severely limits the amount of time and money that can be spent on development, possibly dragging it out forever. [[Some projects need effort above a certain threshold to move forward]]. [[SBIR]] grants can provide another option, but they are relatively small (order $1m over several years.) 
3. **It’s hard to capture the value the project creates**
Markets are great, but there is no law of economics that people can always capture the value they create if they are clever enough. (See [[Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy - Theory and Measurement]].)  Research often falls into this trap because [[Innovation requires multiple people]]. Often the person who figures out how to make a lot of money off of a discovery or invention is not the person who created it, nor are they even in the same organization.  “But what about intellectual property ?” There are *many* reasons intellectual property does not ensure everybody involved in an innovation capture the value they create but a short list includes: many people in many organizations contribute to most innovations, patents only work for a narrow set of innovations, and patents have massive downsides - including potentially capping how much value an innovation can create. 

A more subtle issue than the question of value capture itself is that trying to capture the value created by an innovation can severely hamstring the total value it creates. Consider the [[Graphical User Interface]] and other personal computing innovations created at [[Xerox PARC]]. Arguably they’ve created trillions of dollars of value for the world. Would that be the case if Apple had a patent on the GUI and mouse? Probably not. This situation is not unique. 

[[It is hard to capture value from research]]

4. **The project is changing one or more components of a bigger system or process** 
A startup that is trying to improve or change a component of a bigger system needs to either convince whoever runs that system to adopt the change (which is especially hard when no particular entity runs the system) or the startup needs to build the entire system themselves with the change incorporated. 

Obviously, the change needs to happen eventually, but many paradigm shifts (especially in complex systems) initially *lower* performance, at least on traditional metrics. [[Metrics can cause paradigm lock-in]]. Change happens either when the new paradigm gets enough reps to catch up to the old way of doing things or people see the new paradigm in action and accept that the traditional metrics weren’t capturing all the important features of a system. Both of these situations are hard for a traditional startup to achieve because both approaches take a lot of time and resources before showing ‘traction’ and the potential customers (the people running the systems or consuming their outputs) will assert that the idea is dumb up until its not. 

See [[fillerFundamentalManufacturingProcess2020]] for more.

5. **Innovations that can’t be encapsulated into a product**
There are some innovations that it’s just hard to productize. Process innovations often fall into this category - especially those that don’t depend on new technology per se, but on a new way of doing the same thing with basically the same tools. The [[Bessemer Process]], for example, used basically the same crucibles but you put different things in them. Social process changes (like Kaizen[^1]) are even harder to productize. 

In these situations, the vast majority of the value generally accrues to the end-product producer or consumers. The naive advice would be “start a firm that’s doing the end-to-end thing” and outcompete the incumbents. While that should theoretically work, it often runs into the reality of extremely complex products that you would need to reinvent from the ground up (like if you had a better way of making passenger jets), heavily regulated industries where it would take massive lobbying just to use a new process, and other scenarios. A startup doesn’t usually have the time or resources to tackle these scenarios. The alternative approach is to take on a change-management consulting role, which usually doesn’t capture enough value to be VC-fundable so it needs to be profitable early on. Additionally consulting runs head-long into the issues in point #4 above. 

In some ways this point is intertwined with #4. 

6. **Startups shouldn’t tackle market, channel, AND technical risk** 
New technological paradigms usually come with all three of technical, market, and channel risk. You simultaneously need a lot of work to get the technology to a point where it’s competitive with alternatives, to figure out who wants to use it, and to establish how they’re going to buy it. 

It’s common wisdom among VCs that it’s not a good idea to invest in companies that are taking on two, let alone three of these risks. This heuristic isn’t misguided.  The chance of failure goes up *dramatically* when an organization tries to tackle tow, let alone three of those risks. Startups should only tackle one (or *maybe* two) of these.  The reason therapeutics focused startups can exist is that they have almost no market or channel risk - there is a well established pipeline to being acquired by a pharma company and insurance companies are guaranteed to pay for drugs that go through FDA approval and target big conditions.

At the end of the day, the work you need to do to drive adoption of a technology is often very different from getting it to a certain performance level. The work priorities drive the type of organization you create. As much as we like to think that startups are about building technology, they are actually about selling technology and adopting it for specific markets so that they can do that better. 

### Related
- [[§Academia Constraints]]
- [[§Startup Constraints]]
- [[§Corporate R&D Constraints]]
- [[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]]
- [[Systems research requires a lot of work that is expensive and uninteresting]]

[^1]: [[Kaizen is Toyotas process for continuous business process improvement]] 



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Jason Crawford

# What was Robert Mushet’s thought process when he figured out how to improve steel?
[[Bessemer Process]]

- [[Jason Crawford]] might be interested in this question

## References
[[Lever of Riches]]
           


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Bessemer Process

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