Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results?

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?

# ARPA Does Windows - The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution

- IPTO started with $7million budget (~$47m today)
- 1962 - no CS departments ::[[What departments don’t exist today?]]::
- 
![](BearImages/97C68432-5E2D-4EC9-B0E8-E1AACE5A0F47-45759-0003B2388CD22F8A/376E18E9-85C1-43BB-99AF-B64DDE772D40.png)

- IPTO funded englwebart for 7 years
	- [[Anybody attempting to emulate DARPA needs to be willing to sit with a lot of discomfort for a long time]]
### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Glenn Fong]]
## Link
[(PDF) ARPA Does Windows: The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution | Glenn Fong - Academia.edu](https://www.academia.edu/10575481/ARPA_Does_Windows_The_Defense_Underpinning_of_the_PC_Revolution)

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# Adam Marblestone 26/2/2020
# Adam Marblestone 26-2-2020
- [[Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?]]
- [[What are the small
- [[What are the different parameters in institutional design space?]]
- Really pull out what’s broken
- Adam Shi’s  <—?
Metamaterials 

## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Adam Marblestone]]
## Link

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§ARPA model

Research orgs don’t scale

An endowment that funds operations out of the interest on a large principle seems like the ideal funding mechanism for a a private ARPA

PARPAs third evolutionary stage is a full private ARPA

# DARPA is more ideas limited than money limited
From [[mervisWhatMakesDARPA2016]]:
`“I never really felt constrained by money,” (former DARPA director) Tether says. “I was more constrained by ideas.” In fact, aerospace engineer Verne (Larry) Lynn, DARPA’s director from 1995 to 1998, says he successfully lobbied Congress to shrink his budget after the Clinton administration had boosted it to “dangerous levels” to finance a short-lived technology reinvestment program. “When an organization becomes bigger, it becomes more bureaucratic,” Lynn told an interviewer in 2006.`  
Let’s also just take a moment to stand in awe of this 😮 

Both the explicit desire to avoid bureaucracy and the low marginal benefit of money and people is another reason why [[DARPA is relatively tiny and flat]] is important. 

Why is this?
- At any time there are only so many things in the [[Adjacent Possible]] that fall into the sweet spot of just hitting an inflection point on a [[Technological S curves]].
- Almost by definition, the more of a Big H hard problem it is [[Big H hard problems are those that need a discovery to solve]] the less throwing money at it will help. 
- DARPA is not in the business of dispersion. When you have something that scales, by definition more money = more results. 
- [[The impact of innovations follow a power law distribution]] so if you limit yourself to only working on things with a certain level of impact, and are not in the business of scaling those things, more money will not have more impact. 
- Something about the idea marketplace for ideas - once people realize that something is a good idea, darpa money is less useful. 

VC firms experience a similar effect - they tend to have lower percent returns as funds get bigger even though they *are* in the business of scaling things. 

Presumably DARPA also has a lower bound on effective funding. What might that be? 

 [[Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?]] 

This situation is related to the question. It suggests that if the answer is ‘yes’ that threshold is not enormous. might be “no, you just haven’t digested the problem well enough.”

### Related
- [[An indefinite mindset means that you are out of good ideas]] - throwing more money at a big-H hard problem is an indefinite approach
- 

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List of progress studies questions

DARPA is more ideas limited than money limited

Adam Marblestone 26/2/2020

# Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?
# Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost- If so what is it
According to [[ARPA Does Windows - The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution]], DARPA IPTO started with a budget of $7M ($47M)



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§PARPA

DARPA is ~0.5% of the Department of Defense Budget and ~12% of that is basic research

Person targeted questions for roadmapping

A 1B dollar PARPA budget could come from a 25B dollar endowment at 4 percent interest

ARPA Model Conclusions

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Asking questions

ICT Outline

# Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results?
# Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results
[[It is important for big things to start small]] and many attempts to replicate DARPA’s results start too big. [[Most DARPA clones start too big or with heavy process]]. So it makes sense to ask: can you start with a tenth of DARPA’s budget? A hundredth? A thousandth? 

There are two lower budget bounds that you’ll run into: the number of parallel high-risk programs you need to run to get a success and the budget per program to have a viable shot at that success. 

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that if each program generously has a 10% chance of success [[DARPA has a 5-10 percent program success rate]] then you need to run at least seven programs to give yourself a 50% chance of at least one program being successful. 

The question of minimum program budget is trickier. Let’s look at some comparison numbers. In the years 2018-2020 among DARPA programs not focused on assembly and production, the minimum budget was $2m, the maximum budget was $31.4m and the average budget was $12m. The ARPA IPTO directorate that midwifed the personal computer started with a budget of $47M in today’s dollars.  ARPA-E vacillates between ~$200-$300M/year, has about 50 programs running at any time, which comes out to roughly $4m to $6m per program. IARPA’s budget is classified.  Could a program go below a couple million dollars a year and still be effective? There are arguments both ways. On the one hand you could argue that surely bureaucratic inefficiency is pushing those budgets higher than they need to be. On the other hand, it might be that the sort of work that it’s most valuable for an organization riffing on the ARPA Model to do needs a relatively large budget, otherwise it would be picked up by other funding mechanisms. 

According to [[ARPA Does Windows - The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution]], the ARPA IPTO directorate started with a budget of $7M ($47M today.)

![](BearImages/E3D3DAFC-064A-4106-9667-16B6BB3A6866-1821-0002C788AA5781E9/198E2108-3613-44C5-9D9E-F91EEC23559B.png)

In the years 2018-2020 among DARPA programs not focused on assembly and production, the minimum budget was $2m, the maximum budget was $31.4m and the average budget was $12m. 

https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/DARPA_FY20_Presidents_Budget_Request.pdf

### Related
- [[Adam Marblestone Podcast 2020-03-31]]
- [[Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?]]
- [[Person targeted questions for roadmapping]]



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Innovation orgs need a money factory

It takes roughly 20 years to exploit a phenomenon at scale

# List of progress studies questions
- What is the distribution of timescales it took people to exploit  phenomena over time and the reasons behind those timescales would be good for 
	- See [[It takes roughly 20 years to exploit a phenomenon at scale]]
- What is the role of expectations in progress? Sometimes expectations push things to be done faster, but sometimes they bury a project under hype. 
- [[Could you model dispersion as a second order linear differential equation like a LRC circuit or a spring-mass-damper system?]]
- [[When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?]]
- [[Why aren’t people building more institutions?]]
- [[Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?]]

- [ ] Go through questions and fill them in here

### Related
- [[What is the ontology of constraints on progress?]]


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Benʼs working notes

Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?

Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost- If so what is it

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