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]]

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

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§Academia Constraints

Decoupling from market discipline is like cave diving

Current value capture mechanisms are crude

When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?

§Corporate R+D Constraints

Startups are good at point changes

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Ideally corporate R+D enables work on a general purpose technology before it’s specialized

There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model

One function of a private ARPA is to fill in the gap once filled by corporate R+D

There are many important innovations that are just bad investments

Startup Constraints - essay

The market in for-profit organizations is fairly efficient

Profit-maximizing organizational structures can hamstring technologies whose impact depends on them

PARPA could walk the line between profit and non profit

Startups  need to spend effort on sales, marketing, and productization

# §Startup Constraints
- [[Startups need to make a lot of money or have a lot of users]]

- [[Startups need to conform to investor timescales]]
- [[Venture capital doesn’t work for things that only realize their value on long timescales]]
- [[Startups need an exit strategy]]
- [[Startups need a great story]]
- [[Startups need to produce a scalable product]] 
- [[Startups need to break development into correctly sized stages]]
- [[Startups need specific growth curves]]
- [[If a project has massive possible upside and low enough risk it is venture fundable]]
- [[Scalability and venture fundability happens when you turn a process innovation into a tool innovation]]
- [[Startups are good at point changes]]

- [[Startup Constraints - essay]]

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

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§Program Design

Most roadmaps suck

Good Simulations could be the ‘why now’ of roadmapping tools

# Good roadmaps work backwards from a goal
Working backwards from a goal prevents ideas from being locked-in by how people think about the problem right now. 

In a way, thinking backwards from a goal is what people mean when they talk about first-principles thinking. The usual interpretation is to start with physics but I would assert that while tying back to physical laws is important to ‘first principles’ thinking, it’s actually the end. Or perhaps ending each step with checking “does this violate physics?” Is an important part of the process.  Working backwards from a goal is ‘first principles’ thinking in the Aristotelian sense of not working off of the work of others, which *is* critical to working backwards. 

The working backwards approach contrasts with the map-and-then-roadmap approach, where you would survey the entire landscape and *then* create a path through it. [[Roadmaps have two pieces - the map and the path]] . In reality, the approach is probably a deeply impure mixture of the two approaches - jumping back and forth between working backwards and describing the present state of the world. [[Understanding a thing has to do with intuiting the affordances of a thing]] and in order to understand the affordances of the area you’re playing in you need to at least engage with the way it does work now.  

In a way there is a tension between working forward and working backwards. If you purely work backwards you ignore the accumulated wisdom of one or more disciplines, which is considerable if those disciplines are valuable in the first place. [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]]. And to compound the problem, often that wisdom (especially wisdom on the [[Knowledge frontier]]) is not well modularized and composable, so it’s hard to know what’s important and what’s ignorable without knowing it. At the same time, starting with “the state of a field” can be a trap in a couple of ways.  [[The tech tree is fractal]] so you could actually spend an infinite amount of time digging into exactly what the frontier looks like. Additionally if you spend a lot of time immersed in current paradigms you’ll start to see the world through those paradigms, which is problematic for going after goals that almost by definition have not been reached by the people who work in those paradigms. 

This tension between working backwards and forwards is embodied any time someone approaches a problem outside of their ‘area of expertise.’ It is perhaps best illustrated by physics. Physicists are constantly bombarded by theories from quacks who think that they have found a new theory of <life, the universe, and/or everything.> At the same time, people who in the past *have* found new theories have on occasion come from non-traditional backgrounds and *were* regarded as quacks, until they weren’t. 

Perhaps the correct way to think about roadmapping is actually similar to a backpropagation algorithm, where you do many passes going both backwards and forwards. You

Not working backwards from a clear goal is one of the ways that [[Most roadmaps suck]].  A big reason they don’t do this is that working backwards is *really hard.* It forces you to consider important questions about something that doesn’t actually exist. Asking questions about “made up things” isn’t a mode of thinking we’re used to. 

[[The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions]] asserts that working backwards from a goal helps you evaluate possible paths to that goal with an unbiased eye. 

[[Treating Science Fiction as case studies from a future history]] might be one way to make considering important questions about things that don’t exist. 

Thinking about hard-to-think-about questions regarding things that don’t exist seems like an actual place for tools for thought. [[You could build tools to make program design more efficacious]]. 

Another framing besides ‘goals’ is answers to the question [[What does ‘working’ mean?]] for this particular program?

One thought is that perhaps you [[Work backwards with questions and work forward with answers]]?

### Related
- [[A lot of research feels like it is building lego pieces without any idea how they’ll be used]]
- [[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]]
- [[Technological roadmapping can give an idea of where technological evolution can go and how to get there]]
- [[Luke Durant Email 18 Sep 2020]]



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Good roadmaps work backwards from a goal

PARPAs second evolutionary stage is an architecting institute

PARPAs third evolutionary stage is a full private ARPA

# The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions
- The core idea is that there is an organization that hosts “Architects” 
- Architect may be a better term for PMs
- Principles
![](BearImages/4B427308-60F0-4089-945D-B3CA72B607DF-98199-000AA867B4581C46/DB10724F-8118-40FA-A73E-9E4ACDE2B613.png)
	- Architects must be omnidisciplinary
		- Architects need to know multiple fields at multiple levels of abstraction
		- Need to be able to seek out detailed technical consulting from larger groups of experts 
	- Architects must care only for enduring Impact
		- ::How do you se up incentives to do this?::
	- Roadmap problems systematically and comprehensively
		- The typical notion of interdisciplinary research is to optimize for serendipity 
			- ::Extension Need to engineer who is in the room?::
		- A key to roadmapping is to evaluate all possible solutions in a maximally unbiased way - working backwards from the problem
	- Avoid being a fixed set of people
		- The very notion of a finite institution saving a complete problem on its own might be an instance of push thinking
	- Be agnostic to where collaborators come from
		- No matter how great your institute, most of the relevant people are not going to pack up and move to it
	- Create and leverage trusted networks
		- How to create trusted networks
			- Pairwise interactions between architects and potential team members
			- Pay attention to who works well together, public vs private information
			- Architects need ‘unimpeachable’ creditability
	- Design around problems rather than debugging through them
		- Use existing arts whenever possible - it forces you to find things
		- Outsource everything possible
		- View skills as commodities
- “Latent Architects”
![](BearImages/E13B472B-E081-43FD-95A7-FB2D9878E815-98199-000AA965F7D5A0BB/05D67568-400A-4513-AB45-F8C42F335049.png)
![](BearImages/52FD904E-E434-4BAD-9465-A61A5FE33EF8-98199-000AA96A63A54C2A/590A6437-3B30-4069-8BBB-78BD7E13DDEA.png)
![](BearImages/70C1AE8A-99B7-46A3-9256-834F07EBF423-98199-000AA96D947A9814/93B0DB03-6E32-4D07-A5BB-700920836F6A.png)
- [[§Academia Constraints]]
- 
![](BearImages/3179F3EE-50B2-49A0-9EFF-ADEB2C91BA20-98199-000AA9769BCC520C/7CCBD296-3331-44DF-91F6-5116A47892EC.png)
- [[§Startup Constraints]]

- Features of the Architected Innovation Institution
	1. Act catalytically
		- Estimate 5000 sqft for 10 architects and $25m/year
		- Dynamic funding is important
	2. Generate strategies and act flexibly to execute on strategies
	Possible moves
![](BearImages/49AE1095-2973-4DB4-A797-610557C08B66-98199-000AB6FAD696D488/C55B9441-8EAA-4B58-82CD-EC724225D6E9.png)
	3. Creates a core capability in ground truth biological analysis
	4. Core services to facilitate efforts 
		- Need to have technical people on staff
	5. Provides flexible mechanisms of support for exceptional individuals who do not fit in elsewhere
		- Maintain “fellows” with no projects or goals
- Punts on funding question
![](BearImages/067A6658-AD76-47DD-8D11-3D24958AE9EA-98199-000AB75C67154EBA/148E4D13-324E-49CB-8C1D-E82A692EEFA3.png)
### Published
?
## Questions
## Thoughts
- Possibly a great intermediate step for [[§PARPA]] - at $25m/year level
- Think of PARPA planning in terms of money 
## Related
## Authors
- [[Adam Marblestone]]
## Link
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1a3aqw05ieeaebw/the%20architected%20innovation%20institute_2020-09-18%2016.20.35.pdf.pdf?dl=0



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