odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995

Fundamental Tensions

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

Specialization in research and careers in general has cut off a lot of possible innovations

T-Shaped Individuals

Competition and lack of slack  creates specialization

The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature

How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents

Slow moving fields are almost “fully connected”

You need to earn the right to be a generalist

The way people think drastically changes depending on their context

The difference between specialists and generalists is not clean but depends on which nodes they can extend

Modularizing ideas and specialization are the same thing

NS Notes on Officers Techniques

Are Engineers Who Specialize More Successful? - Paper

The Andy Grove Fallacy

We need more deabstracted shop talk across disciplines

# §Specialists vs. Generalists
# §Specialists vs- Generalists
* [[Specialists create knowledge within fields]]
* See [[Why some people are impossibly talented - article]]
* [[Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast and Slow-paced Domains]] adds some nuance: it might be that  [[Specialists have the most impact in fast moving fields and generalists have the most impact in slow moving fields]]
* [[You need to earn the right to be a generalist]]
* [[Slow moving fields are almost “fully connected”]]
* [[Fast moving fields have lots of unconnected nodes]]
* [[Specialization and l
* What is the actual evidence?



### Related
- https://twitter.com/anderssandberg/status/1430138757253156868?s=20
- [[Epistemic Trespassing]]



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neumannOneProcess2020

Activity Space

Modularization enables pieces to be used in many different technologies

The tech tree is fractal

Technological roadmapping can give an idea of where technological evolution can go and how to get there

A heuretic’s impact is not endogenous to the technology but depends on the environment

The tech tree is a scaffolding inside the knowledge frontier

Technodiversity is important

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

Top of mind

We don’t have good institutional ways to create multi-point changes

Phenomena are things that happen without a human consciously making them happen

Impact in innovation is analogous to fitness in evolution

The tech tree model of heuretics is a directed acyclic graph

Heuretic is a better word than innovation

Science and technology advance through the same fundamental mechanism

Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart

There is a higher probability of accidentally unlocking a closely related node on the tech tree

Untapped technical people near the end of their careers may have more potential than young people

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

Dispersion is a more appropriate word than dissemination or diffusion for heuretics

Uptimal solutions in science and technology are rarer than you think

The affordance of a heuretic dictates how it can connect with another node on the tech tree

Breakthrough fundamental science

Ring Species are situations where group A can mate with group B and B can mate with C but C cannot mate with A

The tech tree model suggests that more work on more root nodes is important

How do you incentivize people to work on nodes farther down the tree?

Each heuretic by default inherits the constraints, affordances, and assumptions of its parents

Observational technological phenomena

Adam Marblestone feedback on design

Science is discovering and exploring phenomena while technology is using a principle to exploit phenomena towards a use

 from airplane design to drug design

What are the different moves that can happen with a heuretic?

# §Tech Tree Model of Heuretics
Imagine a tree growing “up” with “root nodes” “lower” or “deeper” in the tree. The height is some monotonic function of time, but it definitely isn’t 1:1. 
- [[The tech tree is fractal]]
- [[The tech tree model of heuretics is a directed acyclic graph]]
	- [[Each node on the tech tree can recursively be decomposed into more nodes]]
-  [[The tech tree is a scaffolding inside the knowledge frontier]]
- [[Connections create new knowledge]]
- [[The tech tree creates new nodes either through idea sex or learning by doing]]
	- [[The upshot of learning by doing being a first class process is that the implementation is as important as where the idea came from]]
- [[Tech trees first showed up in the Civilization boardgame in 1980]] but [[There do not appear to be any intellectual connections between video game tech trees and history+philosophy of science+technology]]. [[Tech trees are intuitive]].

### Heuretics
- [[As a platonic ideal, research is an unscheduled quest for new knowledge and inventions with hard-to-predict outcomes]]
- [[Heuretics are either inventions or discoveries]]
- [[Heuretic is a better word than innovation]]
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]
	- [[Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans*]]
	- [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]]
	- [[Brains are wombs for heuretics]]
- [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]]
	- [[Conception is the imaginative design of a heuretic]]
	- [[Implementation is the actualization of the heuretic in the real world]]
- [[The process of creating a new heuretic node is like building something out of legos]]
- [[Science and technology advance through the same fundamental mechanism]]
- [[Modularization enables pieces to be used in many different technologies]]
- [[Modularization enables the higher level technology to improve continuously even if pieces improve discretely]]
-  [[The affordance of a heuretic dictates how it can connect with another node on the tech tree]]
-  [[Each heuretic by default inherits the constraints, affordances, and assumptions of its parents]]
-  [[Interfacing between closer neighbors on the tech tree is easier than between nodes that are farther apart]]
- [[There is a higher probability of accidentally unlocking a closely related node on the tech tree]]
- [[Uptimal solutions in science and technology are rarer than you think]]

### Dispersion
- [[Dispersion is the process of a heuretic impacting the world]] ::needs work::
- [[Dispersion does not happen instantly and often requires a lot of work]] ::needs work::
	- [[List of things that affect dispersion]]
- [[Constraints limit the impact and dispersion speed of a heuretic]] ::needs work::
- [[Dispersion is a more appropriate word than dissemination or diffusion for heuretics]]

### Specialists and Generalists
-  [[The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature]]
- [[Modularizing ideas and specialization are the same thing]]
- [[The difference between specialists and generalists is not clean but depends on which nodes they can extend]]
- [[Fast moving fields have lots of unconnected nodes]]

### Other Phenomena
- [[General purpose technologies are technologies that are lower on the tree]]
- [[Macroinventions are the tail end of the impact power law distribution clashing with our intuition]]
- [[The phenomenon of seemingly trivial technologies becoming incredibly important happens because there is fog of war on the tech tree]]

## Tech Tree is analogous to evolutionary tree
- [[Impact in innovation is analogous to fitness in evolution]]
-  [[A heuretic’s impact is not endogenous to the technology but depends on the environment]]
- [[There are many heuretic environments]]
- [[Ring Species are situations where group A can mate with group B and B can mate with C but C cannot mate with A]]
- [[There are scientific and technological problems that make other technology advances irrelevant by altering the environment]]
- [[In the same way that species don’t suddenly replace each other, technologies and ideas don’t suddenly replace each other]]

## Upshots
-  [[Technodiversity is important]]
-  [[The tech tree model suggests that more work on more root nodes is important]]
- [[How do you incentivize people to work on nodes farther down the tree?]]
- [[People are incentivized to work on nodes higher up the tech tree]]
- [[Systems must take performance hits to get out of local optima]]
- [[The tech tree model suggests that explicitly drawing out tech trees is important]]
	- [[The structure of the tech tree can inform actions that are short term suboptimal but long term useful]]
	- [[Roadmapping could be thought of as backwards-chaining together a series of conception-only heuretics]]
- [[What does technological genetic engineering look like?]]
- [[What does technological husbandry look like?]]
- [[What does technological mutation breeding look like?]]

### References
- [[neumannOneProcess2020]]
-  [[Breakthrough fundamental science]]
- [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]]
- [[arthurNatureTechnologyWhat2009]]
- [[narayanamurtiCyclesInventionDiscovery2016]]
- [[Road-mapping Biology - Article]]
- [[Adam Marblestone Podcast 2020-03-31]]
- 

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Progress frontiers are geographically fractal

What are the properties of maps?

There are two levels of institution

Technological and scientific paradigms are each based around exploiting a specific phenomenon

Scientific inquiry is an abstracting process while engineering design is a narrowing process

Maps are multi-scale

olsonManagingModesEffort2020

How can you describe the difference between learning by doing and idea sex?

Each node on the tech tree can recursively be decomposed into more nodes

Conservatism and Progressivism both have good and bad sides

Identity categories are fractal

# Every time you zoom in on a fractal, it presents the same pattern on a different scale
Fractals are Multi- Scale patters
## Questions
## Related
* [[Progress frontiers are geographically fractal]]
## References


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Specialists create knowledge within fields

Idea sex probably happens more often in generalists

Notes that get screwed up somewhere in the pipeline

# Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes 	
This note was originally “Generalists create connections between disciplines.” That statement is imprecise because [[The tech tree is fractal]] so the line between disciplines is mushy. Roughly, the higher the degree of the nodes that someone is connecting ([[Connections create new knowledge]]) the more of a generalist they are. 

### Related 
- The idea of elaboration in [[How to Take Smart Notes]]
- [[Connections create new knowledge]] 
- [[The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature]]. 



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§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics

Generalists create connections between high-degree nodes

# The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature
In the same way that [[Every time you zoom in on a fractal, it presents the same pattern on a different scale]] who is a ‘specialist’ and who is a ‘generalist’ depends on which scale you’re looking at disciplines. 

The “level” of a generalist may have to do with the number of nodes in the [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]]  that a person could build new nodes from.  [[The difference between specialists and generalists is not clean but depends on which nodes they can extend]]

### Related
[[Theory of Expertise - James Dama]]
[[§Specialists vs. Generalists]]



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# The difference between specialists and generalists is not clean but depends on which nodes they can extend
Because [[The tech tree is fractal]], the difference between specialists and generalists is not “the number of nodes they can extend.” Instead the difference depends on the fractal degree of the nodes they can extend. Those who we think of as generalists are the people who are able to extend multiple high level nodes. *but* in order to do this, they often need to work with specialists who are able to extend the nodes that are fractally contained within that node.

More nodes-within-nodes are legible to specialists, while more higher-fractal degree nodes are legible to generalists. [[In order to extend a heuretic it must be legible to you]].

This also has to do with modularity ( [[Modularization allows different groups to work on different pieces]] ) in that given any node, the generalists understand how its interfaces work, while the specialists know the interfaces at least one level down. 

### Related
- [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]]
- [[§Specialists vs. Generalists]]



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When should we defer to experts?

# Theory of Expertise - James Dama
### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[James Dama]]
## Link
[Theory of Expertise - Google Docs](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qj_meuWb0UtYrspA2RW0-01Xy2KpTafRN7G8yAKSEnA/edit)

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Benʼs working notes

The difference between specialists and generalists is fractal in nature

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