
Patrick Collison on Innovation and Scientific Progress [audio] - whoisnnamdi
http://www.econtalk.org/patrick-collison-on-innovation-and-scientific-progress/
======
hoaw
I am trying to read transcript, but I can't really make sense of it. It seems
all over the place. I mean, what is even the argument that society, or growth,
is hard science bound? Maybe that isn't the point.

Some things that define society, or at least peoples views, have also just
been getting harder. You can't really do something as obviously meaningful in
space as the moon landing. You can do many other things if you change your
frame of reference, but we are not going interstellar anytime soon.

If there is any observation I would make it is that the way innovation is made
seems to have changed. It used to be you had some sort of goal and then tried
to get the best technology to do that. Today, it seems like companies, and
societies, are sitting around waiting for technologies to exploit. One day
self-driving cars, 3d printed houses and AI enabled health scanners are going
to save us all. We aren't really sure how, why or if there is even much worth
saving at that point, but it will surely happen?

~~~
throwaway_u328s
(Throwaway since I know a lot of the Stripe folks.)

Agreed -- I'm disappointed to see this from pc. This piece reeks of the "Andy
Grove Fallacy", as described by to Derek Lowe ([1] and [2]).

It's one thing to be a mastercard middleman -- it's completely different to
create new fundamental knowledge about the world.

[1] "Andy Grove: Rich, Famous, Smart and Wrong"
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/and...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2007/11/06/andy_grove_rich_famous_smart_and_wrong)

[2] "Silicon Valley Sunglasses"
[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/sil...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses)

~~~
hoaw
I read the article from The Atlantic instead. While I disagree with their
analysis, where I can't help thinking that they are just measuring the "wow-
factor" which would diminish as more people are working on something in a more
iterative fashion, the middle part of the article is quite interesting. I also
appreciate that they left it rather open ended especially since I assume we
wouldn't come to the same conclusion.

One thing they are at least implying, but I think they could have explored
more is implementations. While you can argue whether there are less scientific
breakthroughs or not, we certainly have less implementations. Were I assume I
differ from their view is that I think this have to do with diminish returns
for the implementations themselves.

To some extent it becomes meaningless to "cure cancer" when we have
preventable diseases and situations killing people every day. So there can't
realistically be a goal to do it. (Which isn't intended as an argument about
the value of each). As I insinuated earlier I think a breakthrough is really
in the eye of the beholder. Society these days doesn't really provide a
platform for creating and implementing breakthroughs. The ambition get lost in
the noise.

I think people assume when watching utopian science fiction that science
resulted in society. Maybe in reality it is the other way around. Once you
decide that everyone deserves e.g. housing the result becomes worth it and the
science follows. That is certainly what happened in the ~60s in many parts of
the world. If no one thinks that this is a worthy breakthrough why would
anything happen in the first place today?

[What I really wanted to say was that I found the middle part of article
surprisingly interesting].

~~~
petra
>> I think a breakthrough is really in the eye of the beholder . Society these
days doesn't really provide a platform for creating and implementing
breakthroughs.

If you'd ask yuval-noah harari, an historian, he'll say that with today's and
tomorrow's innovation in AI and robotics , we're at unprecedented era in
history.

~~~
x3tm
Impact on society doesn't mean impact on science. What scientific
breakthroughs were due to the internet? Yet, the internet had/has an
unprecedented impact on history.

On the other hand, when someone starts having public opinions on pretty much
anything (from buddhism to AI), I tend to be very suspicious about their
expertise.

~~~
jacobolus
> What scientific breakthroughs were due to the internet?

Many, many, many. But it’s hard to pinpoint them.

Lower-friction communication between researchers and better access to
published science is an incredible catalyst for every kind of advance (from
trivial incremental improvements through to new paradigms) in every field.

~~~
x3tm
Better/faster communication can facilitate work, but it's not the same as
causing a breakthrough like say new data/theory. In that regard, English as a
unified scientific language has probably a bigger impact than the internet.

------
whitneyrzoller
I remember being a bit surprised when I read this (the Atlantic article much
of the convo is focused on) back in December, that there was no mention of
Thomas Kuhn's perspective on the structure of scientific progress. Maybe I'm
out of date on the consensus views though.

Personally I would find it more surprising if there were _not_ diminishing
returns on investments on scientific inquiry, than (as presented in the
article) if there are. Kuhn's paradigms offer the escape maybe, ROI
diminishing within one paradigm, and then increasing rapidly within some new
paradigm.

~~~
bacon_waffle
The Atlantic article:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminish...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-
returns-science/575665/)

------
davidivadavid
Patrick Collison is always interesting to read, but the 103 occurrences of
"kind of" and 54 of "you know" remind me why I tend to avoid podcasts.

~~~
carusooneliner
The 'you know' is a filler we use for traffic regulation. We use these fillers
subconsciously to take micro breaks while speaking, to verbalize our thoughts
and to indicate to the listener not to interrupt as we aren't done speaking
yet.

Polish of delivery is just a nice to have feature, substance matters most of
all.

I've attended public speaking courses, which tend to emphasize polish, but
seeing some of the most effective speakers using fillers like 'ums' 'ahs' and
'you know' just goes to show polish doesn't matter all that much. Reality
supersedes theory.

~~~
davidivadavid
The fact it's annoying to listen to "ums", "you knows" and "kind ofs" is very
much a reality. Polish and content aren't an either-or thing.

------
perfmode
Scientific Growth != Societal Growth && Technological Growth != Social Growth

~~~
noobiemcfoob
I definitely see your point, but if you view science and technology as aspects
of culture, then your statement is false.

~~~
perfmode
That’s a semantic issue. And a big if.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
No, it's not a semantic issue, but to someone who doesn't see it that way,
sure it's a big if. Technology is developed in response to the pain points a
given people might feel and represent their beliefs just as clearly as a drum
beat.

------
woopwoop
The benefits of productivity growth are normed to the size of the economy, so
the relevant comparison is R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to productivity
growth. As fas as I know, R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been
relatively flat for a long time. See [1] for data for a bunch of countries
going back to 1996. So this is much less dramatic than the claims of, e.g.,
50x growth in spending on scientific research that he mentions in the podcast.

[1]
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS)

------
epberry
Love seeing so much Patrick Collison content (should I say PC content?)
lately. His Tim Ferriss podcast was thought provoking. I think that's what's
important - he has new ideas and he's talking about them.

------
zackmorris
I think it all comes down to one thing:

 _There is no Income-As-A-Service available on the internet or in
industrialized society._

Real technology liberates people from labor and minutia. What we have today
could be thought of as phantom technology (similar to phantom wealth) in that
it gives the appearance of providing labor-saving devices and software without
actually providing such things:

[http://neweconomy-wg.thenextsystem.org/visions/living-
wealth...](http://neweconomy-wg.thenextsystem.org/visions/living-wealth-money-
system/real-wealth-phantom-wealth)

Under our current capitalist system, no amount of income frees someone from
the daily obligations and distractions that slowly drain away the time that
each of us is allotted. So we end up with millionaires that have less time
than ever, or that feel undignified that they can't get out of The Matrix, who
then impress their toxic worldview on things like our political system,
perpetuating servitude on the masses and future generations.

The vast majority of people working in technology are underemployed.
University researchers spend too much time raising funding. Internet startups
can raise millions and even billions of dollars if they find creative ways to
turn dollars into profit, but there seems to be no funding to permanently
solve problems like energy, hunger, disease, etc etc.

People have tried to create their own off-the-grid societies, but these have
so far been mostly unsuccessful. I'm not aware of any similar online groups
that one could join and obtain a stipend just by being a member. Open source
or crowd funding could possibly go this direction someday, feeding profits
back into the groups instead of siphoning them off to private shareholders.

IMHO the way to solve this is to get back to a grant-based system. Give
researchers, hackers and makers the funding they need to solve the real
problems facing the world, and we'd see outsized returns on investment almost
overnight. That's why I'm a huge proponent of UBI. And also why I think the
entrenched forces of the status quo will never let it happen.

~~~
hoaw
> The vast majority of people working in technology are underemployed.

I am not of the "startups do everything better" variety, but I do agree that a
ton of effort goes into upgrading yesterdays ideas. Without going to political
I really think it has to do with the ownership model. It is the owners that
hold the position in the market. Today we aren't seeing that many spinoffs
anymore either from what I can tell. In fact most acquisitions are the
opposite. And I know many people think startups are a solutions, but it is
really a big barrier to overcome and especially to go on to become an
independent company.

------
danhon
Scott Alexander over at SlateStarCodex has a rational take on this:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-
dow...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/)

------
trevyn
Sadly, Patrick Collison does not have relevant experience in these areas.

~~~
pc
I think it's very reasonable for someone to raise an eyebrow at this, though
I'd love to know where I'm _wrong_ rather than just lacking in relevant
experience.

More importantly, though, the article I was being interviewed about is one I
cowrote with Michael Nielsen, who _does_ have a lot of first-hand experience:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nielsen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nielsen).
(And, as part of writing it, we spent time discussing the questions with many
practicing scientists across a lot of different fields.)

~~~
codekilla
If science is more inefficient, what are some ideas to make it less so? I work
at a top research university in the US, and have thought about this quite a
bit (I don't really disagree). I'm curious to hear what you and Michael think
are some good approaches. I genuinely care about this problem, and I am
working on some things myself.

~~~
tedsanders
My personal take:

There are plenty of ways to improve research productivity on the margin, but I
don't think that's the point of the argument here. The argument isn't that
research productivity is getting worse because of X, and to solve it we need
to do Y. The argument is research productivity is getting worse because of X,
and because X is 'the laws of physics', this slowdown is a feature of the
universe, not a feature of our poor research methodologies. It's inherently
unavoidable, to some extent.

The plain fact is that everything we do is limited by (1) the laws of physics
and (2) the space of possible inventions. In the early days of the industrial
revolution, we didn't really know the laws of physics and we hadn't mapped out
the space of possible inventions. But today is qualitatively different.
Broadly, research productivity is hitting diminishing returns. The key
questions here are (1) how do we know this to be true? and (2) why is this
happening?

(1) is touched on by a number of books and papers. You can look at progress in
transportation. The gains of today are pitiful compared to the gains of
1800-1950, where we went from horses to steam locomotives to airplanes to
rockets. You can look at progress in medicine. We made progress earlier by
discovering that germs existed and that we should wash our hands. Equivalent
gains today now take billions in drug R&D. Really the only sector where we've
been doing well over the past few decades is IT, and now even that's maturing.
Moore's law is dead, the gold rush for the web is over, and smartphone
penetration is approaching its natural limit of 100%.

The two key readings I would recommend here are Robert Gordon's 'The Rise and
Fall of American Growth' and Nicholas Bloom et al.'s 'Are ideas getting harder
to find?'

On (2), I think it's worth emphasizing that electromagnetism was mostly
figured out in the late 1800s. Quantum mechanics was mostly figured out in the
early 1900s. The essentials of nuclear energy were figured our in the early to
mid 1900s. Even though we know gaps in our physics knowledge remain, these
gaps are not going to overturn what we already do know. And what we already do
know really constrains the efficiency of our designs. We're not gonna make
engines that beat the Carnot limit. We're not gonna make vehicles that are
simultaneously (1) fast, (2) energy efficient, and (3) move through the
atmosphere. We're not gonna find chemical fuels that are denser than
hydrocarbons. We're never going to beat entropy in improving the energy
efficiency of ore smelting. Etc.

Now, I don't mean to establish a straw man that progress is over, that
innovation is impossible, etc. But I really do believe that design space is
finite and there are diminishing returns in its exploration. Before you
believe it, it sounds crazy and defeatist, but after you believe it sounds
banal and obvious.

~~~
hoaw
I do think it is a bit ironic that it is, at least partly, economist raising
these issues. Since in my view it is partly the misuse of economics as a way
to decide things, rather than as a way to perform what is decided, that have
left us here. And by that I don't mean you shouldn't consider economics. It is
just that in an ideal world, you do things that are worth it anyway.

1\. I think you could to some extent William Gibson this though. "The future
is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed". Maybe we have made less
progress, but it also looks far less because it isn't being obviously
distributed. (I guess in regards to Moore's law you can remove "not evenly"
from the quote).

2\. I agree. I wonder if this doesn't have a lot to do with misguidance.
Basically a lot of our ideas of the future are old. Therefor we want self-
driving cars, even though we know cars are limited in the sense that they have
non-specific applications. So a lot of what people see as the future is a non-
starter from the beginning.

I will have to read some of that material. I do think that science could be
getting harder. On the other hand I am not sure we are even making the effort.
Space exploration is something that get really hard really quick. But there
are certainly a bunch of things you could at least try to explore in our solar
system. But I guess that progress can be hard to quantify as well.

