
Permissionless innovation - tomhoward
https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/permissionless-innovation-the-fuzzy-idea-that-rules-our-lives/
======
Mz
It reminds me of an article I read years ago in a magazine about solar power.
A guy decided to go off grid with solar panels and battery back up. He was
living in Chicago. He called around to find out who regulated this sort of
thing, where he needed to apply for permits or whatever.

He learned that there wasn't a governing body. So he realized that as long as
he didn't do anything stupid (a la burn the building down), he was pretty much
free to do as he pleased.

If you are responsible, freedom of that sort is empowering. If you are not,
you wind up being the jerk that causes regulations to be written and
permitting processes to be created, ruining it for everyone.

~~~
drdeadringer
I can't remember if it was on HN or reddit, but there was a comment//post
about how a job site operated similar to this.

To heavily paraphrase over the gist of the second-hand account from the boss:
"Our workplace will be rule-free until people start abusing it. When someone
goes overboard, a rule against their abuse will be created under their name
which will be applicable to everybody; if you think that rule bullshit, go
thank that person and a talk with your manager will always be welcome. We do
this out of respect for you, our employees; you have our trust until you prove
we don't."

~~~
vidarh
I'd never, ever consider working a place like that, as it places the power in
the hand of managers who may decide something I consider perfectly reasonable
is "abuse", and use this "under their name" bit to harass people. Which means
I can't evaluate if the company will be a decent work place or a sweatshop.

To me, this is disrespectful to employees in the extreme. It shows a total
disregard for the power disparity that exists, which makes rules more
important for clarity for employees than for the company.

If they wanted to be respectful to their employees: Set rules, and create a
mechanism for asking for exemptions and be lenient with the.

Otherwise they're asking me to trust that they will not abuse their power.

~~~
ythn
I would rather work at a company with few rules than one where there is red
tape around everything. For example, at my current company I don't even have
root access on the machines I develop on, and I have to submit tickets to IT
to get anything installed or changed. One time I asked them to install Docker
and was met with suspicion. IT said they would investigate, and months later
it is still is not installed.

~~~
scaryclam
Why do you feel like you need root access? In my experience, there are pretty
much zero real reasons for a dev to _need_ that level of access in a company
that has an IT dept. IT may have good reasons not to let you mess around. If
you want more access, I suggest you have a conversation with them and make a
good business case for why it's a good thing. If you can't, then you probably
don't need it and they would be right to deny it to you.

~~~
ythn
> Why do you feel like you need root access?

Because I'm a developer and I need to install things to develop. For whatever
reason, the vast majority of windows packages require admin to install.

If you think it's great that I have to open a ticket to IT every time I want
to update VSCode or install Python or Node or whatever, that's good for you,
but I find it cumbersome and annoying and would rather work for a company that
gives me root and trusts that I won't install viruses.

~~~
scaryclam
I read your previous comment as you wanting access to the servers that your
code will run on. I'm guessing from the reference to VSCode that you're
talking about your local work machine, so I apologise for my mistake and I
agree, you should have trust from your company to look after your own work
machine as you see fit.

~~~
ythn
Yes, my local work machine is completely locked down by corporate IT. They
have a list of "pre-approved" things we can install like Chrome and Firefox
and Notepad++, but everything else requires a ticket...

------
muxator
I think this applies not only at large (government) scale, but on a smaller
scale, as well: from single companies to whole industrial sectors. I
personally witnessed various (non tech) companies that self-organized their
tech arm in a way that was for every practical purpose impossible to innovate:
"You can certainly go on with your proposal, provided that you get the
authorization from depts A, B and C, and that your changes have absolutely no
impact on how they operate".

------
pascalxus
This is a very important point the author is making. There are so many areas
that are by default, non-innovation tolerant: for instance housing and
transportation. If you dictate the size and placement of every last nut and
bolt, it leaves little/no room for innovation, making it impossible to make
progress.

------
notacoward
How many of the people praising permissionless innovation are also condemning
Facebook/Twitter/Google for allowing their platforms to be used for political
purposes? If that's you, you're being inconsistent because permissionless
innovation is exactly how those companies got into that pickle. Sometimes
innovation has dangers or negative consequences. It's not always unreasonable
to have a "review cycle" where those can be recognized, measured, and possibly
ameliorated (or at least accounted for) before too much harm is done. There
should be a _tendency_ toward permissionless innovation, but just saying
anyone should be allowed to run any experiment they want on their neighbors is
taking it too far.

------
symstym
This reminds me of some parts of Pieter Hintjens' book Social Architecture. He
advocates that open source projects practice "optimistic merging" where
essentially any patch that is well-formed should be accepted, without value
judgement (though they may be reverted later). He argues that
counterintuitively, this leads to better results than having gatekeepers. It
seems pretty extreme, but similar in spirit to the idea of permissionless
innovation.

------
golemotron
Interesting that the article does not mention The Precautionary Principle [1],
which is the opposite of 'permissionless innovation'. As an example, a society
could decide that the rollout of driverless car technology would disrupt jobs
and communities so severely that it either shouldn't be done or should be done
slowly.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle)

------
mmrezaie
The author has a great interview on econtalk about this which I found very
interesting.

~~~
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
As a long time econtalk listener I am kind of disappointed with this week's
episode. I don't feel like they really elaborated beyond "we should have
permissionless innovation"

~~~
cbayram
Same here. It was my first episode of econtalk. There were thought provoking
points; i.e. focusing more on systemic mistakes rather than small ones as a
result of permitting decision making at the local level (a la N. Taleb).
However, it could've been told in 1/3rd the duration. I'll give it another go
given this episode might have been one off.

~~~
icebraining
Definitively don't judge Econtalk by the episodes with Mike Munger, they're
more informal and less structured, since he's a friend of the host.

~~~
travmatt
He’s even hosted an episode

------
Toenex
I can't recall who said it (may have been Bart Simpson) but I've always liked
the phrase.

_"To truly innovate, one must be prepared to seek forgiveness not
permission."_

~~~
a3n
Grace Hopper said something very much like that, and is generally credited for
the expression of that attitude.
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)

~~~
KozmoNau7
Probably one of the most amazing and most important persons in the history of
computing.

"The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this
way."" sums up so many human-made problems, it's not even funny.

------
sharemywin
I don't really get the article on the one hand he's complaining about the
government picking winners, like the solar failure. On the other he's
heralding a service that closed it's api and is built on one of the largest
government picks of all time. CompuServe, AOL had solutions long before the
internet.

What if Darpa had decided to build an infrastructure on top of compuserve,
aol, and prodigy. the whole world would look completely different.

~~~
ythn
His point is that innovation is both something that we all want, yet something
that is often inadvertently stifled by regulators or competitors. Perhaps the
energy innovation that would benefit society most is not pursued because it's
too lucrative to pursue solar (the government's "winner"). Perhaps there are
streaming video/music innovations we will never see because there is so much
red tape put up by Disney, etc.

~~~
Qwertious
>His point is that innovation is both something that we all want, yet
something that is often best decided by the market, not by regulators or
competitors. Perhaps the energy innovation that would benefit society most is
not pursued because it's too lucrative to invest in solar.

As a generalisation, I think that solar "subsidies" are a two-part problem.
First off, the government is refusing to price the negative externalities of
greenhouse gas emissions (in part due to the republicans largely refusing to
acknowledge the externalities even _exist_ ), which distorts the value of
solar by implicitly subsidising fossil fuels.

Second, people acknowledge that solar needs to be made more viable and attempt
to correct the market by adding a subsidy to solar instead of removing the
subsidy from fossil fuels.

I think this exposes a fundamental flaw in common neoliberal ideology today -
the notion that the way to remove market distortions is for government to do
_less_ , not more. This is clearly absurd, since climate change will cause
trillions of dollars of property damage, and penalising property damage is
basically the government's _job_.

------
FrozenVoid
For most inventions, having starting capital/resources and free time to
innovate is a much bigger factor. If a place laws are against invention the
inventor can move to more hospitable region(he has time and money after all).

------
eecc
Haven’t read the article, but will. Just wanted to share with the world ;)
this brilliant insight i has while showering: this permission to innovate is
the only redeeming factor - it there’s any - to Capitalism. All other systems
of the past tend to stifle this (Real Socialism, Absolute Monarchies,
Bureaucratic Fascism, etc...) and even Capitalism itself in its later stages.

Devise a social organization that focuses on protecting and encouraging this
freedom

------
maxxxxx
Is this actually saying anything other than that government should get out of
the way?

~~~
hawkice
It's more specific. It's saying regulation should be largely post-hoc or with
clearly defined before-hand rules. Instead, many people need permits (&c) for
things where they're already following the rules. That creates a procedural
barrier to change of any kind, and therefore is a massive handout to
incumbents and crushes the most valuable part of a competitive market.

~~~
titzer
While the libertarian agrees with you in principle, the rest of me has been
mugged by reality and has seen more than a few environmental disasters that
have resulted from essential zero protection from bad actors dumping in the
commons. E.g. ocean microplastic is a huge problem and has a lot to do with
absolutely zero oversight from regulators on what can be used as packaging
material. This is a big problem that we need to come to terms with, sooner
rather than later.

~~~
maxxxxx
Libertarians never have a concrete answer for that.

~~~
lend000
You must find the easy libertarians to debate. The answer is that maximizing
liberty involves minimizing net aggressions, and externalities are
aggressions. Therefore, a society is more free if the government proactively
prevents/taxes/regulates certain types of externalities that are impractical
to deal with in individual lawsuits (non-localized pollution fits this bill
perfectly). In the case of smog, the most common interpretation is levying a
carbon/pollutant tax such that the tax generates sufficient revenue to offset
the damage. For something like mercury that has extreme, more localized
effects, it would be perfectly reasonable and in-line with non-aggression-
based philosophy to outright criminalize certain types of disposal.

Compare this to progressives, who want to protect the environment but have no
metric or process for measuring how much environment to protect and how/why,
other than what appeals to their emotions, so they deal with everything case-
by-case and inconsistently. In general, this leads to broad, draconian
regulations in some domains (like not allowing people to create ponds on their
property) and a lack of progress in other domains (CO2 emissions and waste
disposal, for example).

And yes, the carbon tax is a libertarian concept.

~~~
titzer
I've literally never heard a libertarian argue that before.

~~~
lend000
Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party (capital L) does not fully embrace this
line of thinking in their official platform. However, it's a logical
interpretation of their base philosophy to which I subscribe, and many of the
millennial libertarians I know have more progressive interpretations that
address externalities.

------
kmicklas
I don't fundamentally disagree with the article but this is ridiculous:

> People sometimes ask me, “What is the most important concept in political
> economy?” The answer is easy, but subtle: permissionless innovation, a
> strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new
> technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies.

Surely the ideas of capital, labor, markets, property, etc. are more important
concepts in political economy?

------
namuol
For those who care about this sort of thing (NOT trying to bring up any
political debates):

Learn Liberty is project of the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian-
focused nonprofit with Charles Koch and other conservative businessmen and
politicians on its Board of Directors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Humane_Studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Humane_Studies)

------
dreamdu5t
"Learn Liberty" is an ideologically driven organization whose goal is to
promote pro-corporate policies by masking them in radical free market
libertarian rhetoric.

It's propaganda.

------
CalChris
No mention of intellectual property. It isn’t government regulation that
prevents people from innovating. It’s government protection of their
innovation that incents them.

~~~
acjohnson55
Yet that also makes it so that innovation requires permission from your
competitors, which is stifling.

~~~
CalChris
No. It isn’t stifling at all. This is Patent 101.

Joe has a patent on the widget. I can’t make a widget without violating his
patent. I get a patent on an improved widget. Joe can’t manufacture the
improvement. He’s incented to cooperate with me and I’m incented to innovate.
Incented, not stifled.

Just allowing copying incents manufacture but not innovation. Even China is
moving in the IP direction.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Joe has a patent on the widget. You _can 't make_ an improved widget without
either getting permission from Joe, or breaking patent law. So you don't
invent your improved widget, you don't patent it, and if Joe is not interested
in innovating, nobody else won't do it either. The world becomes poorer.

(In reality: enter China, who doesn't give a fuck and innovates anyway.)

(In real reality: unfortunately, the Chinese government is starting to enforce
western IP more and more, due to economical pressures from the west.)

~~~
CalChris
You might not invent the improved widget but I would. Essentially all patents
are improvements.

Berkeley invents CRISPR. Broad Institute invents improved CRISPR.

In a parallel universe, does John Galt invent CRISPR? Let's see. He'd have to
spend millions on development and then wouldn't be able to recoup that because
anyone could copy it. So no, Galt doesn't do this. He's _free_ to do this but
there's no incentive for him to do it.

Galt's world seems more like:

    
    
      From each according to their ability
      To each according to their need

