1. Institutions solve the problem of “phase change” as groups get larger than the Dunbar Number, of about 150 people. Below that number, you don’t need market prices, organization charts, written reports, written rules, and other formal apparatus. Somewhere around or above that number, you do.
2. Historical examples of scientific institutions that made a difference: Royal Society, Encyclopedie, German universities, Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Institute for Advanced Studies, Xerox PARC, DARPA, Internet Engineering Task Forces, Human Genome Project.
3. But institutions can be a problem as well as a solution. In his forthcoming book, Yuval Levin notes that institutional leaders can abuse their power. We don’t hear much about the scientific labs and projects that are dysfunctional, but I would guess that abuse of power by leaders plays a role in such cases. The other problem is that individuals focus on exploiting institutions for personal gain rather than contributing to the mission of the institution. I would argue that the NSF and the Federal grant-making process have been looted like this in recent decades.
4. There may be a “narrow corridor” in which scientific progress in an area requires some institutional structure but progress is inhibited by too much structure or the wrong structure.
5. How do you reform institutions or build better ones? My guess is that reform requires replacing a cadre of leaders with Young Turks. That probably is hard to do with something like NSF. It might be easier to do–but still quite difficult–at a tech firm or a pharmaceutical company.
6. My guess is that building new and better scientific institutions requires a fortunate combination of compelling mission and visionary leadership among the founding team. The leaders are sometimes strong scientists (e.g., Oppenheimer) but often strong scientists are not skilled at bringing out the best in others.
7. What would be a compelling vision today? Improving human longevity? Improving human cognition? Augmented reality sufficient to substitute for in-person meetings?
8. And how do you develop skill at choosing the founder or founders for scientific institutions? What qualities do great institutional founders have?
Assume that everyone is out for himself and you won’t be far wrong. Think of every organization as a voluntary coalition of stakeholders and design it so everyone has something to gain personally by going along.
And if you can’t manage it, then be willing to let the coalition dissolve when it has gone bad. Accept that there is a life cycle, that no organization or institution can be immortal. Let nature take its course.
Beware those who talk of loyalty in the abstract. Loyalty is not an end, but a means. Its value derives entirely from the worthiness of the object.
This will be painful to those weak in a sense of self, who seek identity in an organization. Maybe those people need to change for their own good. Ditch the grey flannel suit. And run away from anything that seems too conformist, too demanding of loyalty, too cult-like. Any such structure has already gone bad.
I would say great institutional founders are hungry and need to exert themselves. This is why federal institutions are so dysfunctional, inefficient, and unproductive: they are led by the well-fed and complacent. Trump is about to lard another 3.1 federal civilian pay raise on them, more than Obama ever gave them, and they will of course grow correspondingly more sluggish. For this reason alone, Trump should be impeached: the civilian pay raise is a shocking display of irresponsibility.
I think the purpose of an institution is to decouple the life cycle of the organization from the biological life cycle of its founders/members/owners. The Dunbar “transition” can be a crucial phase in the evolution of an institution but long lived institutions do not have to grow beyond Dunbar size to be important.
I don’t think we emphasize the natural stages most/all institutions go through as they mature. If the “value” of the organization is measurable, the shape of the institutional life-cycle is a logistics curve (total value) or a gaussian curve (rate of value growth) that looks like Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation curve(s). We often confuse lack of growth with death rather than the natural “mature capacity” (K in population biology terms).
Mature institutions are vulnerable to value degradation due to various zero-sum attacks which sometimes take the form of rent seeking in economic terms or outright theft/corruption. The NSF and other medical/energy research programs are very mature and are tightly coupled to the structure of the equally mature teaching/research university system. I’d argue that they are not broken. If this assumption is true then the focus should be on minimizing the system from being gamed and preventing the drift away from its core value proposition.
If you believe in change control then reforming a highly valuable but mature institution is a high-risk proposition. We should not lament reaching K.
this!
specifically stopping/reversing normal epigenetic cellular aging in humans.
David Sinclar, in his new book, “Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To” (https://smile.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/1501191977), argues that it’s silly to prioritize research of things like Cancer and Heart Disease ahead of research on aging, since aging is the primary underlying root cause to most cancer and heart disease. And by the time most humans die of cancer or heart disease, they have other major aging related health problems. If hypothetically, we cured all heart disease, we’d only increase average life span by 1.5 years. Aging itself should be the top research priority.
Imagine if we could stop/reverse most disease and physical/cognitive decline associated with aging and double normal human life spans. That is the most compelling vision that I can imagine.
Not strictly about institutions, but about the scientists. This talk ‘Richard Hamming: You and Your Research,’ Talk at Bellcore, 7 March 1986 is food for thought. Such as the excerpt below on working conditions.
“This brings up the subject, out of order perhaps, of working conditions. What most people think are the best working conditions, are not. Very clearly they are not because people are often most productive when working conditions are bad. One of the better times of the Cambridge Physical Laboratories was when they had practically shacks — they did some of the best physics ever.”
But history is rife with powerful scientific “leaders” and politics cheating those who ultimately overcame them and advanced humanity. Henry Bessemer was cheated out of several prizes for innovations he made, but ultimately his steel making process was rewarded by free enterprise. Michael Faraday, was treated as a servant by Humphry Davy and his wife. A petty conflict also kept Faraday out of research in electro-magnetism
“These experiments and inventions formed the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. In his excitement, Faraday published results without acknowledging his work with either Wollaston or Davy. The resulting controversy within the Royal Society strained his mentor relationship with Davy and may well have contributed to Faraday’s assignment to other activities, which consequently prevented his involvement in electromagnetic research for several years.[40][41]”
Don’t founders self-select? In the entrepreneurial world they certainly do.