Tag Archives: patrickc

Scientific progress and institutions

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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?

Cultures of conventional failure

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In this essay, I will offer a theory of slow progress based on the maxim, “It is often easier to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” My claim will be that in health care, education, and construction/infrastructure, the consuming public is more receptive to conventional failure than unconventional success. This is less the case in other realms, so progress is faster in those realms. We are willing to try ride-sharing apps or airbnb, but no middle-class parent wants to tell their peers that their kids are not going to an established college.

In the Zuckerberg-Cowen-Collison conversation, Zuckerberg repeatedly asks why costs are high in health care, education, and rent.

So you were talking a minute ago about the explosion in costs in healthcare. And right now, I think one of the defining aspects of the moment that we’re in is a lot of the basic costs of living for a lot of people have just increased a lot. . .things that matter so much like healthcare, education, rent–those things have generally just increased, right? And the normal dynamics that you’d be hoping would play out aren’t. And to some degree, for the quality of life for a lot of people, the increases in those costs may even be dwarfing all the other advances in everything else

1. As I was listening, I was frustrated, because I wanted to point to my essay What Gets Expensive, and Why?. There I include the Baumol effect, but note my critical comments on the attempt by Alex Tabarrok to put it all on the Baumol effect.

2. Patrick notes that our ability to do large construction projects has declined over the past 70 years or so.

it’s very clear that our productivity has fallen off a cliff and for reasons that we can be pretty sure are not that it’s getting intrinsically harder. And so, for example, when New York decided to build the subway in 1900…4.7 years later, they opened 23 subway stations, and in 2019 dollars, they spent just over a billion dollars doing so. … When New York decided to build the Second Avenue subway in the year 2000, 17 years later they opened three stations and they spent $4 1/2 billion doing so. And so our productivity in subway construction has, at least in New York, decreased by a factor of 40. … California, you have high speed rail where… when France decided to build the TGV, its high speed rail, it opened the first line after five years. California started pursuing high speed rail 11 years ago. They forecast–we forecast–being finished in 2033. So we project a 25-year project, but of course, that’s a projection. It’ll probably end up being much longer

3. I already gave away my instinct on this when I wrote,

my inclination is to focus on broader cultural values. The enemies of progress are fear of novelty and envy of success. My thinking is that when those enemies hold sway, progress will be slow. When those enemies are weak, progress will be rapid.

I agree with Tyler that there is a lack of will. In the case of infrastructure projects or housing development, we now have a culture of conventional failure. Look at how hard it has been for Google to try to find a city that will allow it to experiment with a city of the future. Cities are only willing to approve politically correct development–bicycle lanes, as opposed to dedicated lanes for self-driving cars.

4. Patrick says,

empirically the entry costs of forming a new university are really high, but that’s not because there’s a kind of formal toll you have to pay. It’s not like zoning where there are deliberate, specific legal restrictions that prohibit you from doing so. But just as a practical matter sociologically, institutionally, accreditation dynamics, who knows, it’s apparently almost impossibly difficult to create a successful new university today.

Again, that is because we prefer conventional failure to unconventional success. I recently was hosted by a family in Texas. The oldest daughter was in the midst of applying to college. I wanted to scream “No! Don’t do it!” I do not believe that she is ready to go to college. I think she would be much better off just working at a low-paying job for a year or two and living on her own. I believe that is true for the vast majority of high school seniors these days.

Patrick is in the business of making it easier to start a company. Suppose he were in the business of making it easier to start a university. From the standpoint of technology, that seems like a very plausible business. Tools exist to deliver education in different ways. Look at Tyler’s and Alex’s MRU. The barriers are mostly cultural. Nobody wants to be the parent whose child succeeds unconventionally by taking a nontraditional approach to higher education.

I also want to scream “No!” when I see wealthy donors giving money to universities. The top schools have these enormous endowments already, which act like moats protecting them from competition. Don’t help them fill their moats! Instead, put that money into higher education start-ups. But if you give to your alma mater or to create a research institute at an established university, you can enjoy conventional failure. That seems to be more appealing to philanthropists than unconventional success.

Tyler and Patrick offer some provocative views about the way that success in research tends to come from less conventional institutional processes. But people stick with the conventional. For example, Tyler says

So I think in general, big questions are under-studied– the tenure system, I think, increasingly is broken. A lot of academics do work pretty hard, but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters–I think we need to change. And the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them and actually try doing things–we need more of that. I’ve often suggested for graduate school, instead of taking a class, everyone should be sent to a not-so-highincome village for two weeks. They can do whatever they want. Just go for two weeks, think about things. No one wants to do this. No one wants to experiment with it.

And I would add, require internships for economists. You can learn a lot while working in business.

Turning to health care, I think that Zuckerberg over-states the amount of money wasted in futile care in the last six months of life. But I think that the point is correct that we undergo many procedures with high costs and low benefits. I strongly believe that if we took away dollars at the margin from medical procedures and put those dollars into public health measures, the net effect would be positive. But wasting money on medical procedures with high costs and low benefits is a way to fail conventionally.

In short, when it comes to urban construction/civil engineering, education, and health care, we have evolved cultures of conventional failure. Innovation and entrepreneurship are discouraged. The heavy influence of government in these sectors probably serves to reinforce this. But ultimately the political process gives us something like what most people want. As Pogo would put it, we have met the enemy of progress, and he is us.

Telepresence

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[Note: I originally scheduled this post to be published next week, but I moved it up after listening to the conversation between Mark Zuckerberg, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Collison. In the transcript, Zuckerberg says

So rather than people moving–inventing a new hyperloop or cars, I tend to think the set of technologies around–whether it’s augmented reality or virtual reality or video presence that just lets people be where they wanna be physically and feel present with other people wherever they need to be to do their job, to connect with the people they care about–that feels to me the better long-term solution.

Those are the thoughts I express and elaborate on below.]

I remember hearing Robert Metcalfe (link goes to Wikipedia) speak about twenty years ago, and when he was asked what he thought was the killer application for the Internet, he said “telepresence.”

I thought of this when I saw the paper on mobility in the United States by Kyle Mangum and Patrick Coate, pointer from Tyler Cowen.

repeat mobility is common. That is, people living in their “home” locations are far less likely to migrate than those away from home.

My train of thought went as follows.

1. I view the paper as showing that many people come to like where they live. The repeat movers are either innately restless or experimenting.

2. When people my age talk about their children’s work lives, a sentence that comes up frequently is, “They let him (her) work remotely.” Of my three daughters, one works in Boston for an organization based in Maryland, one works from home three days a week, and the third probably could continue to work remotely if her husband moves.

3. In fact, a lot of married couples have job opportunities in different cities.

4. Recall that Patrick Collison said that his firm set up a department that he calls “Remote.”

5. As Patrick pointed out in that same conversation with Reid Hoffman, Zoom Meeting is quite a step forward in the videoconferencing arena. I can’t really articulate what makes it better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but it just feels more conference-y.

6. If I were in the venture capital business, I would make a bet that remote work will grow exponentially, and I would assemble a portfolio of companies based on that bet. Will more people wear body cameras? Do small companies need better support for interstate human resource functions? What are the needs of the home-office worker? What sorts of meeting-scheduling systems address the challenges posed by remote work forces?

7. I think that blue-collar work may be an overlooked opportunity for telepresence. Techies talk about telemedicine, but it seems to me that it is much harder to remotely work on someone’s body than it is to do other tasks remotely. So blue-collar telepresence may come first. Professor Daniel Markovitz, author of the Meritocracy Trap (in another conversation I plan to annotate) says that Amazon warehouse workers already are subject to remote monitoring.

–How about tele-sanitation? Bathrooms at places like airports and hospitals have to be cleaned and re-stocked very often, and robots could do that. But the robots might not be able to operate completely independently. A remote operator could help the robot be more adaptable to situations.

–How about tele-chauffer? Even if self-driving cars are not ready for the road, who says that the driver has to be in the car? In the case of truck driving, the number one source of job dissatisfaction is being away from home all the time Telepresence could solve that problem. Perhaps a co-pilot does not have to be on the plane (assuming you want the pilot to be there).

–The highway construction workers who operate machines. Do they need to be there?

–The workers building skyscrapers. Could they operate by managing robots remotely?

8. Think of what Zoom Meeting and other telepresence apps will be able to do when 5G is ubiquitous.

The time-to-learn effect and the science slowdown

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Scott Alexander writes,

There are eighteen times more people involved in transistor-related research today than in 1971. So if in 1971 it took 1000 scientists to increase transistor density 35% per year, today it takes 18,000 scientists to do the same task. So apparently the average transistor scientist is eighteen times less productive today than fifty years ago. That should be surprising and scary.

He is citing Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb (2018). This paper was discussed at a conference Alexander attended. He writes,

constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like. Nobody expected that before reading BJRW, so we shouldn’t be surprised when BJRW provide a data-driven model showing it isn’t happening. I realize this in itself isn’t an explanation; it doesn’t tell us why researchers can’t maintain a constant level of output as measured in discoveries. It sounds a little like “God wouldn’t design the universe that way”

My favorite economics professor, Bernie Saffran, was wont to observe that learning takes calendar time as well as studying time. A student cannot master a concept merely by putting in a certain amount of hours studying it. It takes some amount of days or weeks or months for a concept to sink in. You could write L = f(T,t) where L is learning, T is the amount of time you spend studying, and t is the passage of calendar time. Throwing more T at a subject brings diminishing returns, unless you also increase t. We can speculate that some of the brain rewiring that takes place is unconscious, and you cannot artificially speed up this process.

Suppose that there is an analogous factor at work at the level of society. That is, scientific discovery depends on calendar time as well as the time that scientists spend working on a problem. It takes a while for X to sink in, and only after X has sunk in can we go on and discover Y.

Alexander sees no reason to expect that we can speed up scientific progress with simple policy changes or institutional tweaks. I am inclined to agree.

But having said that, I can think of institutional habits that may be holding progress back. I probably will write an essay on those. UPDATE: The essay offers two modest reforms.

Why some things get expensive

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My latest essay deals with a question posed by Patrick Collison. He asks why things like education and health care keep getting more expensive. My answer is part Baumol, part Hanson, part Caplan, and part Kling. An excerpt:

It may seem puzzling that the demand for health care and education keeps rising while measurable outcomes, such as longevity or skill attainment, show little response to higher spending. One reason is that the perceived benefits of health care and education may be high relative to their effects on outcomes. You may not be cured of your ailment, but the effort is what matters to you, so you seek treatment. Sending your child to an expensive college may not improve her skills, but your own sense of status depends on it, so you fork over the tuition.

Read the whole thing.