All of ericgilliam's Comments + Replies

This is interesting. I guess I anecdotally have started doing this but my memory (like everyone's) can be quite faulty/hazy. Maybe I'll start keeping a running spreadsheet that I mark up as I read.

So it's unclear, to me at least, whether this would grow or shrink the number of academic jobs. The number of "budgetary shot callers" would shrink by a lot since far fewer professors would have a bank account/grant to direct. But many of these teams would still require PhDs to be doing real research.

To many, that sometimes sounds like a demotion. But I think that's a knee-jerk way to look at it. You can liken many of the new roles to what it was like being one of the many many smart PhDs/professors who worked on something like the Manhattan Project or in ... (read more)

I'm sure there are many changes to publishing/conferences that have been positive over the last 50 or so years. And I'd love to hear about those, too? But I'm primarily curious in what things we used to do pretty well that you think we've lost. If we come upon anything interesting I'd be happy to do a fleshed out research piece on it at some point.

I don't but I'm sure they could exist. My expertise with sources in this area is not as in depth as economics or physics history. The reason I was happy to go about publishing is because Grant Miller is known in econ world to be quite expert/careful and good at what he does. So I did have a certain faith that if in the three decades between Mckinlays writing and their papers he'd have rooted out and addressed the primary counterarguments in their two part research.

And of course I'm always open-minded to update my views as things come out now as well

Your point on the proper, theory-led goals of water sanitation is interesting. I think there's maybe a decent way for us to figure this out. 

The copy of Turneaure and Russel's water sanitation textbook I used was from around 1940. But the first edition of that was from 1901. If we could find some analogous top-tier sources utilized just before some insights from germ theory we could probably figure out how much of the best-practices in planning changed from before/after the pervasion of the theory. 

Do you think that would be fair or did I miss so... (read more)

Hey everyone! I was really excited to share this piece and get everyone's thoughts on the general area, possible extensions, caveats I didn't think of, etc. 

Life sciences is not my particular area of expertise, so I was particularly excited to see what everyone thinks about all of this/if you know interesting books and work I can look in to to learn more.

Right?! I was so fascinated by that. I’d never realized what so many of the Moore’s Law type charts weren’t showing until I saw this one. I think it could be a really great project to try to crowdsource more of these charts as a community. For old and new tech. It would really give us a great peak into where we’re at and how things have changed over time.

I'm not really sure how to go about it because I'm not yet well-connected/don't have a big following, but there are surely people on the forum more plugged in than me who would know the right people who could contribute some of these charts. 

I wonder if another way to think about a piece of this problem is "how do we expand one's scientific/creative productivity peak." Now, don't get me wrong, I want to live 200 years as much as anybody here. So I want us to push for that also!

But it also does seem like a majority of our most progress-inducing ideas are not just coming from a severe minority of people, but happening in a severely limited age range of those people's lives. Mathematicians, physicists, chemists, etc. all have been known to be susceptible to this problem.

So, I could imagine a worl... (read more)

It's probably worth noting that this could also just be because this pipeline doesn't seem to exist. Like I know Peter Thiel comments that today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the mailroom of the white house.

Today, I could probably email HP the specs and proof of concept of a brand new kind of printer that printed an order of magnitude cheaper, was way easier to connect to, etc. And there's little chance they'd see it or respond. I think discounting the possibility that this just doesn't happen often because corporate bureaucracies aren't set up ... (read more)

Thanks! I'll read them this weekend! Have a good weekend!

If one wanted to start flirting with how to disentangle the lost collaborator effect from the lost capture effect, do you think there are any decent ways to do that?

I imagine whatever it is will be imperfect. But maybe there's some pseudo-randomness to certain positions of status/power coming to an end that are independent from one's research capacity. 

Like maybe you're only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you're forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.

Maybe?

When I was considering that line of reasoning that you just made, I wasn't sure how seriously to take the change because it was unclear to me if that was a negative spillover that affected their capacity to do or work just that the field moved on in the absence of a superstar. 

Because in Pierre's (god I love him, he's a godsend) Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? there seems to be an interesting dynamic. Upon an untimely death, collaborators' pubs went down and newcomers' pubs went up. In that case, an alternative model of the situation could... (read more)

Hey Ben! I loved this. Particularly the anecdotes about Boulton and the early and late life of Edison Electric. 

Since reading the Edison biography, something I've been thinking about is whether or not someone could start a modern-day R&D lab the way Edison did. Like I understand that it would be atypical, but I feel like someone with a particular set of skills and the ability to execute (whose mind also moves a mile a minute the way weird minds do) should be able to.

There are certain technical problems, that if solved, are either worth a ton of mo... (read more)

Hmmmmm this is particularly interesting because, if the setback was really a recruiting problem, it breaks the problem down in a way I hadn't thought about. Because when most people deal with this question they treat it as kind of a "are there currently good people there? Yes or no?" But your question implies a different formulation.

Not just "are there good people at the department right now?" But also, "how likely is that department to treat good people well/retain them if they do good work?"

This is quite interesting. Because if we could start... (read more)

This first paper, by B&G, is such a fascinating piece of data collection work. You're absolutely right. Do you have any rough guesses on how much of the issue is building a course of research on niche capital itself vs. the kind of person who does that kind of thing. I'm sure they both have an effect. I ask because I would be not shocked if the hypothesis, "People usually only pursue a course of research that requires specialized equipment if they are extremely dedicated to that problem over all others/that is an area of clear comparative advantage to ... (read more)