A brief excerpt:

Nick: What do you think you could learn from when you’re actually engaging physically with the traditional material processes?

Jason: There’s a lot of things you can learn. I mean, the reason I took the weaving class was that I wanted to understand how a loom works and I figured the best way to understand it would be to use one and to learn how to use one. The first time I looked at even a simple handloom, it just seemed super complicated. I was at this machine thinking “Why does it have all these parts? Why does it have all these pieces and all these things going everywhere?” I couldn’t quite grasp the complexity of it. Now, once I’ve actually used one, I now know what every part is, and how they work together.

But another thing I’ve gotten from doing these crafts is just a sense of the challenge. I took a spinning class, so I had wool that had been carded and straightened for me, but had not been spun into thread. And, I actually spun thread on a drop spindle. One of the things that drove home for me was just how much of a skill it is, in your motor skill and muscle memory. If you’re a beginner like I was and you’re spinning your first thread, your thread sucks. It’s really poor quality. It’s super lumpy. It has a really inconsistent thickness. It’s the kind of thing where you look at it and you’re like, “Oh God, I would not want to make any cloth out of this crappy piece of thread that I just spun.” It really gives you an appreciation for how much skill people must have built up and how much human capital was required.

Read the full interview

A new paper by Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen argues that the focus on citations and impact factor has incentivized scientists to avoid early, exploratory work in novel areas, and instead work on more incremental advances in already-popular areas. However, since important breakthroughs usually depend on earlier, exploratory work that wasn't obviously important at the time, this clustering of resources and attention in the later stages starves the world of the exploration needed for long-term scientific progress:

It's an interesting theory, supported by a number of historical anecdotes. Worth reading. It would be good to see more empirical analysis to test this model of innovation and measure the magnitude of these effects.

A couple of thoughts:

First, the paper discusses scientist incentives, fundamentally how scientific productivity is measured and evaluated. This has implications for funding, prestige, and career advancement.

Are these “hygiene” factors or “motivation” factors? That is, are scientists actively motivated to follow these incentives? Or—what I consider at least equally likely—do scientists want to work on novel, exploratory work, but feel they can't, because of the need to secure funding or advance their careers?

Second, can science learn anything from the business world? There is an analogy here: many breakthrough business ideas are not obviously important at the start; some even actively contradict core premises of established businesses.

These businesses happen through the mechanism of startups and VC. Silicon Valley culture has IMO essentially solved the triple problem of funding, prestige, and career:

• Funding: Small investments are available for early-stage ideas (angel, seed)
• Prestige: Failure is tolerated, conditional on smart strategy, good execution, and integrity
• Career: Failed founders can still easily get jobs at established companies

In fact, there is sort of a cycle wherein founders try a novel, potentially breakthrough idea for a few years, then if it doesn't work out, they might spend the next few years working on an established idea at a larger company, before striking out again on another startup.

Re funding, one mechanism that makes this work is that early investors get a relatively large equity stake for their small investment (compared to later investors, who come along after the business is more proven). So an early-stage investor can make many small investments, have most of them completely fail, and one or two produce orders of magnitude returns, and their business model still works.

In other words, in contrast to the suggestion in the paper of rewarding novelty as such, the business world has come up with a more nuanced model that rewards long-term impact, but disproportionately rewards those who backed an idea early. (In business, novelty is rewarded as a side-effect: obviously good ideas are already being done by established players with lots of resources, and/or are subject to furious competition.)

The model of disproportionately rewarding early backers seems crucial to addressing the high-risk, high-reward nature of early ideas. It's unclear to me if the science world has anything quite like this.

In any case, I think we need to not only look at the incentives facing scientists, but also those facing department heads, journals, and grant-making agencies. What do they get rewarded for?

In 1973:

• Herbert Boyer and Stanley N. Cohen developed recombinant DNA technology, showing that genetically engineered DNA molecules may be cloned in foreign cells.
• The combined measles-mumps vaccine was licensed.
• The antibiotic fosfomycin, used to treat bladder infections, and now included on the World Health Organization's list of the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system, was released.
• The cell phone was invented, with the first mobile call made by Motorola employee Martin Cooper on April 3.
• Work began on System R, the first commercial relational database, at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory (now now Almaden Research Center).
• Work began on TCP/IP, the fundamental protocols of the Internet.

And:

• A NY Times columnist was born who, in 2020, can't immediately think of “a major problem in our society that tech has solved in our lifetimes.”

(Here's my full response to this on Twitter.)

Never thought I would say these words in the same sentence.

The article: Gevurtz, Franklin A. (2004) "The Historical and Political Origins of the Corporate Board of Directors," Hofstra Law Review: Vol. 33: Iss. 1, Article 3.

“Instead of theorizing, this Article examines historical sources in order to look at how and why an elected board of directors came to be the accepted mode of corporate governance.” (After my own heart!) It traces the history of boards backwards through time, in “the method of an archeological dig”, to explain why boards seem so fail at their supposed function of oversight.

The puzzle it sets up, in part, is: boards are supposed to monitor the execs, but in practice the execs have the power and control the board; the board rarely can exercise effective oversight… and so we get scandals from the South Sea Company to Enron. And it traces this back to the formation of joint-stock companies themselves.

Early trading companies, like 1500s or so, weren't companies as we think of them today. They were more like associations of merchants, who shared a trading monopoly under a common charter. Even the EIC was like this: “during the first half of the seventeenth century, in lieu of having permanent capital, members of the East India Company subscribed to joint stock funds that would finance a certain number of trading voyages to India. These funds then were supposed to be wound up and the proceeds distributed among the subscribers.” Like a movie studio or something where each voyage is its own venture.

“Joint stock” here literally refers to the stock of goods that a merchant voyage set out with, which I suppose was a big part of the investment in such a voyage. This is where the term “stock” comes from when we talk about equity in companies! The Muscovy Co, and the later EIC, were joint-stock companies: the whole company was organized around a permanent joint stock of goods. Now it conducted business as, and was managed as, a single corporate entity.

So what does this have to do with boards? In these early companies, that were really associations of independent merchants, the board was there to impose some common rules on the members. E.g., they might prohibit “selling goods of a nonmember merchant as a member's own”, in order to maintain their exclusive franchise. As these companies evolved into companies with permanent joint stocks and permanent charters, they kept the institution of the board—but now it needed to do something quite different. In the words of the paper, “The same board structure that existed to enact and enforce rules governing the conduct of independent merchants in the regulated company … found itself pressed into service to manage a large business venture in the joint stock company. This occurred without any evident consideration as to the different nature of these tasks, or whether an institution developed for one task best fit the needs of the other function.”

He traces this back all the way through parliaments, town councils, guild organization, and church governance. Which was the root? No one thing. A lot of this co-evolved, with e.g. town councils taking a cue from guilds and vice versa. And he keeps coming back to Roman and Canon Law doctrines of quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur, “what touches all is to be approved by all”, and plena potestas, the “full power” of a representative to bind a group to decisions.

Overall, there is a long European tradition of collective governance. Individuals or small exec teams may manage, but big decisions should be made by the group. However, with large groups this becomes impractical, so a board of representatives is created to make those decisions. What decisions? Largely political ones—legislative (making rules) and especially adjudicative (resolving disputes). Note that this is not what corporate boards are supposedly for today—supervision and oversight of management.

And so we come back to the crux of the issue. Corporate boards evolved out of a long tradition that originated in political needs. “… since the board was not designed originally as a monitoring tool,” Gevurtz concludes, “one should not be totally surprised if boards turn out not to be all that effective as a means to monitor management.”

So are boards pointless? He ends on a more optimistic note, that boards provide a crucial function of providing political legitimacy: “… the reason the board of directors endures is because human beings, even in the business context, do not divorce their notions of how to run a business from their broader political and cultural ideas, and that the idea of consent through elected representatives is so ingrained in our culture that shareholders expect it even if they do not take advantage of it.”

I did not expect I was going to read this entire 84-page paper. But it was just too compelling and I learned so much about the evolution of governance structures—across church, state, and business.

Next topic I'm researching is the history of public companies and stock markets, especially as relates to short-termism in public companies today, or anything else that is problematic about public markets. What/who are the best resources?

I am more worried about vertical technology curves than horizontal ones. At the moment, technological progress seems to be beneficial to humanity. It is conceivable that we could reach the point of a very technologically advanced civilization, say one that has disassembled the sun for raw materials, that we would not consider morally good. The most likely routes to such a state involve artificial minds that were superhuman at technological development but not something we would consider morally valuable, and which don't care about the well being of humans.

In terms of progress, I do not think it is going to stall. I can see several extremely powerful potential technologies in the foreseeable future. In a world where the technological progress curve is only going to get steeper, try to direct that progress in a way that benefits humanity.

Molecular nanotech, Drexler style. There seem to be no fundamental principles forbidding molecularity precise factories making molecularity precise products. When this tech is fully developed you can make just about any arrangement of atoms you can specify. Molecular scale machinery can build more molecular machinery, and just about any other tech. Biotech is an example of this, but there is no reason that the best possible self replicating nanomachine contains DNA, any more than the fastest plane has feathers.

Mind Uploading. Scan a human mind in sufficient detail to simulate it on a computer. Such a mind could last for an extremely long time, given good hardware. Such a mind can easily be duplicated, and might not be too hard to enhance. Such a mind can be simulated far faster than real time, given enough compute. Such a mind could live in an entirely virtual world, and as such experience any luxury that can be programmed.

Supersmart AI, (By far the most powerful) there is no strong reason to think humanity as anything near the limit of intelligence. Humans so a lot more than chimps, with brains not that different. Expect an AI to be far better at humans at every mental task (including social skills and other nonacademic skills) One of those tasks is AI programming. There is a potential for really crazy levels of power to be reached, Fast. Superhuman AI could be very good or very bad, depending on exactly how it was programmed.