Notes on 'Good Ideas are Hard to Find'

Without intending to, we’ve shifted status away from people actually doing the work and towards the people advocating for their work. If you asked a typical informed person who has made the biggest contributions, who would they list? George Church?

• It didn’t used to be this way —
  • While people like Vannevar Bush and Mervin Kelly contributed enormously to science, you could see their increased prominence as a historical revision where we go back and ascribe credit to the adminsitrators of the past, not the do-ers — rewriting history with the same lens that we view contemporaries.
  • Now, at the same time, if you are an administrator, you should absolutely study their examples — they worked “behind the shadows” to provide meaningful credit to their scientists.
  • “A good engineer gets stale very fast if he doesn’t keep his hands dirty” — Wernher von Braun
    • It’s really hard to quote people from that era since lots of them would be described as problematic today — I think Wernher von Braun is so obviously problematic that by quoting him I come back around into a non-contentious place.

I’ve had the discussion — why does it feel like so many people in science feel this immense pressure to climb into management? When you read old biographies, it feels like it didn’t used to be this way? I feel like there is a meme of NPC-ification of individual contributors in science — this sense that if you don’t join a management track, you’ve hit a glass ceiling. This is exasperating for our brightest scientists — many of the brightest resent (a) not being chosen for management, or (b) being chosen for management, and then resenting the responsibilities and tasks that come with it. But many scientists are shoe-horned into pursuing management roles because that is the only route to (a) a steady, even tenured career, (b) enough pay to live comfortably in SF or Boston, the two major hubs for life sciences research, and (c) the social status and recognition that comes with being a PI with your own name on the door. These aren’t unreasonable asks.

this article makes a case for private ownership. He claims that patents leak substantial value. That may be true that they leak value, but they still capture a lot — there are many wealthy people who have succeeded in biotech companies where their primary value is in their patents. Returns for equivalent effort seem to be lower in biotech vs tech, but still pretty darned good.

• most of the most brilliant inventors i’ve met really just want those 3 things: (a) a stable career that lets them focus on science, not politicking or bureaucratic needs, (b) a comfortable salary, and (c) to be appreciated. I feel like we’ve stopped giving people this? Why in the hell did we do that?

he mentions the pfizer thing — that pfizer stock increase after the vaccine approval was only 1% of the value of the total overall bump on the announcement day. This is sort of true, but pfizer also got lasting goodwill from this. It’s politically hard to justify the high profits that pharma companies make — I’m confident that this vax will get trotted out a few times within the next several decades when those conversations come up.

• as an example — look at the number of times that the US Gov wanted to unwind bell’s telephone monopoly, but did not because of the implicit deal that bell labs would provide the US (and the US military in particular) key technological advantages. undersupply of people in the right place is a big thing — people won’t be as willing to move for the risky, really new stuff, so if you need people to move to start your thing, you are discouraging that thing from starting.

  When funding is instead given out without clearly defined deliverables, with long award cycles, without extensive reporting, and for ‘people not projects’, as it has been by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, it has led to far more innovative work. — this seems to a pretty pernicious misinterpretation of HHMI. Most of these people are still strongly incentivized, for social and professional reasons, to keep publishing. 90% of the work in HHMI labs is done by PhD students who have the same exact incentive structure.