Comment by ramraj07
3 years ago
They always keep trying though. Janelia Farms, now this “renewed” Cancer Moonshot program, and some commercial attempts like Calico, Chan Zuckerberg - each with their own goal but similar idea that if only they could recreate bell labs or the Manhattan project or the moon Landings..
They all fail at that goal and become just another research institute no better or worse than the entities they purport to replace.
If you ask me why, it’s because they forget and do the one cardinal mistake - they hire professors from existing academia or industry. By the time you finish your PhD (leave alone the rest of Tenure track), it has been subconsciously indoctrinated in you to only care about YOURSELF. And worse, that the only way to do that is to specialize in a specific topic and then keep convincing everyone that this is the topic that will cure cancer, eradicate Covid, solve the South China Sea crisis and then finally eliminate aging altogether.
In the Manhattan project, the only qualifications required were that you were a physicist and smart one at that. You gave up on your own research and focused on what needed to be done whatever field it may be. In the cancer moonshot program every guy they brought in tried to cure cancer with his own tool. They always want to do their own thing. Guess what nothing has been cured and hundreds of billions have disappeared.
For better or mosty worse Neuralink seems to be the one place bucking the tend. Worse because they seem to be driven by a guy who really doesn’t care about humanity, is of extremely questionable ethics and what they’re trying to do will likely be used for bad things more than good anyway (once it leaves the clinical realm).
If someone gives me $50MM and asked me to cure cancer I’d probably run around the US top institutions and identify truly smart 1-2 year PhD students and recruit them with insane amounts and try to Train them “in the old ways” so to speak.
the manhattan project was a wartime effort, it is not comparable. moreover, if you read feynman's memoirs, it seems there were certainly a lot of people indulging their intellectual interests under the banner of los alamos. (feynman himself, for example, discovered a fondness for tinkering with computers- and he was a physicist)
i've also been told that bell labs strength comes from the opposite of what you speak. from a culture of intellectual freedom. from a culture of "no committees." they hired the smartest people they could, let them work on what they wanted to, made sure they had every resource they needed, engaged socratically on project progress and otherwise stayed out of the way.
in terms of people using their own tools? that's specialization. if someone spends a lot of years on something, that's what they become an expert in, they will try and apply it and that's what they should do.
while i certainly believe that science can and should answer the calls of society to make the world a better place. it seems that time and time again this happens through the magic of basic research where scientists pursue their interests without regard to this ultimately producing discoveries that are sometimes combined and then give rise to practical and translational applications.
The Manhattan Project was successful, because there was a real pressure to get groundbreaking results quickly. Similar pressures don't exist in the academia or the industry in normal times. If a company fails, the worst case is generally bounded by the value of the company. People are not that motivated to get results, because the alternative is probably no worse than bankruptcy. There is no looming threat of slavery or death for employees, shareholders, and their friends and family.
Covid vaccines were a recent example of similar pressures. The academia and the big pharma – the establishment – managed to create many effective vaccines in a record time, because people had real reasons to achieve something.
Interesting thoughts, could you perhaps expand on what you mean by " Train them “in the old ways” " ?
The core of academia is preserving a fairly specific culture for long periods of time - a culture of people who care more about logical argument than social pressure.
In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage. That gets compared to the real world where entities like the churches, political parties & <insert any groups> just don't work that way. Many organisations can go for multiple generations with charisma being a superior strategy to argument. In academics they remember the people who went it alone with the most technically correct argument in the face of general opposition (names like Galileo and Socrates spring to mind, along with legions of unpopular and unlikable men who nevertheless earn places of high honour for their contributions to the world's knowledge).
The academics perpetuate that with a series of exclusionary, weird and crufty traditions that frequently date back centuries. It isn't perfect but it has proven an effective culture at grinding out slow productivity gains.
> In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage.
This is a remarkably naive view of how contemporary (and likely, any) academic institution or academia as a whole operates. Do you actually believe this?
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Academia is at the vanguard of dismissing meritocracy for politicking. If it were so great at dispassionately pursuing the truth then you wouldn't get things like decades of Alzheimer's research being based on a fraudulent study. There's nothing magical about the academy. They don't hire people of above average moral integrity and they are incentivized to publish attention grabbing findings. The result is they form cliques to protect their meal ticket theories.
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The core of academia is being a good sophist. Every successful professor I met in gradschool was a better salesman than they were scientist, my own advisor included.
By that I just mean to make sure that they don’t succumb to the pressures of modern academia (grant agencies and every committee judge your proposal based on your expertise in the exact same field only in the past). That they need to find the goal they want and have an absolute open mind to reach it. That they also need to be well versed with philosophy (Neil Bohrs philosophy background arguably gave us the atomic bomb). That they should not think small (most academics would swear their life that there can never be a single cure for all of cancer. I beg to differ). That they should steer clear of this George Costanza academia attitude of “it’s not a lie if you truly believe in it” you need to get your grants and papers published. I can keep going on lol.
He's trying to say he has no idea what he's talking about
I’m pretty sure I have a decent idea about this. I’ve been fascinated at the rot of modern academia and to identify what went right in the past in such successful scientific endeavors. Decades of reading and rumination. If you now want to come and say my PhD is not enough and I need to be a professor to comment on the status quo, then perhaps that’s the exact attitude I’m critiquing.
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Yeah, insane amount of money will definitely keep them motivated. Feynman wouldn't have gotten anything done, were it not huge money government paid.
Feynman didn’t have a ton of other options back in the day. If you’re truly smart today, the smartest thing to do is join tech or go into finance. Will be a millionaire in a few years. If you can’t pay the smartest minds to do science competitively you’ll only get people who are not as good or were stuck with their decisions for a bunch of reasons.