Comment by musicale
6 months ago
> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing
This was addressed in the article
> Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming:
> "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?
I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.
> Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?
Why would someone who is not motivated by financial gain care?
> I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn't trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.
— Claude Shannon
"The only secret worth keeping is out: the damn things work".
What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively?
It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.
Shannon did a lot more than just information theory. In fact, anyone who fits the autonomy persona does because that was part of the definition.
Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.
If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies.
By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...
5 replies →
>Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?
When an employer or occupation provides a fully respectable career for life, that's your job and it's fully respectable to have that be your life's work from that point onward, plus information theory doesn't represent the full 1% of what Shannon had to offer anyway :)