Patrick Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…But also the vision, right? There has to be a vision, and there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who are not curious. So for intellectual progress, to really put curiosity very highly is part of my philosophy. On the one hand, not only do we acknowledge that an immense amount of very important insightful work has already been created, and it’s that work that has to a large degree inspired both of our viewpoints. For example, the paper Tyler mentioned about declining research productivity in semiconductors, crop yields and a couple of other fields, that was done fairly close to here and that is work squarely relevant to these questions that I think is really important and we may not be here in the same way without it. On the other hand, it is simultaneously true that major swathes of these questions really are surprisingly under-investigated. And so, again, to return to biomedical funding and the NIH, as far as I can tell, there are no books assessing how well the NIH is working. And I don’t have a strong view on the answer to that question, but I do have a strong view on the importance of knowing. Which parts of the NIH are working better and worse? And inasmuch as the NIH has changed over the last couple of decades, was the old NIH better or the new one? Like, this stuff is so important, and so while it’s the case that there’s a huge amount of good research happening today with fantastic researchers, in a sense, there aren’t enough of them. And a lot of the central questions are still unanswered. Yeah, interesting. So you were talking a minute ago about the explosion in costs in healthcare. And right now, I think one of the defining aspects of the moment that we’re in is a lot of the basic costs of living for a lot of people have just increased a lot. The story that we tell about our society is that you have technology and you have competition and it drives down prices. So if you bought a ten-year-old TV today it would cost 5% of what it cost ten years ago. So clearly, the value and efficiency has increased a lot there. But then in things that matter so much like healthcare, education, rent — those things have generally just increased, right? And the normal dynamics that you’d be hoping would play out aren’t. And to some degree, for the quality of life for a lot of people, the increases in those costs may even be dwarfing all the other advances in everything else.…

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