Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…If the binding constraint is the number of John von Neumann's, then yes, that's bad news, I guess. There's not a lot we can do on the margin. But I'm not sure that it is. I keep going back to the cultural and sociological point. Gerty and Carl Cori, they ran a lab at the University of Washington, St. Louis. And six of their students, if I recall correctly, went on to win Nobel prizes. They had a well-known lab, they got good students, but they weren't the most prestigious lab in the world. It's not like they got to cherry-pick every year the single most promising person, so something was going on there. There's a book about it, which tries to get into this a little bit. I don't know if I can figure out quite what it was. There was also some good fortune, where they got into molecular biology at a good time, but I think there were these "hopeful data points". Again, they were extremely brilliant people, but the thing that distinguished them and their students was not that they were these seven "sigma-Martians", it was rather that they found organizational structures and cultural practices that really worked. Those are, at least in principle, more replicable. Now, you might still say: "OK, fine, in theory. But how do you actually do that?" That's the big open question. OK, that's a great point to talk about, Arc institute. I think you just answered this question but still: It's not exactly like biology research is, it's something that society has neglected. So what's the theory of change here? Is it just a story similar to Stripe? In that, if you get the right people, there's tens of billions of dollars of biology funding. Getting the right people, the right culture and right education is what it takes, right? Even though there are lots of scientists and lots of universities, there's a lot of homogeneity today in how science, and in particular, how biomedical science is pursued, where basic research is done in an academic context before there's any commercialization prospect in sight. I don't know that this model is necessarily a bad one. Certainly, we're not claiming that it's a bad one. Construct of universities, labs, PI — a principal investigator running the lab, who applies for grants primarily to the NIH, maybe supplemented by other sources, grants reviewed by committees with "study sections", as they call them, with pretty rigid scoring criteria and so on — that is the structure and it seems suboptimal to me. Homogeneity is bad in basically any ecosystem, especially ecosystems where you're producing or seeking tail outcomes. And we thought that, for a variety of reasons, from first principles, other models should be possible. We had specific ideas as to how one particular model might be a good idea and complementary to the status quo. In very short terms, what's different about Arc is: one, scientists are funded themselves to pursue whatever they want. So it's curiosity-driven research, whereas NIH grants are given for projects. Second, we build a lot of in-house infrastructure, so that scientists can draw upon other platforms and capabilities that they don't have to build and maintain themselves. Whereas, in the standard university academic context, scientists would virtually always have to do that in-house. Because of the natural scale constraints on any given lab, that effectively circumscribes the ambition of a possible research program. And thirdly, we try to provide career paths for people to remain in science if they don't want to become principal investigators, whereas the university structure commingles the training purpose of academia with the execution — the people who are doing the work there are typically the grad students and the postdocs, who are themselves, at least nominally, on the career path of eventually becoming principal investigators. There are lots of people who, for all sorts of different very valid reasons, love science and the pursuit of research, but don't want to be a manager running a lab, choosing their own research programs, and dealing with all of the overhead and typically grant applications that are concomitant with that. With Arc, we have a real emphasis on hiring scientists to finish their postdocs, finish grad school, who know that that's what they want to do in their lives. And again, it isn't really a career path for them today. One of the things that's really exciting about the discovery, that we mentioned, that came out yesterday, this new bridge editing technology, is: that work was led by one of senior scientists, who had finished his postdoc. It's not clear to me that he wanted to become a PI, but he loved science, and he's an amazing researcher, so he's able to go and have that career at Arc.…

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