Patrick Collison: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Maybe financial is not the right word for it, but just trying to map inputs to outputs is the framing, which you're using to compare the pre-World War II inputs to what's happening now. If it was particular to the scientific institutions, you'd expect, for example, that things that are disconnected from the NIH-specific structures would show different trends. You've talked a lot about the fact that it's getting harder to find impactful papers. Sector through sector, it's not like NIH is running Moore's Law progress, right? But even there you see that you need exponentially more researchers to keep up the same level of progress. It does seem important to have these "level effects", that are one-time, in the case of something like COVID happens, where we say: "Yeah, we need that level-effect" right now." But if we're framing it in terms of hundreds of years from now, I wonder if these events are going to be a thing that increases growth rates, which is a sort of framing that is also applied when talking about progress. Does that make sense in that context, when all sectors are seeing slowdowns, which seem consistent with how the economy and science progresses over time? “I don't know” is the short answer. It's really puzzling. The constancy of US GDP growth is one of the weirdest things. I don't know if I've got an explanation for it. An obvious thing to do would be to shrug and say: "OK, well, it's overdetermined, and that's just how countries work." But you can look at other countries, where it's manifestly not the case. What is it that's weird and special about the US? The thing that I wonder about in a lot of these cases is: you could get many of the observed system phenomenon characteristics, if we weren't actually adding productive capacity. That's a simple way to explain a lot of it, in that if you're just adding exponentially more unproductive capacity, then on a stylized level, a lot of this stuff would just fall out of it. Now, I'm not saying that we're necessarily doing that, but it could be that maybe we're making them... There's lots of ways where that could be quite effectively going on, even if it's not the case that the marginal people or things or organizations themselves are bad. It's just how the components interact. But the fact that you could get these exponentially diminishing returns through the addition of ever more nonproductive capacity makes me not persuaded that the low-hanging case is necessarily true, and gives some weight to the prospect that it's fundamentally structural, cultural, or organizational. Just to give a micro example there, and it's a very basic and an obvious one, it's interesting to compare the SpaceX R&D budget and the NASA R&D budget and to actually look at those two time series together. Maybe we're just returning to the financial point again, but it seems pretty clear that the trajectory of NASA's efficacy has not fully followed the trajectory of its inputs. Yeah, although the point about: "the marginal inputs we put into science have not been as effectively used as what was before". The 1X then was a 1X of much higher quality, than 100X now. It's not clear what you do to fix that. If it's just a case, that there's a limited amount of John von Neumanns in your society, that are part of the pre-World War II 1X, it's not like we can just put 100X more John von Neumann-type physicists into science.…

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