Patrick Collison: belief

Transcript context

…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. 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?…

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