As part of my work at IFP, I’m helping to co-organize the Bottlenecks Summit, which will take place in September in collaboration with the Abundance Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation. The summit will be focused on bringing together a wide set of “thinkers, builders, creators and policy entrepreneurs working to overcome bottlenecks to human progress and abundance.”
The academic promotion process has become a bottleneck. It rewards quantity, not quality. Among other things this overwhelms the reviewing system, further de-emphasizing genuine insights and contributions. Junior faculty get promoted based on churning out numerous publications.
* Agriculture -- Where did startups for farming robots go? How can robots be used to free up time for farmers to begin conserving land or rewilding?
* Housing -- Putting aside permitting reform (which would include building codes and abolishing parking minimums), how can progress studies be applied to Montgomery County, MD-style competitive, proactive public housing development? What are the main bottlenecks in modular housing supply chains, as a way of tackling construction costs?
* STEM Journalism -- Transparency and science ethics require a vibrant media, but there are workforce recruitment issues especially among local news, which the Peace Corps-style Report for America tries to solve. How can the model be leveraged to spark passion earlier in prospective science journalists, or many others?
* Creator Economy -- Similarly, the creator economy, along with the open source community in general, face institutionally-imposed bottlenecks, an example in America’s case being due to the entrenchment of the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. How can copyleft be promoted further to improve innovation?
A big research bottleneck is the worsening lack of replication of experiments. Replicating someone else's work is not sexy and does not get grant money so much, but it is absolutely crucial for scientific methods to work. If experiments are not replicated, we don't know if the results are valid. If we don't know whether the results and conclusions are valid, researchers must make a best guess and bad research lives on for far longer than it should, causing other researchers to have to go down dead ends and wasting precious time and money.
Legacy Technology and the procedures and stakeholders embedded with it. In corporate America, even with agreement all around in favor of improvement, a change has to pick its way carefully and reconstruct the environment in which it will reside.
The academic promotion process has become a bottleneck. It rewards quantity, not quality. Among other things this overwhelms the reviewing system, further de-emphasizing genuine insights and contributions. Junior faculty get promoted based on churning out numerous publications.
* Agriculture -- Where did startups for farming robots go? How can robots be used to free up time for farmers to begin conserving land or rewilding?
* Housing -- Putting aside permitting reform (which would include building codes and abolishing parking minimums), how can progress studies be applied to Montgomery County, MD-style competitive, proactive public housing development? What are the main bottlenecks in modular housing supply chains, as a way of tackling construction costs?
* STEM Journalism -- Transparency and science ethics require a vibrant media, but there are workforce recruitment issues especially among local news, which the Peace Corps-style Report for America tries to solve. How can the model be leveraged to spark passion earlier in prospective science journalists, or many others?
* Creator Economy -- Similarly, the creator economy, along with the open source community in general, face institutionally-imposed bottlenecks, an example in America’s case being due to the entrenchment of the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. How can copyleft be promoted further to improve innovation?
I'm realizing I'm too late for the summit, but I'd love to see a summary of discussions and any takeaways. Very top of mind for me.
A big research bottleneck is the worsening lack of replication of experiments. Replicating someone else's work is not sexy and does not get grant money so much, but it is absolutely crucial for scientific methods to work. If experiments are not replicated, we don't know if the results are valid. If we don't know whether the results and conclusions are valid, researchers must make a best guess and bad research lives on for far longer than it should, causing other researchers to have to go down dead ends and wasting precious time and money.
Legacy Technology and the procedures and stakeholders embedded with it. In corporate America, even with agreement all around in favor of improvement, a change has to pick its way carefully and reconstruct the environment in which it will reside.
Some pedantic (but nevertheless important) questions:
- Where are the nebulous limits of "what is a bottleneck and what is a multicausal mess?"
- What level of fidelity are we talking about? eg. "$/kg to orbit" is a bottleneck on space exploration but not useful.