Idea Machines

A conversation with Tim Hwang about historical simulations, the interaction of policy and science, analogies between research ecosystems and the economy, and so much more.

Topics

• Historical Simulations
• Macroscience
• Macro-metrics for science
• Long science
• The interaction between science and policy
• Creative destruction in research
• “Regulation” for scientific markets
• Indicators for the health of a field or science as a whole
• “Metabolism of Science”
• Science rotation programs
• Clock speeds of Regulation vs Clock Speeds of Technology

References

• Macroscience Substack
• Ada Palmer’s Papal Simulation
• Think Tank Tycoon
• Universal Paperclips (Paperclip maximizer html game)
• Pitt Rivers Museum

Transcript

[00:02:02] Ben: Wait, so tell me more about the historical LARP that you're doing. Oh,

[00:02:07] Tim: yeah. So this comes from like something I've been thinking about for a really long time, which is You know in high school, I did model UN and model Congress, and you know, I really I actually, this is still on my to do list is to like look into the back history of like what it was in American history, where we're like, this is going to become an extracurricular, we're going to model the UN, like it has all the vibe of like, after World War II, the UN is a new thing, we got to teach kids about international institutions.

Anyways, like, it started as a joke where I was telling my [00:02:35] friend, like, we should have, like, model administrative agency. You know, you should, like, kids should do, like, model EPA. Like, we're gonna do a rulemaking. Kids need to submit. And, like, you know, there'll be Chevron deference and you can challenge the rule.

And, like, to do that whole thing. Anyways, it kind of led me down this idea that, like, our, our notion of simulation, particularly for institutions, is, like, Interestingly narrow, right? And particularly when it comes to historical simulation, where like, well we have civil war reenactors, they're kind of like a weird dying breed, but they're there, right?

But we don't have like other types of historical reenactments, but like, it might be really valuable and interesting to create communities around that. And so like I was saying before we started recording, is I really want to do one that's a simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But like a serious, like you would like a historical reenactment, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like everybody would really know their characters. You know, if you're McNamara, you really know what your motivations are and your background. And literally a dream would be a weekend simulation where you have three teams. One would be the Kennedy administration. The other would be, you know, Khrushchev [00:03:35] and the Presidium.

And the final one would be the, the Cuban government. Yeah. And to really just blow by blow, simulate that entire thing. You know, the players would attempt to not blow up the world, would be the idea.

[00:03:46] Ben: I guess that's actually the thing to poke, in contrast to Civil War reenactment. Sure, like you know how

[00:03:51] Tim: that's gonna end.

Right,

[00:03:52] Ben: and it, I think it, that's the difference maybe between, in my head, a simulation and a reenactment, where I could imagine a simulation going

[00:04:01] Tim: differently. Sure, right.

[00:04:03] Ben: Right, and, and maybe like, is the goal to make sure the same thing happened that did happen, or is the goal to like, act? faithfully to

[00:04:14] Tim: the character as possible.

Yeah, I think that's right, and I think both are interesting and valuable, right? But I think one of the things I'm really interested in is, you know, I want to simulate all the characters, but like, I think one of the most interesting things reading, like, the historical record is just, like, operating under deep uncertainty about what's even going on, right?

Like, for a period of time, the American [00:04:35] government is not even sure what's going on in Cuba, and, like, you know, this whole question of, like, well, do we preemptively bomb Cuba? Do we, we don't even know if the, like, the warheads on the island are active. And I think I would want to create, like, similar uncertainty, because I think that's where, like, that's where the strategic vision comes in, right?

That, like, you have the full pressure of, like, Maybe there's bombs on the island. Maybe there's not even...

In this episode I talk to Craig Montouri about nonprofits and politics. Specifically their constraints and possibilities for enabling innovations.

Craig is the executive director at Global EIR - a nonprofit focused on connecting non-U.S. founders with universities so that they can get the visas they need to build their companies in America. Craig's perspective is fascinating because contrary to the common wisdom that innovation happens by doing an end run around politics, he focuses on enabling innovations through the political system. It's eye opening conversation about two worlds I knew little about so I hope you enjoy this conversation with Craig Montouri.

Key Takeaways:

• There is a lot of valuable human capital and knowledge left on the table both by the US immigration system and the university tech transfer system.
• Nonprofits need to find product-market just as much as for-profit companies making products. And just like the world of products, there's often a big difference between what people say their problems are and what their problems actually are.
• Political innovation is different than other domains for several reasons - it both has shorter and longer timelines than other domains and in contrast to the world of startups, politics needs to focus on downside mitigation instead of maximizing upside.

Global EIR

Craig on Twitter(@craig_montouri)

NPR piece on Global EIR

In this episode I talk to Joel Chan about cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer, zettlekasten, and too many other things to enumerate. Joel is an a professor in the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies and a member of their Human-Computer Interaction Lab. His research focuses on understanding and creating generalizable configurations of people, computing, and information that augment human intelligence and creativity. Essentially, how can we expand our knowledge frontier faster and better.

This conversation was also an experiment. Instead of a normal interview that’s mostly the host directing the conversation, Joel and I actually let the conversation be directed by his notes. We both use a note-taking system called a zettlekasten that’s based around densely linked notes and realized hat it might be interesting to record a podcast where the structure of the conversation is Joel walking through his notes around where his main lines of research originated.

For those of you who just want to hear a normal podcast, don’t worry - this episode listens like any other episode of idea machines. For those of you who are interested in the experiment, I’ve put a longer-than normal post-pod at the end of the episode.

• Context and synthesis are two critical pieces of knowledge transfer that we don’t talk or think about enough.
• There is so much exciting progress to be made in how we could generate and execute on new ideas.

More meta-experiments: An entry point to Joel’s Notes from our conversation

Wright brothers - Wing warping - Control is core problem - Boxes have nothing to do with flying - George Vestral - velcro

scite.ai - Canonical way you’re supposed to do scientific literature - Even good practice - find the people via the literature - Incubation Effect - Infrastructure has no way of knowing whether a paper has been contradicted - No way to know whether paper has been Refuted, Corroborated or Expanded - Incentives around references - Herb Simon, Allen Newell - problem solving as searching in space - Continuum from ill structured problem to well structured problems - Figuring out the parameters, what is the goal state, what are the available moves - Cyber security is both cryptography and social engineering - How do we know what we know? - Only infrastructure we have for sharing is via published literature - Antedisciplinary Science - Consequences of science as a career - Art in science - As there is more literature fragmentation it’s harder to synthesize and actually figure out what the problem is - Canonical unsolved problems - List of unsolved problems in physics - Review papers are: Hard to write and Career suicide - Formulating a problem requires synthesis - Three levels of synthesis 1. Listing citations 2. Listing by idea 3. Synthesis - Bloom’s taxonomy - Social markers - yes I’ve read X it wasn’t useful - Conceptual flag citations - there may actually be no relation between claims and claims in paper - Types of knowledge synthesis and their criteria - If you’ve synthesized the literature you’ve exposed fractures in it - To formulate problem you need to synthesize, to synthesize you need to find the right pieces, finding the right pieces is hard - Individual synthesis systems: - Zettlekasten - Tinderbox system - Roam

Graveyard of systems that have tried to create centralized knowledge repository - The memex as the philosopher’s stone of computer science - Semantic web - Shibboleth words - Open problem - “What level of knowledge do you need in a discipline” - Feynman sense of knowing a word - Information work at interdisciplinary boundaries - carol palmer - Different modes of interdisciplinary research - “Surface areas of interaction” - Causal modeling the Judea pearl sense - Sensemaking is moving from unstructured things towards more structured things and the tools matter

My guest this week is Mark Micire, group lead for the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Previously Mark was a program manager at DARPA, an entrepreneur, and a volunteer firefighter.

The topic of this conversation is how DARPA works and why it’s effective at generating game-changing technologies, the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA, and developing Robotics and technology in high-stakes scenarios.

Intelligent Robotics Group

DARPA

Camp Fire

DARPA Defense Sciences Office

First DARPA Grand Challenge Footage - looks like a blooper reel

FEMA Robotics

Ben: [00:00:00] [00:00:00] Mark, welcome to the show. I actually want to start let's start by talking about the campfire.

[00:00:04] So we have a unprecedented campfire going on right now. It's basically being fought primarily with people. I know you have a lot of experience dealing with natural disasters and Robotics for emergency situations. So I guess the big question is why don't we have more robots fighting the campfire right now?

[00:00:26] Mark: [00:00:26] Well, so the believe it or not. There are a lot of efforts happening right now to bring robotics to bear on those kinds of problems. Menlo Park fire especially has one of the nation's leading. Groups, it's a small called kind of like a squad of folks that are actually on Menlo Park fire trained in their absolute career firefighters who are now learning how to leverage in their case.

[00:00:57] They're [00:01:00] using a lot of uavs to to do Arrow aerial reconnaissance. It's been used on multiple disasters the we had the damn breakage up in almost the same area as campfire. And they were using the the uavs to do reconnaissance for for those kind of things. So so the the ability for fire rescue to begin adopting these two new technologies is always slow the inroads that I have seen in the last say five years is that they like that it has cameras.

[00:01:32] They like that it can get overhead and can give them a view they wouldn't have been able to see otherwise the fact that now you can get these uavs. That have thermal imaging cameras is frighteningly useful, especially for structure fires. So that's so that's the baby steps that we've taken where we haven't gone yet that I'm hopeful we'll eventually see is the idea that you actually have some of [00:02:00] these robots deploying suppressant.

[00:02:01] So the idea that they are helping to, you know, provide water and to help put out the fire that that's a long leap from where we are right now, but I would absolutely see that being within the realm of the possible. Sybil about gosh now friend 2008. So about 10 years ago NASA was leveraging a predator be that it had with some with some.

[00:02:27] Imagery technology that was up underneath it. Um to help with the fire that was down in Big Sur and I helped with with that a little bit while I was back then I was just an intern here at Nasa and that's I think a really really good example of us using of the fire service leveraging larger government facilities and capabilities to use Robotics and usually these and other things in a way that the fire service itself frankly doesn't have the budget or R&D [00:03:00] resources to really do on their own.

[00:03:00]Ben: [00:03:00]

[00:03:00]So you think it's primarily a resources thing

[00:00:00] Mark: [00:00:00] t it's a couple factors there's resources. So, you know outside of I'll say really outside of DHS. So the problem that homeland security has a science and technology division that does some technology development outside of that. There's not a whole lot of organizations outside of commercial entities that are doing R&D a for fire rescue the it just doesn't exist.

[00:00:28] So that's so that's that's your first problem. The second problem is culturally the fire service is just very slow to adopt new technology. And that's not it. It's one part. You know, well, my daddy didn't need it in my daddy's daddy didn't need it. So why the heck do I need it right at that?

[00:00:49] That's it's easy to blame it on that. What I guess I've learned over [00:04:00] time and after working within the fire service is that everything is life-critical? There's very few things that you're doing when you're in the field providing that service in this case Wildfire response where lives don't. Kind of hang in the balance.

[00:01:09] And so the technologies that you bring to bear have to be proven b...

My Guest this week is Malcolm Handley, General Partner and Founder of Strong Atomics.

The topic of this conversation is Fusion power - how it’s funded now, why we don’t have it yet, and how he’s working on making it a reality. We touch on funding long-term bets in general, incentives inside of venture capital, and more.

Strong Atomics

Malcolm on Twitter (@malcolmredheron)

Fusion Never Plot

Fusion Z-Pinch Experiment.

ARPA-e Alpha Program

ITER - International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

NIF - National Ignition Facility

ARPA-e

Office of Fusion Energy Science

Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air

[00:00:00] This podcast I talk to Malcolm Hanley about Fusion funding long-term bets incentives inside of venture capital and more Malcolm is the managing partner of strong atomics. Strong atomics is a venture capital firm that exists solely in a portfolio of fusion projects that have been selected based on their potential to create net positive energy and lead to plausible reactors before starting strong atomics.

Malcolm was the first employee at the software company aside. I love talking to Malcolm because he's somewhat of a fanatic about making Fusion Energy reality. But at the same time he remains an intense pragmatist in some ways. He's even more pragmatic than I am. So here in the podcast. He thinks deeply about everything he does.

So we go very deep on some topics. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Intro

Ben: Malcolm would you would you introduce yourself?

Malcolm: Sure. So I'm Malcolm heavily. I found in strong [00:01:00] atomics after 17 years is software engineer because I. I was looking for the most important thing that I could work on and concluded that that was kind of change that was before democracy fell off the rails.

And so it was the obvious most important thing. So

my thesis is that climate change is a real problem and the. Typical ways that we are addressing it or insufficient, for example, even if you ignore the climate deniers most people seem to be of the opinion that we're on track that Renewables and storage for renewable energy are going to save the day and my fear as I looked into this more deeply is that this is not sufficient that we are in fact not on track and that we need to be looking at more possible ways of responding to [00:02:00] climate change.

So I found an area nuclear fusion that is that it has the potential to help us solve climate change and that in my opinion is underinvested. So I started strong atomics to invest in those companies and to support them in other ways. And that's what I'm doing these days

What did founding strong atomics entail?

Ben: and he did a little bit more into what founding strong atomics and Tails. You can just snap your fingers and bring it into being

Malcolm: I almost did because it was extremely lucky but in general Silicon Valley has a pretty well worn model for how people start startups and I think even the people getting out of college actually no a surprising amount about how to start a company and when you look at Fusion companies getting started you realize just how much knowledge we take for granted in Silicon Valley.

On the other hand as far as I can tell the way [00:03:00] that every VC fund get started in the way that everyone becomes a VC is unique. It was really one story for how you start a company and there are n stories for how funds get started. So in my case, I wasn't sure that I wanted to start a fund more precisely.

It hadn't even occurred to me that I would start a fund. I was a software engineer and looking for what I could do about climate change. I'm just assuming that I was looking for a technical way to be involved with that. I was worried because my only technical skill is software engineering but I figured hey, but software you can do many things.

There must be a way that a software engineer can help. So I made my way to The arpa-e Summit in DC at the beginning of 2016 and went around and talked to a whole lot of people if they're different boots about what they were doing and. My questions for myself was does what you're doing matter. My question for them was how might a software engineer help [00:04:00] and to a first approximation even at a wonderful conference like the arpa-e summit.