Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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There's an inherent tension in this take.

The people need to be free to study whatever they want without profit interfering, but also they need to be attached to a for profit business in a specific arena that has monopoly profits.

What is the magic ingredient that we lose if we just give the public's money (plus some extra we get from avoiding the inefficency of monopolies) to academics directly and tell them to build cool stuff?

Is it patents? Is this basically an internal Venture Capital thing using monopoly profits? If they get to stick their flag in one new idea before anyone else then they get to extract rent from everyone else and/or squash competition and so pay for the 99 misses?

edit: they were forced to licence their patents in 1956 so before that, patents were presumably the goal.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190086

The above suggests that the open licencing of the patents spurred innovation, except in telecoms, where AT&T maintained their monopoly.

You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.

someone at Bell Labs once remarked that 90% of staff worked on development (bringing research into a practical deployment). Based on that they estimate that development is ~10% more difficult than research. While works like Shannon’s or Bardeen’s or Pierce’s stand out, most of the work was devoted to deployment. Something academics and patents don’t cover.

So the modern equivalent might be Sunshot where the government recognises a certain area with potential like PV (sort of a Bell Labs innovation coincidentally) and then funds efforts to commercialize and drive prices down while supporting initial business in the field.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-initiative

A decentralised, non-monopolistic Bell Labs for the 21st century.

Oh, just noticed it was announced by a Bell Labs alumni, Steven Chu, in his role as U.S. Energy Secretary.

> You could write a book on this point. In fact a few have and they are worth reading.

If you have time, could you share some specific recommendations?

If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?

> If I'm going to read one book about Bell Labs, with the goal of learning things I can apply to the current day, which book should I read?

The "Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner comes to mind. It is quite accurate.

This was basically the approach of Mozilla Research AIUI, which gave us Rust.

IIRC this talk goes into a lot of history there: https://youtu.be/9OHcJzJQ2Nk.

Industrial labs pay better and don't sink as much time into grantsmanship.

It's not so much that they are magical, it's that traditional academia sabotages itself by being stingy. Industrial leaders have a better calibrated sense for when "stingy" becomes "counterproductive," so they don't shoot themselves and their scientists in the foot.

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