Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

> If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing

This was addressed in the article

> Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

also this hilarious quote from Richard Hamming:

> "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as [Tukey] did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

View on HN

Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.

"The only secret worth keeping is out: the damn things work".

What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively?

It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.

Shannon did a lot more than just information theory. In fact, anyone who fits the autonomy persona does because that was part of the definition.

Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.

If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies.

By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...

Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.

I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.

> Maybe the 2025 Bell Labs is the wider ecosystem of VCs and free floating innovators who end up starting startups instead of doing things in house.

Yep, agree with this statement. That's exactly what I think happened.

I have no idea what Bell Labs was like on the inside, but the startups I've been involved in didn't leave a lot of room for experimentation, trying and failing.

Quite the opposite, always a mad rush towards profit at any cost.

> Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.

That almost seems like a problem! We shouldn't reward a prospective Claude Shannon for moving away from fundamental breakthroughs in favor of applied research that can go into a product. We're really failing to incentivize discovering fundamentals like information theory.

Bob Metcalfe made a lot of money by making Ethernet ubiquitous. He didn't capture a lot of the value because it cannot be captured.

>Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

When an employer or occupation provides a fully respectable career for life, that's your job and it's fully respectable to have that be your life's work from that point onward, plus information theory doesn't represent the full 1% of what Shannon had to offer anyway :)

> Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?

Why would someone who is not motivated by financial gain care?

> I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn't trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.

— Claude Shannon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com