A New Ideas Machine
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Oh wait, we've spent the last 30 years enjoying the fruits of government funded research from NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, and others. I know that this may not be popular with some people on Hacker News, but by and large government funded research in the basic sciences has been instrumental in transforming America into the technological powerhouse it currently is.
Peter Thiel is upset we have 140 characters, and not flying cars? I choose to be blown away that we have a world wide planetary communication grid capable of delivering information in near real-time. Step back for a moment and let that blow you away for a while.
I appreciate the enormous advances that industry has layered on top of the many breakthroughs that have come from public labs, and I also understand that industry has been invaluable in making many of these breakthroughs popular and widespread.
But we already have a model for successful R&D that will allow for the sort of paradigm shifts that Thiel is apparently asking for, and it's not going to come from a decade of eating ramen in your garage, hoping that you'll finally get your payoff in the form of an X-Prize. It comes from consistent government funding towards the best and brightest, not beholden to quarterly results or the profit motive, from dedicated researchers each doing their part to move things a step forward.
If you really want breakthroughs that will change the world, then it has to come with the patience to wait years or decades, to keep funding steady and high enough that the best aren't impoverished, and the understanding that the results need to be open and free to all who want them.
And while I like the performance-based approach, unlike patronage this places a great deal of risk on the shoulders of the innovators. If they are independently wealthy, no problem. But most scientists aren't. Which means they'll need to get funded, which means dealing with capital. Now VCs are already, quite directly, in the research game. But even $10M prizes are small. Indeed, a $100M prize might be too small if there are many competitors and the challenge takes years. These prizes would have to be a lot bigger to compete with the kinds of payouts startups can yield.
Or perhaps the idea is that people compete while they are not doing anything at their day job at the Swiss patent office?
If you've seen the excellent RSA animate talk "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"[1] you'll see that it's quite the opposite. When it comes to mentally challenging tasks, people want autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Just pay them enough to take the issue of money off the table.
Personally, that really agrees with me. My ideal situation is to be funded via a sustainable crowd-sourced funding like Gittip, so that I can continue doing what I'm doing now: _not_ working at a deadend business that's only concerned about making a profit, where I hate working for my boss. Instead, I want to[2] create amazing software tools that make our world a better place to live. I really enjoy software development and want to make it better, funner, more efficient. I don't care about money beyond just making enough to pay for rent and food. Money and food are just in my way, stealing away from the time I could be working.
Thankfully, I still have some savings that'll last me maybe half a year before I do have to find a way to make a living again. But really, I want to keep this up.
My current life: wake up each morning, absolutely free of any commitments, and think to myself: what cool things can I do today to make the world better?
Maybe it is, I don't know. But it isn't for me. I've been working the last 12 months 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week on a free, open source project. My total income during those 12 months? Pretty much $0. Some people say I'm crazy for not having a monetization plan. But I do it because I believe there's a small chance, if I'm successful, it will have a lot of value. I hope that when I get closer to finishing it, it will be very useful to myself and hopefully other people too.
I would much rather work on what I love and enjoy rather than do anything else that gives me money. Money is a very low motivator for me. I only need it so I can keep doing what I'm already doing now.
Saying that "money isn't a motivator" is extremely short-sighted. Few people are motivated purely by money. It's the opportunities that money provides you that are valuable. Completely ignoring this fact and focusing 100% on some open source project as if that is the epitome of value creation is just setting yourself up for a serious reality-check. If you seriously do not see the value in acquiring money then I'd say you aren't looking at the big picture. Others definitely shouldn't be encouraged to follow suit. The HN crowd tends to idolize the noble hacker who isn't concerned about worldly things, but this is a tragic path for the vast majority of folks who may be convinced to go down it, likely yourself included. Reality can only be ignored for so long.
It's actually the very definition of sustainable.
From the perspective of other people, what I'm doing is likely crazy. I agree with that. I don't expect many people to follow this path, because it's not for them.
But it is for me. I feel like I don't have a choice, I do what I do because I feel it's my moral responsibility to do it and I couldn't do anything else. I believe in my cause that much.
I am referring to Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" talk that does a great job of explaining my approach.
> That lifestyle is simply unsustainable.
My current plan is quite simple and definitely sustainable. I work full time on my project, and I do my best to make it as good as possible in that time, hopefully making it profitable (i.e. so I can keep working on it) by the time my money runs out. I just have to make it provide value to lots of people, and the money will come in. If I don't succeed, then I look for a job to sustain my living and work on it on the side. When I have enough savings again, I can consider getting back to the project full time.
> It's the opportunities that money provides you that are valuable.
Sure, I don't disagree there. But since I care about my work and changing the world for the better more than anything else, money for me is only something that can support that lifestyle. If I had lots of it, then I could potentially hire people to help me work on it, etc. Also, if I were rich, it would be an indicator that what I'm doing is bringing lots of value to other people (hence they want to throw money at me). So I'm not opposed to making money, but it's far from the #1 thing I optimize for. I optimize for happiness.
> Completely ignoring this fact and focusing 100% on some open source project as if that is the epitome of value creation is just setting yourself up for a serious reality-check. If you seriously do not see the value in acquiring money then I'd say you aren't looking at the big picture.
So let's pretend I would focus on making money (i.e. by not working on this project). The way to make money is to produce value[1] and then monetizing that somehow. So it's best to do something in an area where I am most skilled, which would be programming, C++, graphics, user interfaces, etc. for me. So I could get a job at some company doing that. But why not just do what I want to do right away?[2]
A part of my plan is to take a huge risk. If I have even 1% chance of succeeding and changing the world in a significantly positive manner, then I'll happily take that chance. I want to do things most companies wouldn't dare try. Nothing is stopping me but me.
In conclusion, I'm not advocating my lifestyle for others, I just wanted to explain why I think it's best for me and I try to do the best I can...
P.S. I'm always open to criticism and I try to improve myself. My goal is to be the kind of person I'd want others to be. :) I'm not the most skilled at explaining my thoughts, so sorry if I didn't do the best job at it here.
How so?
There is a troublesome user experience in any crowd funded innovation prize though - most prizes will take a long time to pay out, or will never pay out at all. For the first several years your user experience will be, "Well, I've committed 100 dollars to 3 projects, but nothing has happened yet." Kickstarter projects can take years but at least they clearly march towards a ship date.
Any endeavor here will need to have a mix of big and small projects, and will also need to find ways to show feel-good incremental progress from the more ambitious prize pools.
For something like an "X-Prize for Everything" to be truly be a successful there have to be goals that are reachable at all size levels. So instead of just a grand goal, there could be smaller goals, that are published, have awards, and all of it should be open sourced/licensed.
There was research on a wiki-like programming contest that I think demonstrates how important solving both the big and small aspects is, and one contest implementation to address both[1]. Because of the "winner take all" approach, I don't think it's a good way to solve grand goal challenges (i.e. it financially punishes losers).
But something like a VCS that can show contributors to a winning solution. Or a crowdfunded site where even small goal challenges can be posted, this could obviously include micro-goal challenges of grand challenges (e.g., a team trying to win a "human cloning" contest could post a "human eye cloning" contest).
[1] http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.htm...
His vision is clear, my vision, I'm sure shared by many, will come true when companies are able to opt in giving a percentage of their profits towards innovation funds like the one suggested, local civic engineering / hacking funds to become an incentive for cross sector collaboration in opening data from the government and other beneficial entities, and funds for programs like STEM, FIRST, and NASA or their choice of other NPOs or even NGOs.
All of this on top of receiving a deduction for doing so in their taxes can drive innovation on a whole new level. Somewhat allowing a a post-benefit company-like[0] incorporation in all states might lead to this.
Who will NOT opt into this for at least 5 years?
But patents and traditional innovation where you have to found a company and try to market your stuff might be even worse than that - I think most technical people don't like the idea of creating their own company. It might be easier to just open source your project.
I've been thinking about open sourcing some of my (hardware) ideas. It doesn't seem likely I'd ever create a company and start wasting my time in the pursuit of unlikely success. I'm not a crazy risk seeking optimistic person.
Kickstarter seems to be this in reverse. I come up with an idea and people fund it based on their desire. Instead of rich patron, I have many "poor"[2] patrons. A weekly video program on Kickstarters would drive more than big money prizes.
1) I have seen quite a few grocery stores now putting up the "minimum credit car purchase $10 due to rising fees".
2) poor in the money contributed sense, not a commentary on their personal finances
Simple. But you have to cleanup the mess first.
In other words, throw out all that is mismanaged, inefficient and abused and replace it with an infrastructure fine-tuned to iterate to optimize growth and innovation.
This means making changes to government, workforce and taxation.
Here's my (incomplete) list:
- Pass a constitutional amendment that requires our
government to operate under a balanced budget
- Establish a maximum cost of government as a percent of
GDP (or some other metric) in order to prevent a grab
for more tax revenue to expand government and the
pervasive always-spend-more culture
- Reduce government to a bare minimum
- Completely phase out all entitlement programs
- Institute new --smaller-- programs to help those who
really need them.
- All businesses contribute a small percentage of gross
to this program (1%?). The idea is to setup a system
where government will have reason to work towards
improving business activity in order to fund programs.
Today they reach for optimizing tax revenues as
opposed to optimizing economic activity which is far
more important.
- Make unions illegal for government workers.
It's a huge conflict of interest: Government workers
benefit from laws and the workings of government and
form a unified voting block that is self-serving.
- No lifetime pensions for anyone working in government.
I'd go as far as making them illegal for anyone, period.
There is no sensible mathematical formula that supports
the idea of lifetime pensions. A person and their family
ought to be responsible for their own retirement without
becoming a burden for the rest of society for generations
to come.
These are business killers.
- Fire everyone at the patent office
- Create a new patent and trademark system who's priority
is to optimize to maximize innovation while
providing reasonable protections for work that requires
massive R&D
- Flat and low taxes
- No deductions for anyone
- Businesses pay zero taxes
- Businesses contribute 5% of their gross to a national
R&D fund
- The fund is NOT accessible to anyone in government
- The fund is administered by a team of CEO's from various
industries. There could be other layers too. The main
point is: No government claws can reach this fund.
- The fund's goal is to provide financial support, legal
and operational guidance to entrepreneurs. Call it a
mega-incubatorI knew my post would not be popular. That's OK. I am not a cargo-cult thinker.
It's interesting that in a thread about innovation only one person so far --me-- brings-up the elephant in the room: Government, choking innovation in so many ways it is beyond criminal.
I think most on HN would agree that the Patent Office has, in the last, say, 30 years, done more damage than good. Why does it take thirty years to fix it?
Why does anything in government take FIFTY years to change? Notice I said "change" not "fix". They rarely fix anything.
What's the impact on innovation of not having a balanced budget? An I mean, not balanced by a TRILLION dollars, not a few million? No impact at all? How is that possible?
What is the impact to innovation of having tens of millions of Americans enslaved by entitlement programs? There exist people who have been living under these programs their entire lives, even families who've been under them for generations. Here's a huge mass of people who's very drive to live and succeed has been killed off by not having to fight for survival. Innovation does not happen when you are not hungry. Period. We have to break this chain of slavery and get these people to re-join society. Those who truly need help ought to receive it through sensible programs. That's a small percentage of those currently under these programs.
We also need to limit government and keep them away from industry. I mean, stuff like the NLRB and their fight against Boeing. I'll tell you, if I were running Boeing I would have said "Fuck you all, we are moving the entire operation to Canada until you figure out that unions are the enemy of innovation and growth.".
What's the impact to innovation of the double-taxation that happens with revenue generated by businesses: Tax the employees once and then, if anything remains, tax the company. Criminal. You are taxing the same pile of money that came in through the same door!
C'mon folks, picture it this way: You start a landscaping business. You have a job this weekend. You finish the job with four other workers. The tax man shows-up. You paid each worker and yourself $100. The tax man takes $20 from everyone. You spent $100 on supplies. That means $400 remains. This is $400 to save for a rainy day, advertise to get more work, hire more people, grow the business, etc. The tax man doesn't leave. He wants another $80 bite out of the same money. So, the same money got taxed twice. And now you have less money to tend to your business.
To make things even worst. The $180 the tax man collected is going to be wasted by government in a million different ways.
Anyhow, innovation does not come from those who sign-on to cargo-culture and simply parrot what their circle is also parroting. I know I am not voicing popular culture at all. That's OK, I am not a clone. I innovate.
It was designed that way because change comes in two forms, good change and bad change. No one at the time of the creation of the US form of government could come up with a way that would enable good change to happen faster than bad change, and they recognized that bad change could could be fatal, they had to create a system where change was slow enough that bad changes could be reversed as it slowly became obvious how bad they were.
They also made the assumption that the people being governed would proactively participate in the institutions of government in order to effect change. What we've seen as that things can get bad enough to motivate participation, and in doing so force more change. The 'tea party' movement is a good example of that sort of force in action. There were more new 'tea party' congressional representatives in 2010 than any new movement had produced in a while proving once again that a block of people, motivated by the same sorts of issues can effect change by participating in their government.
Things move faster today. We can't wait another fifty years to fix the patent system, have reasonable gun control and stop fucking with the rest of the world with senseless wars. Does it really have to take fifty years for these things to be resolved?
Let's use the Tea Partiers who are currently driving us off into some fiscal unknowns. A large enough constituent of people was of the opinion that the Federal Government had gotten too big and was fiscally out of control. Their efforts managed to elect a parliamentary significant number of them to congress where they have been generally voting as a bloc against additional taxes without significant spending cuts. Whether you and I agree with them, that agenda is moving forward. It went from whine to change in less than 10 years. (I count the start of that movement around 2005/6, how about you?)
So that patent system is broken, its been broken for a long time, but until patent-a-geddon here, it never rose to the attention of anyone outside of tech circles (and like it or not we're both a relatively small and (historically) a relatively ineffective political force). And yet patent-a-geddon has put it on the radar of politicians, and big time donors like Google and Bill & Melinda Gates have been bending the ears of said politicians and for the first time in my memory we're seeing actual changes to the way the patent system works (America INVENTS act) and more critical scrutiny on both the PTO and on the federal court in Washington that hears the appeals. That is all good news and indicative that change is happening.
2014 is going to be another election year. A number of people will put their names in the hat to be your congressional representative. If you don't like what your incumbent is doing with regard to patents, talk to the contenders and see if there is any one of them that will both support your desired changes to the patent system and their personal goals aren't too distasteful. If you live somewhere like the Bay Area there are a bunch of congressional districts in the area, you can talk to lots of folks. Try to get your entire state's congressional delegation lined up around fixing patents in the next two years. To do that you will need to research some ways in which the patent system should be changed (if you want to advocate the abolishment of software patents then it helps to look at other places that have done that, they have a history you can reference). Talk to some outspoken supporters and critics of the Patent system, find out how they rationalize their position, can you argue successfully against that rationalization? Find their arguments and their evidence and see where it leads you.
None of this takes money, but it does take time and effort. Its a crap load of work, much of it fairly clerical and boring. Get other people involved (from your congressional district is the most impactful but from all over is okay too). You are going to ask a representative to stand up and say "we need to make these changes ..." and they need facts to back that up, they need counterpoints to the arguments that will be thrown in their face, they need to know who is going to come after them, and they need to know what is at stake. Your congressional representative is your tool for manipulating the Government to your will, that is their job.
Recognize too that you are but one pusher in a sea of pushers, pushing from the home district gets +1 to impact because you're a voter but there are other pushers out there. Find them and blunt their story.
And that takes time of course. Less if you have money and you can hire clerical staff, more if you run down everything yourself.
Or don't. Your choice. FWIW the voter registrar will have the names and addresses of the folks who are putting their name in the hat for Congress usually in November of this year but no later than March[1] of next year. Get the names and go talk to them. They will be happy to talk to you if they are trying to get elected.
[1] http://fec.gov - "When are the Federal Election Activity periods for my state?
Within 120 days before an election, voter registration, voter identification, get-out-the-vote and generic campaign activities conducted by state, district or local party committees are considered federal election activity (FEA) and must be financed using federal funds, Levin funds or a combination of the two. As states establish their election schedules (including special elections), the Commission calculates the applicable FEA periods."
Another thought that is interesting is the idea that all legislation ought to be passed with an expiration date. This ensures that laws --and the ideas they represent-- will be re-evaluated every n years. This approach would be one step towards preventing politicians from making decisions that will affect generations to come. Of course, some legislation needs to become the law of the land forever (civil rights stuff). Still, laws ought to be passed with fully justified and debated expiration dates. If something needs to be "forever" and it is justified, then the expiration date is "never". Most anything else might not pass the "forever" test.
I nearly ran for congress in 2010, it is still on my list of things to do. The only thing that stopped me that time was figuring out the dynamics was taking longer than I had. I no interest in offering just a random name on the ballot and putting together something of a platform took longer than I expected. In some ways I chickened out when it came to sending the FEC money. My reasoning was the paperwork burden I was about to incur vs that possible outcomes. At the time I was going to run as a Republican although the California party had already said that my views on Gay marriage (for) and abortion (pro choice) made me "unsuitable" for their support. Too late to create a 'new' party, and unlikely to make it through the primaries as an "off" ticket, didn't bode well. Instead I used the time to try to learn more about the underlying processes. Starting out targeting congress is a pretty low percentage move unless you're a Kennedy. :-)
...eh. Sorry to say but it looks a lot like you are.
No brother, I am far from cargo culture, very far. On fiscal issues the stuff you'll see me write might seem to align with the Republicans. On social issues the right wing would burn me on a cross if they could because I tend to align with the godless left (gay rights, religion, abortion, gun rights, war, etc.)
The thing about fiscal issues is that they are very, very simple. Anyone with high school math can confirm or refute claims. If you use a spreadsheet even better; you can model a far larger system and see how it actually works.
The problem with most who react negatively to calls for severe cuts, balanced budget and reduced government footprint is that they are simply parroting what has been indoctrinated into their brains without even making a small effort to put pen to paper and really understand how things work.
Here's a simple example. Model this in your spreadsheet and then tell me how YOU would solve the problem.
You hire a union gardener. He gets $200 a month. After working ten years he can retire with 80% of his salary for the rest of his life.
Ten years later he retires. Now you pay him $160 per month to stay home.
You still need a gardener and hire another one. Now that position effectively costs you $360 per month.
Ten years later this new guy retires. Now the position costs you $200 + $160 + 160 or $520 per month, nearly triple the salary for just one person.
If I hire non-union I pay my gardener $100 per year and, when he retires, I pay a similar gardener a similar amount.
Get it?
Who pays for their amazing lifetime pension benefits.
You, of course.
Do the math.
Contrary to what you (somehow) believe, innovation can only really flourish (as opposed to the sporadic jumps made otherwise) when you are safe, warm and well fed.
Maybe humger drives some people to innovate (though it's hard for me to imagine how they could drink clearly when hungry). But I suspect hunger drives most people to simply do what's necessary to eat - and they can and would stop well short of innovation to do that. I would love to see data on a significant number of innovations that were developed by hungry people.
A huge chunk of our population would be easy to look like sorry excuses for human being when compared to the stories most immigrants could tell you about their history in the new world.
Granted, we created some of these problems. That said, the human condition is such that some of us will not act unless put into a sink-or-swim predicament. Stories of able-bodied youngsters stuck in this alternate reality abound. Some have even taken to YouTube to very publicly show off what they can get for free from the government and actually talk about how you can do the same.
Look, I recognize there are a lot of things government has gotten right. That's the truth. However, today, it has degenerated into this thing that has been relentlessly destroying our country from the inside.
> Businesses contribute 5% of their gross to a national R&D fund
> Businesses pay zero taxes
Technically, the first two invalidates the third as the first two are taxes.
I think to non-technical people there is nothing innovative about Twitter, Facebook and most of online services offered today. To techies innovation is in the infrastructures these services are built on & sometimes made publicly available to others (ie Amazon).
Basically, a government/taxation-funded prize scheme, where everyone gets to vote on who should get prizes. Like nationalized crowd-funding, but strictly after-the-fact (unlike Kickstarter, which is very much before-the-fact).
or
>"Somewhere between dire straits and dead... we wanted flying cars; instead, we got a global communications service.