218 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 9 Mar \ on: Incentives and coordination to solve hard problems mostly_harmless
I missed this article. Reading about the gap their org fills was like a whiff of smelling salts. When did we largely retire private, independent labs like this?
I'll be reading their Lessons from history’s greatest R&D labs soon. OpenAI started in a similar lab form but they were pulled another way.
I always reach for incentives when coordination problems arise, but its not clear to me how they'd work here. Loosely, financial incentives gives us companies, reputation incentives give us academia, and R&D labs are both. If we aren't creating R&D labs, our culture/economy is leaving out blended incentive systems.
You could incentivize creation of new incentive systems so these gaps never form. But how would you design such a thing to produce R&D labs? Is the good that R&D labs do measurable in a short enough time period to reward them?
I think there might be a Goedel's (tried for one whole minute to make the umlaut, failed) analogue here, that any incentive system is 'incomplete' in the kinds of expressions that can arise from it. My working theory is that one can't solve this problem, the best one can do is come up with some Schumpeterian arrangement that encourages the wrong ones to die, but also doesn't make the death of a company into the death of the people who constitute it.
Easier said than done, though. The failure modes on both extrema are clear, and bad.
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I left out intrinsic incentives, which we don't seem to account for in our societal system design much, but maybe that's part of the problem.
I'm completely untrained here, but my understanding is that we partition motivation into intrinsic and extrinsic forms. Financial and reputational motivations are extrinsic subforms. What are the intrinsic subforms?
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Ha! Yes. This is an extra-hard problem, I think, because:
a) economic incentives are not only generally useless for vitally important classes of endeavor, but counter-productive to it, and
b) we have no good way of non-economic incentive-design that our civilization can manage anymore -- religion being both perverted and largely ineffectual to current sensibilities; and nothing else seriously on offer.
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R&D labs are mostly motivated by these non-extrinsic incentives too as far as I can tell. If a stable financial life is harder to achieve now than it was in the golden age of R&D labs, maybe we are scrambling too much to pursue intrinsic things. That's probably my bias though.
Another view: the hard problems, absent AI, were so hard R&D couldn't reliably spinoff extrinsic things so we stopped building R&D labs.
This is sort of consistent with one of Theil's theories for why we are stagnating.
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It’s hard to separate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
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