The conversation touches on several landmarks in in the history of technology. In this comment, I take a deeper dive into their business, social, scientific and mathematical contexts.
The Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers won a patent in 1906 on airplane flight control (what we now call “ailerons”). A glance through their Wikipedia article suggests they tried to build a monopoly by suing their competitors into oblivion. I get the impression they prioritized legal action over their own business expansion and technological development.
Outside of the medical industry, I can’t think of a single technology company in history which dominated an industry primarily through legal action. (Excluding companies founded by fascist oligarchs such as the Japanese zaibatsu.)
Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don’t know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don’t win by winning lawsuits. That’s too uncertain. They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels.
Microsoft and Oracle are not known for being afraid of lawsuits or being unwilling to crush their competitors. I think patents just aren’t very important.
The Wright brothers had the best flying technology in 1906. The way an inventor captures value is by using a technological edge to start a business that becomes a monopoly by leveraging how technology lets small organizations iterate faster than big organizations. The Wright brothers “didn’t personally capture much value by inventing heavier-than-air flying machines” because they let their technical lead slip away by distracting themselves with legal disputes.
They didn’t know a secret…
The Wright brothers did have at least one key insight few others in the aviation industry did. Flying a plane is not intuitive to land-dwelling bipeds. They knew the key difficulty would be learning to fly an airplane. But if the first time you learn to fly an airplane is the first time you fly an airplane then you will probably die because landing is harder than taking off. How do they solve the chicken-and-egg (or plane-and-pilot) problem? They tied their engine-less plane to the ground and flew it like a kite to practice flying it under safe conditions.
This kind of insight isn’t something you can discover by throwing lots of stuff at the wall because you only get one chance. If you fly a plane and crash you usually don’t get to try a different strategy. You just die (as many of the Wright brothers’ competitors did).
Another cognitive advantage the Wright brothers had was the conviction that heavier-than-air flight was possible in 1906.
Technical Secrets
secrets = important undiscovered information (or information that’s been discovered but isn’t widely known), that you can use to get an edge in something….
The most important secrets often stay secret automatically just because they’re hard to prove. Suppose you were living in 1905 and you knew for certain that heavier-than-air flight was possible with the available technology. The only way to prove it would be to literally build the world’s first airplane, which is a lot of work.
Prediction markets are a step in the right direction.
There seems to be a Paul/Eliezer disagreement about how common these are in general. And maybe a disagreement about how much more efficiently humanity discovers and propagates secrets as you scale up the secret’s value?
I think much of the disagreement happens because secrets are concentrated in a small number of people. If you’re one of those small number of people then secrets will feel plentiful. You will know more secrets than you have time to pursue. If you’re not one of us then secrets will feel rare.
If critical insights are concentrated in a tiny number of people then two claims should be true. ① Most people have zero good technical insights into important problems. ② A extremely tiny minority of people have most of the good technical insights into important problems.
Corollary ① is trivial to confirm.
Corollary ② is confirmed by history.
Einstein didn’t just figure out relativity. He also figured out blackbody radiation and tons of other stuff. These are wildly divergent fields. Blackbody radiation has nothing to do with special or general relativity. Richard Feynman invented Feynman diagrams and the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
Good entrepreneurs don’t just get lucky. They win repeatedly. Steve Jobs started Apple, left to start Pixar and then resurrected Apple. Elon Musk founded SolarCity and now runs Tesla and SpaceX. Sam Altman used to run Y-Combinator and now runs OpenAI.
Steam Engines and Nukes
The participants in this conversation reference two energy technologies: nuclear energy and steam energy. The first nuclear bomb had a major immediate impact on world affairs. The first steam engine did not. This is because of math.
With nuclear weapons, the math came first and the technology came second. With steam engines, the technology came first and the math came second. Consequently, the first nuclear weapons were close to physically-optimal (after factoring in infrastructure constraints) whereas the earliest steam engines were not.
Steam Energy
The first commercial steam engine was invented in 1698 by Thomas Savery but the Carnot cycle wasn’t proposed by Sadi Carnot until 1824 and the ideal gas law wasn’t discovered until 1856.
Imagine building a steam engine 126 years before the discovery of the Carnot cycle. That’s like building a nuclear reactor 126 years before E=mc2. It’s like building a nuclear reactor with Benjamin Franklin’s knowledge of physics.
The early steampunks did not have sophisticated mathematics on their side. They built their machines first. The mathematics came afterward. The earliest steam engines were extremely inefficient compared to the earliest atomic bombs because they were developed mostly through trial-and-error instead of computing the optimal design mathematically from first principles.
Nuclear Energy
The engineers at the Manhattan Project built a working nuclear device on their first try because they ran careful calculations. For example, they knew the atomic weights of different isotopes. By measuring the energy and velocity of different decay products and plugging them into E=√p2c2+m20c4 you can calculate the theoretical maximum yield of a nuclear weapon.
The engineers’ objective was to get as close to this theoretical yield as they could. To this end, they knew exactly how much benefit they would get from purifying their fissile material.
Trivia
Idk what the state of knowledge was like in 1800, but maybe they knew that the Sun couldn’t be a conventional fire.
Before the knowledge of nuclear energy, one idea of where the Sun got its energy was from gravitational collapse. The physicists used it to compute a maximum age of the universe. The geologists used geological history to compute a minimum age of the universe. The geologists’ minimum age was older than the physicists’ maximum age. The geologists were right. The physicists were wrong.
You could hardness gravitational potential energy to create superweapons by redirecting asteroids.
The conversation touches on several landmarks in in the history of technology. In this comment, I take a deeper dive into their business, social, scientific and mathematical contexts.
The Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers won a patent in 1906 on airplane flight control (what we now call “ailerons”). A glance through their Wikipedia article suggests they tried to build a monopoly by suing their competitors into oblivion. I get the impression they prioritized legal action over their own business expansion and technological development.
Outside of the medical industry, I can’t think of a single technology company in history which dominated an industry primarily through legal action. (Excluding companies founded by fascist oligarchs such as the Japanese zaibatsu.)
Microsoft and Oracle are not known for being afraid of lawsuits or being unwilling to crush their competitors. I think patents just aren’t very important.
The Wright brothers had the best flying technology in 1906. The way an inventor captures value is by using a technological edge to start a business that becomes a monopoly by leveraging how technology lets small organizations iterate faster than big organizations. The Wright brothers “didn’t personally capture much value by inventing heavier-than-air flying machines” because they let their technical lead slip away by distracting themselves with legal disputes.
The Wright brothers did have at least one key insight few others in the aviation industry did. Flying a plane is not intuitive to land-dwelling bipeds. They knew the key difficulty would be learning to fly an airplane. But if the first time you learn to fly an airplane is the first time you fly an airplane then you will probably die because landing is harder than taking off. How do they solve the chicken-and-egg (or plane-and-pilot) problem? They tied their engine-less plane to the ground and flew it like a kite to practice flying it under safe conditions.
This kind of insight isn’t something you can discover by throwing lots of stuff at the wall because you only get one chance. If you fly a plane and crash you usually don’t get to try a different strategy. You just die (as many of the Wright brothers’ competitors did).
Another cognitive advantage the Wright brothers had was the conviction that heavier-than-air flight was possible in 1906.
Technical Secrets
The most important secrets often stay secret automatically just because they’re hard to prove. Suppose you were living in 1905 and you knew for certain that heavier-than-air flight was possible with the available technology. The only way to prove it would be to literally build the world’s first airplane, which is a lot of work.
Prediction markets are a step in the right direction.
I think much of the disagreement happens because secrets are concentrated in a small number of people. If you’re one of those small number of people then secrets will feel plentiful. You will know more secrets than you have time to pursue. If you’re not one of us then secrets will feel rare.
If critical insights are concentrated in a tiny number of people then two claims should be true. ① Most people have zero good technical insights into important problems. ② A extremely tiny minority of people have most of the good technical insights into important problems.
Corollary ① is trivial to confirm.
Corollary ② is confirmed by history.
Einstein didn’t just figure out relativity. He also figured out blackbody radiation and tons of other stuff. These are wildly divergent fields. Blackbody radiation has nothing to do with special or general relativity. Richard Feynman invented Feynman diagrams and the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
Good entrepreneurs don’t just get lucky. They win repeatedly. Steve Jobs started Apple, left to start Pixar and then resurrected Apple. Elon Musk founded SolarCity and now runs Tesla and SpaceX. Sam Altman used to run Y-Combinator and now runs OpenAI.
Steam Engines and Nukes
The participants in this conversation reference two energy technologies: nuclear energy and steam energy. The first nuclear bomb had a major immediate impact on world affairs. The first steam engine did not. This is because of math.
With nuclear weapons, the math came first and the technology came second. With steam engines, the technology came first and the math came second. Consequently, the first nuclear weapons were close to physically-optimal (after factoring in infrastructure constraints) whereas the earliest steam engines were not.
Steam Energy
The first commercial steam engine was invented in 1698 by Thomas Savery but the Carnot cycle wasn’t proposed by Sadi Carnot until 1824 and the ideal gas law wasn’t discovered until 1856.
Imagine building a steam engine 126 years before the discovery of the Carnot cycle. That’s like building a nuclear reactor 126 years before E=mc2. It’s like building a nuclear reactor with Benjamin Franklin’s knowledge of physics.
The early steampunks did not have sophisticated mathematics on their side. They built their machines first. The mathematics came afterward. The earliest steam engines were extremely inefficient compared to the earliest atomic bombs because they were developed mostly through trial-and-error instead of computing the optimal design mathematically from first principles.
Nuclear Energy
The engineers at the Manhattan Project built a working nuclear device on their first try because they ran careful calculations. For example, they knew the atomic weights of different isotopes. By measuring the energy and velocity of different decay products and plugging them into E=√p2c2+m20c4 you can calculate the theoretical maximum yield of a nuclear weapon.
The engineers’ objective was to get as close to this theoretical yield as they could. To this end, they knew exactly how much benefit they would get from purifying their fissile material.
Trivia
Before the knowledge of nuclear energy, one idea of where the Sun got its energy was from gravitational collapse. The physicists used it to compute a maximum age of the universe. The geologists used geological history to compute a minimum age of the universe. The geologists’ minimum age was older than the physicists’ maximum age. The geologists were right. The physicists were wrong.
You could hardness gravitational potential energy to create superweapons by redirecting asteroids.
“Richard Feynman invented Feynman diagrams and the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.”
These discoveries are much more related than Special Relativity & Blackbody radiation.
Feynmann diagrams are a visual representation of certains terms of the path integral.