Why Bell Labs Worked

>In particular, just blaming 'MBA Management' does little to explain why MBAs appeared in the first place

Whatever the reason it is definitely not because they are effective managers.

I suspect it's more of a social class phenomenon - they speak the language of the ownership class and that engenders trust.

Plus there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" from the war time that was yet to be "productify", as we say today.

Radars, computers (Enigma crushers), lasers, many less visible inventions that had a great impact in say, materials science - those barrels had to be durable, planes lighter and faster, etc this allowed do build fancier stuff. Whole nuclear industry and its surrounding.

Another factor: cold war, there was incentive to spend money if only there was some chance to win some advantage.

>there's too many of them to allow judging

Agree with this in particular as a good symptom of the "tectonic shifts". I usually blame the Baumol effect, i.e., the increasing difficulty of the inherently human task: keeping science education/science educators up-to-date. Especially when faced with the returns on optimizing more "mechanical" processes (including the impressive short term returns on "merely" improving bean-counting or, in Bell Lab's/IBM's later eras, shifting info-processing away from paper)

I doubt AI or VCs* have any significant role to play in reducing the friction in the college-to-self-selling-breakthrough pipeline, but they should certainly channel most of their efforts to improving the "ecosystem" first

TFA has right ideas such as

>Make sure people talk to each other every day.

Which already happens here on HN! (Although it's mostly different daily sets of people but.. the same old sets of ideas?)

*Not if the main marketable usecase for college students is to game existing metrics. And I don't see no Edtech in the RFS either

Every breakthrough needs many 'man years' of effort to bring to market. research is good but for every researcher we need several thousand who are doing all the hard work of getting the useful things to market in volumn.

RCA tried to duplicate Bell Labs' success and it arguably bankrupted the company.

Who ever said that they should be isolated?

The key differentiator was giving them freedom and putting them in charge, not isolating them.

Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.

But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.

My dad was at this talk in 1986 that PG shares on his blog:

https://paulgraham.com/hamming.html

Said it was amazing.

It's been out of stock for nearly a year. Interesting in a post talking about AT&T and Bell Labs to point out that Stripe struggles to maintain an inventory of niche printed books.

Yeah F# and Typescript are very impressive. We just got used to tonnes of innovation. It ain't UNIX but I'd say Typescript is as impressive. An exoskeleton for JS that rivals Haskell.

See also VSCode and WSL.

And if we ain't impressed with LLMs then wtf! I mean maybe it is just nostalga for the old times.

Lots of great stuff is coming out. Quantum computing. Open source revolution producing Tor, Bitcoin, Redis, Linux.

I think we are in the Golden age!

And it is not all from one place. Which is better.

This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing.

But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.

    > Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said.

It's not about excess.

Look at some of the most famous success stories in comedy, art, music, theatre, film, etc.

A good number of them did their best work when they were poor.

"Community" is a great example. Best show ever made, hands down. Yet they were all relatively broke and overworked during the whole thing.

It's because they believed in the vision.

To some extent, the NSF did that. My graduate education was funded by the NSF, and my research didn't have an obvious practical purpose, except to enable further research.

Today, I'm in a corporate research role, and I'm still given a lot of freedom. I'm also genuinely interested in practical applications and I like developing things that people want to buy, but my ability to do those things owes a lot to the relatively freewheeling days of NSF funding 30+ years ago.

I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?

This is what I wished academia would be. I'm finishing my PhD and despite loving teaching and research (I've been told I'd make a good professor, including from students) I just don't see the system doing what it should. Truthfully, I'm not aware of any such environment other than maybe a handful of small groups (both in academia and industry).

I think we've become overly metricized. In an effort to reduce waste we created more. Some things are incredibly hard to measure and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that one of those things is research. Especially low level research. You're pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Creating things that did not previously exist! Not only are there lots of "failures", but how do you measure something that doesn't exist?

I write "failure" in quotes because I don't see it that way, and feel like the common framing of failure is even anti scientific. In science we don't often (or ever) directly prove some result but instead disprove other things and narrow down our options. In the same way every unsuccessful result decreases your search space for understanding where the truth is. But the problem is that the solution space is so large and in such a high dimension that you can't effectively measure this. You're exactly right, it looks like waste. But in an effort to "save money" we created a publish or perish paradigm, which has obviously led to many perverse incentives.

I think the biggest crime is that it severely limits creativity. You can't take on risky or even unpopular ideas because you need to publish and that means passing "peer review". This process is relatively new to science though. It didn't exist in the days of old scientists you reference[0]. The peer review process has always been the open conversation about publications, not the publications themselves nor a few random people reading it who have no interest and every reason to dismiss. Those are just a means to communicate, something that is trivial with today's technologies. We should obviously reject works with plagiarism and obvious factual errors, but there's no reason to not publish the rest. Theres no reason we shouldn't be more open than ever[1]. But we can't do this in a world where we're in competition with another. It only works in a world where we're united by the shared pursuit of more knowledge. Otherwise you "lose credit" or some "edge".

And we're really bad at figuring out what's impactful. Critically, the system makes it hard to make paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift requires a significant rethinking of the current process. It's hard to challenge what we know. It's even harder to convince others. Every major shift we've seen first receives major pushback and that makes it extremely difficult to publish in the current environment. I've heard many times "good luck publishing, even if you can prove it". I've also seen many ideas be put on the infinite back burner because despite being confident in the idea and confident in impact it's known that in the time it'd take to get the necessary results you could have several other works published, which matters far more to your career.

Ironically, I think removing these systems will save more money and create more efficient work (you're exactly right!). We have people dedicating their lives to studying certain topics in depth. The truth is that their curiosity highly aligns with what are critical problems. Sometimes you just know and can't articulate it well until you get a bit more into the problem. I'm sure this is something a lot of people here have experienced when writing programs or elsewhere. There's many things that no one gets why you'd do until after it's done, and frequently many will say it's so obvious after seeing it.

I can tell you that I (and a large number of people) would take massive pay cuts if I could just be paid to do unconditional research. I don't care about money, I care about learning more and solving these hard puzzles.

I'd also make a large wager that this would generate a lot of wealth for a company big enough to do such a program and a lot of value to the world if academia supported this.

(I also do not think the core ideas here are unique to academia. I think we've done similar things in industry. But given the specific topic it makes more sense to discuss the academic side)

[0] I know someone is going to google oldest journal and find an example. The thing is that this was not the normal procedure. Many journals, even in the 20th century, would publish anything void of obvious error.

[1] put on open review. Include code, data, and anything else. Make comments public. Show revisions. Don't let those that plagiarize just silently get rejected and try their luck elsewhere (a surprisingly common problem)

> 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!

This has not been my experience at all. I worked on a team with substantial autonomy and agency for a few years, and most people—not everyone, sure, but almost—naturally rose to the occasion.

People want to do good work and people want to feel like they're doing good work. If you create an environment where they feel trusted and safe, they will rise to your expectations.

I had way more trouble with people working too hard but with misaligned ideas of what "good" meant—and stepping on each other's toes—than with anyone slacking off. It's easy to work around somebody who is merely ineffectual!

And, sure, a bunch of stuff people tried did not work out. But the things that did more than made up for it. Programming and quantitative modeling are inherently high-leverage activities; unless leadership manages out all the leverage in the name of predictability, the hits are going to more than make to for the flubs.

> it's been nearly impossible to hire anyone who wants that freedom and autonomy

Interesting, this is something that I'd love to do! I'm already planning on pursuing custom chip design for molecular simulation, but I don't really want to handle the business side of things. I'd much rather work in a paid lab than get rich and sell it off. Plus, you can do so much more with a team vs being independent.

I was also homeschooled though (unschooling and tjed philosophy) so I've always been picking my own projects. Sometimes I wonder if the lack of generalist researchers comes down to education (another thing I'd love to pursue).

“Smart people don’t need organizations anymore.” I get it—going solo is more appealing now than ever. But I can’t help thinking: some things really only happen in a kind of shared magnetic field. Not because you can’t do it alone, but because that moment when another smart person lights you up— that doesn’t happen in solo mode.

Hypothetical slackers didn't stop great work from coming out of the lab. I'm not sure why today would be any different.

Hiring smart people who want freedom and autonomy is easy. Just give them freedom, autonomy, stability, and a good enough salary. The hard part is getting them to contribute to your business. Maybe they will contribute if they find it interesting. But if you expect them to contribute, you are clearly not giving them autonomy.

Many of the smartest people I know are good at ignoring bureaucratic requirements, or at least handling them with the minimum effort necessary. And that often includes business, which many of them see as a subcategory of bureaucracy.

If your needs are known, they are also known to competitors.

I know that Elon Musk is not a popular figure nowadays, but he very correctly stated that competition is for losers, and the real innovators build things that competitors are just unable to copy for a long time, let alone exceed. SpaceX did that. Google, arguably, did that, too, both with their search and their (piecemeal acquired) ad network. Apple did that with iTunes.

Strive to explore the unknown when you can, it may contain yet-unknown lucrative markets.

(There is, of course, an opposite play, the IBM PC play, when you create a market explosion by making a thing open, and enjoy a segment of it, which is larger than the whole market would be if you kept it closed.)

That's absolutely true! But we aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation with a war chest in the billions so sadly this is the best we can do. :(