Tag Archives: Innovation

Ideals Can Conflict

By Robin Hanson · January 28, 2012 4:10 pm · Comments (11)

The usual wisdom says we are most creative when working in groups that avoid criticism. This is wrong:

His book … was published in 1948. … Osborn’s most celebrated idea was … the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important … was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. … Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. …

But … brainstorming … doesn’t work. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. … Groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientist gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. … The solo students came tip with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” … Numerous follow up studies have come to the same conclusion. …

Nemeth … divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. … The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism rules. Other teams were told … “Most studies suggest that you should debate and criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions. …The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated twenty per cent more ideas. And after the teams disbanded, … brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven. …

“There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. … Well, that’s just wrong.” (more)

Since the usual wisdom has resisted robust data for so long, it must be that people want to believe it. But why?

First note that we tend to believe this more about other people, and less about ourselves. It is a good idea for a good cause non-profit, or perhaps for our firm somewhere at some future date. But when we have a big immediate problem we really want to solve, we rarely invoke this process. So we believe this more in far mode.

Second, we tend to believe that idealistic things go together. For example, if art is good and peace is good, then art must promote peace, peace must promote art, and so on. Third, since far mode is more idealistic and less analytically critical, in far mode we are more willing to set aside analytic doubts to believe the simple correlation that all good things go together. Fourth, since we are especially creative, social, and uncritical in far mode, and we see all of these as idealistic good things, we are especially willing to believe that they all go together.

We are more idealistic in far mode, and all else equal far mode tends to promote idealistic things. So in far mode we tend to think all idealistic things promote each other. Peace, art, relaxation, positive moods, agreement, cooperation, altruism, creativity, love, etc. But in fact, there are usually tradeoffs – some ideals come at the cost of others.

Interestingly, the article I quote above goes on to talk about patterns of interaction that promote productivity, and it repeatedly just assumes that whatever promotes productivity promotes creativity. For example:

People who worked on Broadway were part of a social network. … The density of these connections [was] a figure he called Q. … A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q. … The relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low … the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. … But, when the Q was too high, the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.

Note that this just assumes that a musical’s success is mainly a tradeoff between communication and innovation. Since a successful musical is good, and innovation and communication are good, then musicals must be good because of their innovation and communication. But lots of things that influence success could correlate with how many people you know on Broadway.

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Religion Gets Bad Rap

By Robin Hanson · January 21, 2012 10:50 am · Comments (73)

Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy. … He was attacked by a mob on his way to work. (more)

I’m an atheist, and dislike mistreatment of atheists. But I also have to admit religion often gets a bad rap. For example, I’ve been reading more science fiction than usual lately, some old and some new. I notice that they almost all include the trope of religious folks trying hard to hold back progress, often via terrorism. Perhaps this was once fair, but it doesn’t seem remotely so today. (And I don’t see it listed among other science fiction tropes.)

When religion helped turn foragers into farmers, it paid a lot of attention to sex. So religious folks still care a lot about sex, and have resisted sex-related techs, such as birth control, abortion, and IVF. But those techs are pretty old today, and only abortion remains strongly opposed. Yeah there are stem cell treatments, but that is a pretty tiny fraction of medicine.

A science fiction author from fifty years ago might have imagined strong religious oppositions to VCRs or the internet, because they aided porn. Or to cell phones with cameras because they allow sexting. Or to all sorts of “unnatural” medical techs. But overall, religious folks today seem just as pro-tech as others.

That doesn’t mean we don’t erect social barriers to new techs. But instead of being religious, most barriers today are regulatory and risk-based. As we have grown rich and eager to regulate each other, we have become more risk-averse and made it harder to introduce new disruptive techs. For example, computer-driven car tech is basically here and ready to go, but it will be a long time before we allow it. Same for automated flight and medical diagnosis,

Alas science fiction authors are reluctant to blame over-regulators as their anti-tech villain. Religion makes a safer target – most sf readers like regulation, but few are religious. Also, we tend to overestimate the importance of doctrine and dogma, relative to habits of behavior. Most religious dogma is silly and doesn’t meet our usual intellectual standards. But it also doesn’t much influence behavior. In fact, religious folks tend to have exemplary behavior overall. They work hard, are married and healthy, avoid crime, deal fair, help associates, etc. While it may seem plausible that people with crazy beliefs would do crazy harmful things, the opposite seems to apply in this case.

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Over-Regulated Flight

By Robin Hanson · December 3, 2011 4:10 pm · Comments (25)

Over-regulation is delaying the automation of flight:

Time was when a uniformed man would close a metal gate, throw a switch, and intone, “Second floor- men’s clothing, linens, power tools …” and the carload of people would glide upward. Now each passenger handles the job with a punch of a button and not a hint of white-knuckled hesitation. … And back in the day, every train had an “engineer” in the cab of the locomotive. Then robo-trains took over intra-airport service, and in the past decade they have appeared on subway lines in Copenhagen, Detroit, Tokyo, and other cities. …

Automation … runs oceangoing freighters, the crews of which have shrunk by an order of magnitude in living memory. … Today, the U.S. military trains twice as many ground operators for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as pilots for its military jets. Its UAVs started off by flying surveillance millions, then took on ground attack; now they are bering readied to move cargo and evacuate wounded soldiers.

In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot, whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two? Many aviation experts think not. ….

Still, UAVs have yet to find a place in even the humblest parts of the aviation business – surveying traffic jams, say, or snooping on celebrity weddings. Such work has not yet been approved for routine purposes, even when the aircraft is small and controlled by a human on the ground. …

Technical problems are hardly the entire explanation. The military has proved this time and again. … For nearly two decades, automatic landing systems have been able to drop and stop a jet on the fog shrouded deck of an aircraft carrier. … “There’s no harder job for a pilot than landing on an aircraft carrier.” …

Pilotless commercial flight is overdue … Civilian UAVs could easily and profitablyt be deployed to survey infrastructure and carry cargo. … Already, … an airliner’s software typically takes over flight secods after takeoff, handles the landing – and most of what happens in between. The pilot just “babysits.” … Global Hawk .. is able to fly itself home and land on its own if it loses its satellite link with its ground station. ..

As significant as the technical hurdles are, however, by far the biggest impediment to pilotless flight lies in the mind. People who otherwise retain a friendly outlook toward futuristic technologies are quick to declare that they’d never board a plan run by software. (more)

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Inspiring Innovation

By Robin Hanson · December 2, 2011 3:30 pm · Comments (21)

My colleague Alex Tabarrok, has a new ebook Launching the Innovation Renaissance. It came out yesterday, and I immediately bought it and read it. Bryan loves it:

It … aims to reverse America’s Slight Stagnation with a handful of big evidence-based reforms. Especially:

1. Drastically narrow patent protection. …
2. Drastically increase (abolish?) high-skilled immigration quotas. …
3. Increase school choice, curtail the power of teachers’ unions, and stop pretending that non-STEM majors produce significant positive externalities.

I agree with most of Alex’s recommendations (which also include more prizes), and I think he focuses on our near-most-important policy question: how to promote long term growth and innovation. Alex is a good writer and knows his subjects well. He avoids academic lingo and his writing is accessible. But, alas, what struck me most reading Alex’s book are the natural limits to the emotional punch he can muster to his cause.

Following good academic norms, Alex mostly avoids blaming specific parties and being needlessly partisan, national, extreme, or overtly emotional. He appeals instead to the reader’s reasonableness and interest in the general good. And I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who is primarily motivated by such things. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that approach often falls flat emotionally.

I can feel the emotion more when Alex praises college sci/tech majors (I majored in physics), or favors positions that I’ve previously favored. And I can see the emotional potential if Alex had let himself cheerlead for technology, warn of foreign competition, or bemoan our “malise” or “stagnation.”

Alas, people don’t naturally care much about long term wide-spread growth and innovation. And the US just isn’t scared enough for its future for fear to motivate change. His title suggests he sought to pull on hope’s heartstrings, but Alex doesn’t really do much with that. So, while to his intellectual credit, Alex resists easy emotional appeals, the result is alas a well reasoned case that will probably be mostly ignored.

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Learn From A&P

By Robin Hanson · August 25, 2011 7:10 pm · Comments (12)

Law and policy matters for innovation. Sometimes it matters by promoting innovation, and someday I hope we’ll have better intellectual property rights to better promote innovation. But today, and for much of history, law and policy has mattered mostly by hindering innovation. For example:

In a new book, Levinson explains how local mom-and-pop stores — with their limited selections, high prices and nonstandard packaging — paved the way for national chains like the A&P to swoop in and dominate the grocery industry. … “People get misty-eyed at the thought of the independent store — maybe it had some unique product, maybe we had more choices than we have today — but the truth was exactly the opposite.” ….

A&P … opened its first small grocery store in 1912. Unlike traditional mom-and-pop stores, the A&P had no telephone, no credit lines and no delivery options. They also had lower prices. .. “It stocked only items that were fast-sellers. … It had limited hours. It had a single employee. … Within eight years, this approach turned their company into the largest retailer in the world.” … Controlling both the retail store and the supply chain gave the A&P a huge advantage over corner grocery stores because the A&P could run the factories at a lower cost. In addition, the A&P started to bypass wholesalers and go directly to distributors for various products. …

Competitors were not happy. Efforts to limit chain stores grew in the 1920s, when states and localities began passing laws designed to help independent merchants. … “Now, you’ve got these gigantic companies like A&P dominating retailing and wholesaling and not leaving a chance for the average guy. That was the basis of the complaint.”

State laws were passed to force manufacturers to sell to all stores at the same price and to tax merchants with multiple stores in a case. An antitrust suit was also filed against the A&P, claiming that it had become a food monopoly because it controlled all aspects of manufacturing, retailing and wholesaling. But the movement lost steam in the late 1930s, when the economy started to pick up. (more)

A&P introduced major innovations, and was punished for it by the regulatory system. For now, law and policy can most help innovation by getting more out of the way. Whether it will actually do so, however, is far from obvious.

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IP+ Like Barbed Wire?

By Robin Hanson · July 21, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (50)

“Without barbed wire the Plains homestead could never have been protected from the grazing herds and therefore could not have been possible as an agricultural unit.” (1931) …

English common law made livestock owners responsible for damages by roaming livestock, assigning the responsibility to fence in livestock. In contrast, the American colonies adopted legal codes that required farmers to fence out others’ livestock. Without a “lawful fence,” farmers had no formal entitlement to compensation for damages by others’ livestock. …

From 1880 to 1900, the introduction and near-universal adoption of barbed wire [in the US west] greatly reduced the cost of fences, relative to the predominant wooden fences, especially in counties with the least woodland. Over that period, … average crop productivity increased relatively by 23% in counties with the least woodland, controlling for crop-specific differences among counties and crop-specific statewide shocks. The increased productivity was entirely among crops more susceptible to damage from roaming livestock. … This increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers’ increased ability to protect their land from encroachment. (more)

Before the invention of barbed wire, it just didn’t make sense to build fences around farms in areas with little wood. Thus, it didn’t make as much sense to farm, near where others raised livestock. If you farmed, nearby livestock might just come and eat or trample your crops. In such times and places, many ranchers probably thought that “natural law” favored ranching, not farming, and favored property in animals more than property in land.

But the kinds of property and activity that makes sense depends on the available institutions and technology. Before barbed wire, it make less sense to farm, or to enforce property rights in land against roaming animals. But after barbed wire, farming and land property rights made a lot more sense.

Similarly, the kinds of innovation activities and intellectual property rights that make sense depend on available institutions and technologies. I’m happy to admit that today intellectual property (IP) is not obviously a good idea. Such property can create large “anti-commons” transaction and enforcement costs that greatly raise the cost of combining old ideas into valuable new ideas. Such costs often outweigh the social benefits of the incentives to create IP, in order to sell it. Today, it is often better to rely on other social incentives to innovate, incentives that don’t require such expensive support.

But if true, this is a sad fact about our limited abilities, not a fundamental natural law or right. You have no fundamental right to enjoy the innovations produced by others without compensating them. You owe them, at least your gratitude. Yes for now it may be best to let you take innovations freely without paying, since the alternative seems too expensive. But you have no right to expect that situation to last forever, any more than ranchers had a right to expect they could forever let their animals trample nearby farms.

Just as farmers developed barbed-wire, someday I expect IP advocates will develop better forms of intellectual property, and better technologies for marking, sharing, and enforcing such property. Using such innovations, I expect we will allow more and stronger intellectual property, and more of the world economy will focus on developing such property. Which, like barbed-wire, will mostly be a good thing.

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Why Hate Anti-Star Trek?

By Robin Hanson · July 18, 2011 10:15 am · Comments (89)

A comment at my recent post on how innovation might be >50% of future GDP points us to a Thursday post by Matt Yglesias, favorably citing a December post by sociologist Peter Frase, who imagines an “Anti-Star Trek” society. Frase says that Star Trek society is:

A communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure.

Frase says an Anti-Star Trek society shares the same access to replicators and “unlimited” energy, but is instead a hellish “system based on money, profit, and class power” because it enforces intellectual property in the designs replicators use. So, horrors, people who want to use the latest designs, rather than old or donated designs, need some sort of income, which Frase says they might get by creating and selling new designs, marketing and advertising them, or making and enforcing lawsuits.

Now it should be noted that Star Trek fiction has many cases of people using money and trading. Even setting that aside, replicators need both matter and energy as input, and neither could ever be in infinite supply. So even an ideal “communist” Star Trek must enforce limited budgets of access to such things. Lawyers and guardians would need to adjudicate and enforce such limits.

In both the Star Trek and Anti-Star Trek societies, the main source of long term value seems to be the accumulation of better designs. Yet Frase (and apparently Yglesias) is horrified to imagine that the people who contribute this main value might get paid for their contributions. After all, this might lead to unequal “classes,” where some own more than others. This even though Star Fleet displays lots of hierarchy and inequality, and spends large budgets that must come at the expense of private budgets.

The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade. Sigh.

Frase also greatly underestimates how much we can spend on innovation:

People to come up with new things to replicate, or new variations on old things, … is never going to be a very large source of jobs, because the labor required to create a pattern that can be infinitely replicated is orders of magnitude less than the labor required in a physical production process in which the same object is made over and over again.

Yes the labor to create any one design might be small, but to find good designs we must search a vast space of possible designs. To search for good designs, we create candidates, try them out, diagnoses their failings, and then seek better variations. This can use up practically unlimited labor.

Quotes from the Frase post: Continue reading "Why Hate Anti-Star Trek?" »

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Innovation >50% GDP?

By Robin Hanson · July 15, 2011 12:30 pm · Comments (15)

What will be the biggest future economic sectors? Medicine is many folks bet – we want few things more than health, and the med spending % of GDP has grown for many decades. But while I agree that medicine will continue to grow for decades, on longer timescales my bet and hope is: innovation.

We are richer than our ancestors mostly because of innovation. But most of the innovation benefits we receive are externalities – we only pay our ancestors (or those to whom they transferred their property rights) for a small fraction of that benefit. If we instead had better property rights for innovation, we’d pay a large fraction of our income as compensation for past innovation. That would increase incentives to innovate, the rate of innovation, and the fraction of the economy devoted to innovation. With good institutions, I could imagine more that half of all income being paid to the innovation industry.

Alas, it is devilishly hard to design good innovation property rights. Patents are supposedly the best we have now, and they are often terrible. But over the next few centuries, we might just create better institutions (e.g., futarchy) to better encourage institution design, and within those institutions, folks may well come up with better designs for institutions to encourage innovation. Optimist that I am, my best guess is that we will succeed at this.

Of course in the long run innovation must run out, and then we’ll have a long stable future with little innovation. But I expect the innovation era to last a few more centuries at least, with the best innovation yet to come.

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Idealizing Research

By Robin Hanson · July 13, 2011 6:00 pm · Comments (12)

On Institutional Review Boards (= IRBs), I wrote in March:

It makes little sense to have extra regulation on researchers just because they are researchers. That mainly gets in the way of innovation, of which we already have too little.

To decide if academic studies are “ethical,” IRBs ask if the benefits of a proposed study to the world and to its subjects (= people studied) outweigh the risks to its subjects. And a standard rule is that financial payments to subjects do not count as benefits.

To an economist, this paternalism sounds pretty crazy. In the latest Bioethics, Alan Werthmeimer agrees. First he notes that no explicit arguments are offered for this “money isn’t benefit” rule:

Although the standard view has become a virtual mantra in research ethics, no [official] document contains an argument in its defense. … The scholarly literature also contains little defense of that view. For example, [an] important article … [says] ‘otherwise simply increasing payment or adding more unrelated services could make the benefits outweigh even the riskiest research.’

So Werthmeimer makes up seven reasons:

  1. A subject might think that having the money to purchase a big screen TV makes it sensible for him to accept certain medical risks. … IRBs should not incorporate such impoverished conceptions of a person’s interests into their decisions.
  2. IRBs are not well positioned to determine how much weight to assign to the benefit of payment as compared to risk.
  3. The standard view [is] a way to provide extra insurance that payment does not constitute an undue inducement.
  4. [Otherwise,] it would allow IRBs to approve risky research with economically vulnerable populations so long as investigators are prepared to pay subjects enough.
  5. The physician’s role is to advance the patient’s medical interests, and not her interests, writ large. And perhaps much the same could be said for the relationship between IRBs and subjects.
  6. Society may prefer that research not be viewed as an economic transaction and it may symbolize its commitments by not allowing such values to intrude on the assessment of risks and benefits.
  7. It is crucial that the public believe that research subjects are not abused or exploited. … Whereas society accepts with a relative yawn the fact that people incur job related injuries or deaths as coal miners, fishermen, and off-shore oil service workers, society seems to react with great intensity to research related injuries and deaths.

I hope you can imagine my incredulous stare. This goes way beyond sometimes overruling certain judgements because you think people sometimes make particular mistakes. Here regulators basically presume that all wanting of money is illicit and not to be counted. Reason #7 seems to me closest to the truth – the idea appears to be to preserve an ivory-tower image of research as a high pure far ideal thing not to be sullied if possible by money motives. Which if you think about it isn’t that far from the common medical ideal, that cost should not be a factor in medical decisions.

 

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New Is Not Better

By Robin Hanson · June 26, 2011 9:20 am · Comments (28)

“As a non-American, I don’t completely understand it, but there is a phenomenon in the U.S., the latest and the greatest. … There was a patient demand to get these implants on the misconception that the latest was the best.” …“The vast majority of the ‘innovations’ on which we have spent money with respect to orthopedics over the past two decades have not resulted in improved patient outcomes.” (more; HT Tyler)

Assuming no side-effects, if users gain from innovations then innovators must gain less than the social value of their innovations, which risks their having insufficient incentives to innovate. This effect can be countered, however, by giving extra social status to the creators and users of innovative products, services, and behaviors.

United States culture gives such extra status to creators and users of innovations, and so probably deserves some credit for encouraging innovation. But alas much of this is wasted via merely rewarding things things that are new, rather than innovative. And if your reaction to reading that was “what is the difference?,” that just shows the depth of the problem.

Innovative things must be new, but new things need not be innovative. To be usefully innovative is to be better some how. Innovators try many new things, most of which are not better, but a few of which are. On average new things are w0rse, but those that are eventually retained are hopefully on average better. And with the right incentives, the retained better things are so much better that they pay for all the other new worse things.

If our culture waited until it was clear which new things were actually better, and gave more status to the creators and early adopters of those things, culture would promote innovation. But alas culture instead mainly showers status on those who merely create and use new things, regardless of whether they are better. While in small amounts even this status effect can promote innovation, in larger amounts it can hurt. After all, when there is too little added reward for creating or using something that is both new and better, relative to something that is just new, people will mainly focus on the new part.

The problem comes from an excess focus on current behavior, relative to past track records. In enforcing social status norms, it is relatively easy to just see that someone is today affiliated with with something that is new today, and give that person credit for their newness. It is much harder to remember that a person was once affiliated with something that was then new, and which later turned out to actually be better. A mechanism that made it easier to collect and view such track records could be of great social value, at least if combined with new matching social norms on who deserves social credit for being “innovative.”

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