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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27281 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Diversity is our Strength. Us being whites

At the top of Marginal Revolution today: "How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation"

I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).

You don't have to read the whole study. The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.

We show that innovation in U.S. counties from 1850 to 1940 was propelled by shifts in the local social structure, as captured using the diversity of surnames. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surnames—stemming from the interplay between historical fluctuations in immigration and local factors that attract immigrants—we find that more diverse social structures increased both the quantity and quality of patents, likely because they spurred interactions among individuals with different skills and perspectives. The results suggest that the free flow of information between diverse minds drives innovation and contributed to the emergence of the U.S. as a global innovation hub.

1850 to 1940. Bruh.

This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!

The HBDers are going to love this one.

Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.

The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.

From the comments:

Steve Sailer

The authors are from the HBD-adjacent wings of anthropology and economics, but they worry about that being recognized (e.g., Henrich wrote an entire book never mentioning that HBD Chick had beaten him to most of his ideas on her blog over the last couple of decades), so they need to be able to point at Diversity Is Our Strength type stuff to avoid being cancelled.

Something I've always wondered about academic inquiry into immigration is how much of 'immigrants make economies more successful' could equally be influenced by 'ambitious immigrants will attempt to join successful societies' and the correlation could end up atleast somewhat cyclical. Argentina and Brazil used to pull in massive immigration from across the world, which very quickly petered out when the vibes changed.

Something I've always wondered about academic inquiry into immigration is how much of 'immigrants make economies more successful' could equally be influenced by 'ambitious immigrants will attempt to join successful societies'

Not necessarily already-successful societies, but rather societies where there is opportunity. 19th c. America and Argentina were places where there was a lot of land for the taking, and where the economy was growing. They weren't already successful by the standards of major European countries.

America and Argentina were very wealthy by the standards of most of Europe at the time; really only the UK and the low countries could compete.

I've been told, verbally, but don't totally know how to confirm this, that lots of the immigration to the new world from poorer Euro countries in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was more of a policy on the part of the authorities to empty the orphanages, with immigrants sent to essentially random destinations rather than making rational choices on the basis of economic health.

It used to be common for British minor nobility to send their extra sons / failsons to Australia to 'make their fortune'. Possibly also India, I'm not sure.

Very much India. The stereotypical nabob was upwardly-mobile from a middle-class background, but it was very much on the accepted career list for younger sons of the landed gentry (who I suspect are what you are referring to as "minor nobility" - the younger sons of the actual peerage had access to better options).

Of course serious inquiry into this is aware that correlation != causation and they employ lots of methods to establish causation.

Relentless P-Hacking and lack of replication don't seem indicative of this.

Possibly? But that’s a totally different criticism.

The steelman is that 1st and 2nd generation immigrants sometimes have great success for selection effects.

After all, most people do not migrate. The ones who are happy doing the same job their grandfathers did are unlikely to migrate. If you select for people who look at the lives of their forebears and decide that they want their kids to have a better life, it is not surprising that some of them will be very smart and many of them will be willing to put in a lot of work into securing their place in their new society.

It is not questionable. Number of patents obviously broke as a proxy for innovation after 1952. That's what you get when you let a patent attorney write and interpret the patent law.

I believe I agree with you. Can you say more about why 1952 was the pivotal year?

Number of patents has become fairly untethered from actual innovation, just speaking as a patent lawyer. Maybe at sometime it was true, or maybe it was always the case that most are basically a minor modification or a dreaded methods patent relating to software.

Of the many reforms I would make to the constitution if I ever become dictator for a day. One would be we hand your patent application to a relevant tradesman with any material he requests. If he does not emerge from the room with the object you intend to sell, your patent is denied.

For software parents, if your patent doesn't compile using what ever compiler you submitted in the application your patent is denied.

If he does not emerge from the room with the object you intend to sell, your patent is denied.

You would not allow a patent on part of a large industrial process?

For software parents, if your patent doesn't compile using what ever compiler you submitted in the application your patent is denied.

That's not a bad idea (since that part does get gamed) but that's not the real problem with software patents. The actual problem is that people can patent things that are obvious by ordinary standards, but either so obvious that nobody would bother documenting prior art, or only useful when computer technology reaches a certain point, so there is a first person to do it even though it's obvious.

One would be we hand your patent application to a relevant tradesman with any material he requests. If he does not emerge from the room with the object you intend to sell, your patent is denied.

This would prevent the majority of the patents that significantly advanced technology starting from the 19th or even 18th century. How does a "relevant tradesman" build an integrated circuit for example? Or a method for industrial production of some material?

Tradesman meaning in this case semiconductor fab technician and materials including rented space at a foundry, If we need it. The thing must be clear enough that once the patent expires any competitor can duplicate it if it's relevant.

For an industrial process we just need to replicate the process. Not do it at cost or volume that makes business sense. I don't mind spending the budget needed to make a bunch of small samples of hideously expensive stuff once.

For example, Nilered's video on purple gold is sufficiently detailed. The original patent applications are not:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI?si=vgAo6MrObRV3nloa

Just reading the vibes, I would have thought this untethering would have already happened a good 30ish years ago, before software patents took a major share. By the time I became aware of things, the pop understanding at least in Western academic circles was that patents were either a tool for corporation-on-corporation lawfare, self-actualisation for cranks who idolized Tesla, or a way to publish wrong theories that couldn't make it past academic peer review in a way that might fool mid-low tier employers who don't understand the difference in process, and that it would accordingly be at least mildly embarrassing for a legitimate academic to bother with getting one in the same way in which having a publication in a predatory journal would be.

As far as academia is concerned, patents are fairly important in the engineering side. Good labs and teams can become self-sustaining and get out of the tedious grant-writing game, or at least finance an extra grad student's stipend.

Friends of mine tried pushing me into studying law when I was in junior high and high school specifically because I loved to argue and debate. For a time I actually became very interested in patent law and specifically intellectual property law. How relevant is patent law today in a globalized and international economy? I’d imagine patent law is one of things whose landscape has changed tremendously within the last 50 years or so.

Incidentally to your first point, I think it was Switzerland if I’m not mistaken that developed fairly advanced industries without a patent system in place, per Ha Joon Chang, shooting a pretty big hole in the idea that innovation doesn’t happen without patents to economically preserve someone’s investment and ingenuity. I think in the US at one point as well there used to only be process patents on end products, and not the final output itself.

I'm willing to make a deal - You do an effortpost on your general observations in patents and patent law. I'll do an effortpost on any topic of your choosing. If it isn't something I'm familiar with, I'll pledge 5 hours of research time.

@anti_dan and @PokerPirate, I'll backup @100ProofTollBooth's ante as well. If all three of you do effort posts...

...well, could be fun to join a research-and-spill effort.

Just do it.

I would not really know where to start, or how to make it interesting or relevant. Most of what I do is incredibly mundane. Looking at disclosures, looking at prior art, telling clients my good faith estimate at their chances the disclosure is patentable, writing the spec, writing the claims, on the rare occassion of litigation, writing demands and civil complaints, then pouring through discovery and assigning doc review teams to the overly lengthy discovery, and maybe doing a hearing or so. Never had an actual patent case go to jury trial. And because my practice area is in mechanical devices we don't run into the interesting section 101 stuff basically ever (and if you want my opinion on those things, just read IPWatchdog and whatever the opposite of what Gene is saying is what I think, or at least was when I bothered paying attention).

I suppose I could do something like a, "So you think you are an inventor, whats it like to get your invention patented?" Post if that would interest you, because that is something I could cobble together in a week or so.

Do it!

My offer for an effort post of your choosing stands.

@PokerPirate. You're an AI researcher and you're just going to pretend like that's no big deal. I'll offer the same effortpost deal to you or, if I can middle man a little bit, what if you and @anti_dan swap effortposts and I take credit for both? hashtag finance, bro.

We get pretty regular effort posts about AI research around here. If there's something specific that you'd like that's not been covered then I'll consider it.

Maybe something we could do is a series that's a little bit more structured about specific careers people are in around here. Something like the user focus series that people were doing a while back. A structured set of questions might be less intimidating to get started on and might help people write about things this community would actually find interesting... maybe I'll start thinking about what those questions could look like at least for myself.

Here's a prompt (heh):

To what extent is the field if AI Research a new means to do "real world" or applied philosophy? Academic philosophy is notoriously obtuse and inscrutable and, therefore, often of very limited real world / non-academic benefit. You will occasionally see academic philosophers who publish successful mainstream books, but this is the exception rather than the rule. In a different direction, hard analytic philosophy that uses propositional logic gets towards something that looks like a "system" of thought but, to me, seems to get blown out of the water in terms of practical application by the hard math and science people doing applied research (CERN comes to mind as an off hand example).

Does this deck of cards get reshuffled with AI?

This seems like a much better prompt for a philosopher.

My answer fits in a paragraph: I work with a lot of undergrad philosophy (and other humanities) majors at a top-5 liberal arts college known for humanities. Without exception, they suck using AI. They all think it is magical pixie dusk that can be waved on any problem to solve it. Philosophy professors aren't any better. A number of phil profs have commented to me about the decline in student quality due to students using AI as a crutch for their writing assignments, but it's not clear to me how much this is AI vs the secular trend of more sucky students vs just old professors being crotchety.

Okay, I lied, here's another paragraph: For philosophers to actually be able to make use of AI, or to provide insights into how humans work based on metaphors from AI, they need to understand the basics of computability. Scott Aaronson made a valiant attempt getting philosophers to recognize computability problems with his papers NP-Complete problems and physical reality and Why philosophers should care about computational complexity, but AFAIK the only people who have read these papers are computer scientists with a passing interest in philosophy. I have tried to start conversations on this topic with about 20 philosophers (both continental and analytic) and their eyes all instantly glaze over.

Damn it, I'm writing a 3rd paragraph. Way back in grad school (~10 years ago) I took a bunch of philosophy grad classes because I was interested in the problem of "what made people different from computers/AI". The most interesting result of this was me writing a paper What if Aristotle had been a Robot? that (roughly) tries to show how a robot could implement a virtue ethics system as an optimization problem (which is normally how people think of consequentialism). It's basically a badly written less-wrong article, and exactly 0 academics are interested in anything like this because it won't get you tenure because existing philosophers don't recognize it as philosophy.

Okay, fine, here's a 4th paragraph conclusion: There's been enough interesting stuff for the past 50 years in AI research for philosophers to get excited about, and they haven't. So I predict the LLM trend will not change anything.

Damn it again, here's a 5th paragraph: I'm just remembering my philosopher friend at a different university who has made the prediction that as writing "gets cheaper", more writing will be expected, and so tenure in the philosophy world will require much more output. This push for quantity will drive quality down, make tenure much harder to get, and make philosophers even more siloed/specialized than they already are. I agree with all this, but I think it applies across the board in all of academia, and these trends have been going on for so long that I don't think they can be attributed more than like 20% to AI.

There you go. You tricked me into an effort-ish post :)

Thank you for this. I'll be reading everything you listed. And I'll try to come up with an intentional effort post response.

Side note: You do realize that linking to your paper does self-dox? I assume you do, but just want to double check.

More comments

You're too humble... or more likely probably too much of an expert to realize how little all of us know about the process... c.f. https://xkcd.com/2501/.

I have a couple of undergrad students who want to be "AI patent lawyers". That seems like an obviously farcial job to me and not something anyone should aspire to (for many reassons, but the simplest is because as an AI-researcher patents have not affected any of the work I do and I don't see how patents will ever have a material effect on anything remotely related to AI). I would love it if your effort post could either change my mind or was a resource I could point them to explain why they career choice is stupid.

I suppose I could do something like a, "So you think you are an inventor, whats it like to get your invention patented?" Post if that would interest you, because that is something I could cobble together in a week or so.

Yes, please!

I love the idea of trading effortposts. I'm down if anyone is that interested in my thoughts.

What's a hobby-interest you have that you'd be willing to nerd/geek/fan-out over? I've been mooting something on strategy games, and if I could get you to do something similar...

Is that an effortpost for the CW thread? Idk I love fantasy, partner dance, uhhh meditation and esotericism more generally. History. Etc.

I'd probably do it as a motte-level post, since it has no real culture war application, but you can put yours here if you'd like.

Let's go with... how about some mix of history and fantasy?

Hah history and fantasy interesting. I'll think about it! Idk if I like the idea of trading posts anymore but I'd like to contribute a little more.

The causality here is tricky to figure out. Immigrants from ethnic backgrounds that are outside of the US mainstream have always, I think, tended to settle predominantly in urban areas, and urban areas are where most innovation happens.

This was my immediate thought.

Are more diverse areas innovating more due to their diversity?

Or do innovative areas rock in general (hard to be innovative if you're malnourished, etc) and that attracts immigrants and innovation simultaneously?

With the SF Bay area the key ingredient was the US Navy doing a lot of research and engineering there. It created a concentration of engineering talent that wouldn't have occurred on it's own.

I think it’s a biased analysis to reverse engineer areas where innovations have came out of. It’s probably more relevant to analyze what the cultural trends and forces and composition if you like, were at the time these major ideas were taking root. Innovation is too multidimensional to be reduced to a single factor explanation.

Military R&D and espionage alone contribute an enormous amount to innovation. Commercial air flight came out of the military sector with the recognition that an airliner is just a modified bomber. GPS was developed by the US navy under the NAVSTAR program. There actually is institutional money and pressure to innovate that doesn’t solely reduce to the kind of innovation one would see on Shark Tank for instance.

Cities are always more innovative than the countryside. Cities have lots of people. Institutions are in cities, education is to be found in cities. People who want education will come to the city to get it, they then stay there, jobs that require education are in cities. So the educated people are in cities, where they are in contact with the other educated people. Wealth concentrates in cities, so the capital you need is also in the city, probably generated by the previous innovators.

And all of this used to be even more so when travel and communication were a lot harder than they are nowadays. Nowadays you can learn from the Internet. A hundred years ago people in the countryside wouldn't have had access to libraries. You'd have to move to a city first.

Not all immigrants went to the cities. The Germans mostly settled the Midwest to become farmers, and didn't invent much of anything, except the ones who did go to the cities.

Rather than HBD (which might be part of it but I think tends to be overhyped as an explanation around here), I wonder how much of this is based on integration. Which is partly downstream from HBD, but more from culture and perception.

That is, "white" people are more likely to integrate with and interact with white people and value stereotypical white people things like "get good grades", "get married", "get a job". While people who are visually distinctive and identify as "ethnic minorities" are more likely to learn things like "white people are powerful and steal from you, so steal back". Most of those European ethnicities used to be poor and underperforming, and weren't considered "white" until they gradually integrated into the melting pot culturally, which also brought them up economically. I wonder if having an obviously different skin-tone provides significant friction against this integration because it makes people perceive them (and more importantly, makes them perceive themselves) as distinct and special, and thus fail to integrate properly.

That is, if we took a million Polish people in 1900 and modified their genes to have blue hair or skin, without changing any of their other genes (so they have the same IQ and personalities), would that have caused them to become a permanent ethnic minority who doesn't get along with or act like all of the white people?

Most of those European ethnicities used to be poor and underperforming, and weren't considered "white" until they gradually integrated into the melting pot culturally

This isn't really true. In 1850, anti-Irish Americans would have seen no tension between acknowledging the Irish as 'white' while also saying they were lazy, criminally inclined, disorderly, Catholic, [insert negative descriptor here]...

Most of those European ethnicities used to be poor and underperforming, and weren't considered "white" until they gradually integrated into the melting pot culturally

A common liberal myth, usually mentioned with specific regard to the Irish. But no, not counting the idiosyncratic views of Ben Franklin, no one considered southern or eastern Europeans to be anything other than white. This is especially obvious when looking at their legal status in states that banned miscegenation. WASPs may not have been legally permitted to marry blacks, but they were always allowed to marry the swarthy Italians, Poles, Slavs, Spaniards, etc.

People forget a lot of Italians also returned to Italy after deciding America wasn’t for them.

I thought many went to South America

That is, if we took a million Polish people in 1900 and modified their genes to have blue hair or skin, without changing any of their other genes (so they have the same IQ and personalities), would that have caused them to become a permanent ethnic minority who doesn't get along with or act like all of the white people?

Chinese immigrants looked different, had a native language no one else knew, and were about as culturally alien to the US as anyone you were going to find in real life. They worked out fine.

Chinese immigrants looked different, had a native language no one else knew, and were about as culturally alien to the US as anyone you were going to find in real life. They worked out fine.

They mostly died out in a generation.

Okay well it worked out for everyone else. lol

But man there is this constant urge all across society to avoid the conclusion that black people just Are That Way and that there's nothing anyone can really do about it. (That's what this kind of thing always comes down to.) So people are always inventing these bespoke sociological theories where historical trauma or visible differences send an ethnic group spiraling off into dysfunction for centuries, but the proposed effects just never fuckin' ever replicate across history the way they supposedly should.

The tracks yearn for Chinese souls

Is that satire? Nothing on that page makes any sense. Many surnames come from occupations, so of course there's a relationship to diversity of labour. The reason "diversity" used to correlate with innovation was that skilled migrants from many countries in the world would go to places with opportunities. The diversity was more of a result than a cause. The phrase "Diversity is our strength" is made to imply that diversity of races is good in itself, which is an entirely different topic. It also implies that there's no difference between races, which is trivially false. To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself. Also, people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality. Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself. Countries are more similar than they were in the past because of globalism, the only way to slow down the trend towards homogeneity is separation (borders for instance). I'd go as far as to disagree that innovation is necessarily good (it conflicts with stability).

And what's a patent? It's something which forbids others from using your ideas.

Lets look at the Abstract in the linked paper. What does it say? "Fostering the diverse social interactions that faciliate idea sharing"

Am I being too pedantic? Do these people even realize that they're being dishonest?

surnames

I’ll echo @Skibboleth here. Names were pretty divorced from profession by the founding of the country, let alone the Industrial Revolution.

the reason diversity used to correlate

A reason, sure. There are at least a couple others. Concentration in cities reducing networking costs. Reduced friction from a surplus of labor. The low-hanging fruit of our transition from an agrarian economy. Etc.

[list of contradictions]

I don’t think this part makes a lot of sense. You’re not exactly working with a steelman of “diversity is our strength,” but then, neither were the authors. Quibbling over terminology is beside the point.

second law of thermodynamics

Culture isn’t a closed system.

facilitates idea sharing

Yeah, there’s no contradiction here. Innovation is risky. Idea-sharing is risky. A good government hedges against that instability.

Am I being too pedantic?

No comment.

Do these people even realize…?

Steve Sailer thinks they wrote it for a fig leaf. So…probably.

I concede the thing about surnames. But the actual value of things is found in that which haven't yet reached an equlibrium. Value is that which you extract as things tend towards equlibria. But once that equilibrium has been reached, no more value can be extracted. So people promote that which destroys value, which is the classic definition of immorality. This is the problem with superstimuli, they have the highest value, and they destroy value the fastest. Porn destroys relationships faster than erotic magazines in the past, and the more hardcore porn is, the worse the damages. Energy drinks are more harmful than tea, and adderal is more harmful than energy drinks, and meth is more harmful than adderal. The latters have stronger effects, and therefore they build tolerance faster, thus depleting the value of stimulants (the productivity which can be extracted) faster.

Quibbling over terminology is beside the point

But "Diversity is good in itself" is a wrong axiom, and the statement "Diversity is our strength" is not based on said axiom in the first place. They're promoting their own moral values, saying whatever seems to defend said values. The important part is that people start with feelings and end with logical arguments, rather than the other way around. In a best-case scenario, the article in question is signaling, meaning that it holds little academic value

Culture isn’t a closed system.

Consider the entire earth as one big system. What would we expect if my model was correct? The continuous merging of many, small local systems into few, giant systems? Less languages over time? Countries becoming more similar in every way (culturally, legally, morally)? All of these changes are already taking place.

There's is a counter-force at work, but it doesn't generate uniqueness as fast as we're currently destroying it, and this generation seems like a unique property of humans, meaning that it will go away as we replace human systems with automated machinery.

probably

That makes me feel a little better.

How does restricting people from using your ideas end up enabled idea sharing?

The theory is that patents protect the people that figured out the ideas to share them and get compensation if people license them, which protects inventors from copycats and allows publishing patented ideas

In a world without patents: if i come up with a brilliant steam engine design, and go to a factory and ask them to make it for me, they could simply steal the design and claim they came up with it. And then the factory would have to carefully guard the secret techniques for making this new engine from rival factories that would steal the design.

Patents do add value to the discovery of new ideas, and make it safer to share said ideas. They're not strictly good, but they're also not strictly bad. They've only become bad in recent times because patents last too long, and because they're used by monopolities to prevent competition (e.g. Nintendo vs Palworld).

In our current society, patents are necessary. I'd say it's a locally optimal idea. But if there existed a more ideal society, in which people cooperated with eachother rather than competing aggressively, patents wouldn't be necessary. But the model in the paper would naively assume that such a society is strictly inferior to ours, merely because the people within it are less hostile to one another. I wish to reject the metric on the grounds that it assigns the most value to materialistic dog-eat-dog societies. It harms collective faith in FOSS philosophies by implying that the moral values behind it are irrational/suboptimal (and that irrational == suboptimal), which rubbed me in the wrong way

Palworld problem is trademark and copyright not patents

As far as I can tell, the only lawsuits filed by nintendo against palworld have been patent claims. Most of those were rejected by the courts and the only surviving patent claim is now getting a second look in US courts.

Nope, Nintendo actually sued them solely over alleged patent violations

A world without patents generally just looks like a world with industrial secrets. Ultimately what matters in business is having a "moat" that gives your competitors an obstacle to overcome. The bigger the obstacle the bigger your profits can be without inducing a competitor to enter the business.

Patents were an attempt to get people to share their secrets. Before patents if someone comes up with an industrial improvement the general approach is to just keep it secret and utilize it as best they can. If they die and the factory burns down that improvement is just gone forever.

Many surnames come from occupations

By the mid-19th century, occupational surnames had long been divorced from their associated professions. John Smith wasn't a smith, Geoffrey Chaucer didn't make pants, Benjamin Franklin was pretty much everything but an independent farmer, etc... Beyond which, the point of interest is national origin of surnames. Unless your thesis is the Germans and Poles were bringing in some special occupational knowledge that the various British peoples who initially colonized the Eastern seaboard lacked, but that begs for additional detail.

To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself

Shared identity and sharing all the particulars of culture are not the same thing. Leaving aside immigrants for the moment, the US has a fair amount cultural diversity within itself - there are marked cultural differences between North Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerns, West Coasters, as well as racial, religious, state, and rural/urban values divisions. None of that contradicts the existence of the US or of American culture.

people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality

That is an argument that they are hypocrites, not that they are wrong.

Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself

You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.

Occupational surnames may have happened sufficiently long ago that any correlation has been drowned in noise.

You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.

It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist. When things interact, they tend towards the average of the two. If you mix cold and hot water, you get lukewarm water. If you mix eastern philosophy and western philosophy, you get something which borrows ideas from both (and the mixture is not necessarily better than either of its components)

The reason Easterns and southerns are different is because there's distance between them. Higher distances means fewer interactions. Long physical distances are similar to physical borders. Any other kind of mechanism which prevent interactions will protect differences - including age gaps and language barriers. But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long. To make matters worse, there will be conflict until people are in alignment, and the definition of alignment is establishing something which is common to all (and therefore not diverse)

In America, some aspects are local, and some aspects are global. A global aspect (e.g. the tendency to have guns) lacks diversity, and local aspects (something which is specific to a single area) does not mix with the rest. Of course, different areas can benefit from trade with eachother, but the more they trade the less they benefit (an equilibrium will be reached).

There's a natural tendency for people to create bubbles of similar-minded people (friend groups, echo-chambers, religious gatherings, ghettos, etc), but the lobal political concensus is (increasingly - as America is exporting this value system) that all people are equal and that all things must be openly accessible to everyone (no gatekeeping, no mens-only spaces, no right-wing spaces, no privacy, no elitism, etc) so the world will rapidly tend towards homogeneity

It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist.

The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing, it even matches the metaphor. It's unpopular enough that it doesn't happen practically ever, but it's not a hard physical law like entropy.

Stepping away from race, it isn't irreversible for culture either. Spend a few generations sending all the nerds to the Bay Area, the creatives to Hollywood, and the performers to Broadway, and you can create local concentrations of cultural traits that are far outside the national average. It may not be ethnogenesis, but it's certainly the creation of something.

The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing,

How is ethnic cleansing the inverse of race mixing? After all, don't both, if carried to their full conclusion, result in the territory in question going from two ethnic groups to one?

As you sort of note at the end of your comment, the true inverse operation is ethnogenesis. But how much can that really happen in our modern, ever more mobile, ever more interconnected world?

It depends on your exact definitions and which axes you care about.

Race mixing (and cultural exchange more generally) involves Group A becoming more like Group B (and vice versa). Ethnic cleansing interrupts and reverses that process, keeping the original group(s) the same.

It depends on your exact definitions and which axes you care about.

Isn't the axis in question diversity vs. homogeneity?

Race mixing (and cultural exchange more generally) involves Group A becoming more like Group B (and vice versa).

So it reduces diversity, moving things in the direction of homogeneity.

Ethnic cleansing interrupts and reverses that process, keeping the original group(s) the same.

So it (theoretically) prevents the process of homogenization — that is, when the ethnic group being "cleansed" from the area survives the process, and doesn't just end up being assimilated by whatever population(s) they end up living with after their expulsion.

What is the operation that increases diversity? Which makes Group A become less like Group B, and vice versa? And further, gives rise to Groups C, and D, and E, and makes all these groups more distinct, culturally and genetically? What, in this age of globalization, can truly make humanity more diverse?

(Other than space colonization, that is? Contolism — the real way to increase diversity.)

I view that a little different, you can't unmix something which has already been mixed, but you can push it elsewhere and pretend that the problem has been solved.

Your example involves separating things, and it's not impossible for us to play Maxwell's demon and sort people, but society just doesn't take kind to the creation of spaces which excludes certain groups (not even toilets are exempt) so one is not allowed to reverse this process. Even if you make your own society kind of like the Amish, people will come and ruin what you're doing because the rest of the system has laws that it must enforce (for instance, it's illegal to collect rain water in some parts of the world).

But it's certainly the creation of something.

If you move nerds around the world, the total amount of nerds does not increase. You're re-ordering what already exists, you're not creating something more. So if white people have less children on average, you can reorder them all you want, the ratio of white people will tend towards zero. And in America, men and women have a poor relationship. This is not the case in Japan, but is that not a manner of time? Once American culture really gets its grip on Japan (As it's trying to), do you not think gender relations in Japan will take the same path? Is the corruption of gender relations reversible?

To really create something unique, you must isolate it and leave it alone for a while. Kind of like petri dishes. Borders used to have this kind of effect.

It's not technically irreversible, but processes which generate certain things are very, very slow. Using money is faster than earning it. Cutting down a forest is much faster than growing it. Destroying trust is much faster than regaining it. Recycling anything back to its base ingredients is tedius work. It's this asymmetry which makes so many processes unsustainable.

If you wish to grow back something which used to exist, like "Uncontacted civilizations", "Untouched wild nature", "High-trust communities", "The wild west", etc. How long do you think it would take, if such a thing was even possible? Caning is currently a form of punishment in Singapore - if we stop this practice, do you think it will ever return again? If we ban gun ownership, will that ever return again? If we rise the age of consent, will it ever drop again? If all ownership is replaced with subscription models, will we ever go back again? Do you think the sexual revolution can be reversed?

I view that a little different, you can't unmix something which has already been mixed, but you can push it elsewhere and pretend that the problem has been solved.

True. My point is that once it has started, it can be stopped well before the finish line. Even a few decades is within the realm of physical possibility for cultural diffusion, or a few generations for genetic.

The "challenges" are social and political: One of the older attempts to unmix a population resulted in a bit of a dustup that killed 70-85 million people, while more recent ones are usually stopped before that point.

If you move nerds around the world, the total amount of nerds does not increase. You're re-ordering what already exists, you're not creating something more.

The creation happens in the years after the re-ordering takes place. Do you think growing up surrounded by nerds would be essentially similar to growing up surrounded by performers? Heck, do you think a mundane unrelated office job would be the same?

On a smaller scale, there's the idea of "startup incubators". They concentrate like-minded people together, forge connections, and hope to strengthen and expand their culture. I think the same thing can happen with culture in general when groups have a strong enough presence in an area.

To really create something unique, you must isolate it and leave it alone for a while. Kind of like petri dishes. Borders used to have this kind of effect.

It's not technically irreversible, but processes which generate certain things are very, very slow.

Fair point. I was focusing more on years-to-centuries timescales. If you're thinking of decades-to-eons, then it's much closer to the bare truth.

"Maintaining the old" is only one half of diversity though. The Wild West came about from a mix of societies, Singapore combines multiple influences, etc. Generating new cultures is the other half.

...if we stop this practice...will we ever go back again?

I'm about 50/50 on your examples.

For gun control, see this gif: states went from mostly may-issue to mostly unrestricted concealed carry over the course of a few decades.

With the current push of sexual content onto school children, I'd be surprised if the age of consent didn't go down in the next couple decades, even if it's restricted to Romeo-and-Juliet laws.

It's not a metaphor.

It is necessarily a metaphor, because we're not talking about social systems rather than thermodynamic ones.

You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist.

That's very clearly not true. New identities emerge all the time. There's even a special word for it: ethnogenesis.

But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long

That doesn't seem like a problem for their thesis. They still might be wrong, but the tendency towards homogenization over time within an area doesn't threaten the idea that heterogeneity breeds innovation.

I don't really see a difference in the abstract mechanics.

Am I right to assume that ethnogenesis is a result of things being isolated from one another? If you were to split America in two, and disallow the two sides from interacting, and simulate 100 years of time, the two would grow less similar over time. They'd have different slang, different viewpoints, slightly different values, etc.

I don't think heterogeneity breeds innovation, I think that differences is a finite resource which you deplete every time you force different things to interact. You will generate innovation by using differences as your fuel, but once the fuel is been depleted, the local system will be at equlibrium, and you will need to import more differences.

Let me give you a similar example, call centers exploit the elderly, burning trust in order to generate money. As trust disappears, the ratio of people who fall for the scams will decrease. At equlibrium, either all gullible people have no money left, there are so many call centers in existence that they face hard competition between one another, or it costs more to find a new victim than one can expect to earn.

You don't seem to model the world as being finite in the same way I do. Many people seem to think that innovation and other such things are "better than zero-sum", such that things improve without bounds. That's a much more pleasant way to view the world, but I have a hard time believing that it's true

Am I right to assume that ethnogenesis is a result of things being isolated from one another?

No. It can, but it doesn't have to. For two examples: "African American" is for all purposes an ethnic group that developed from the interaction of black Americans with the white Americans they lived alongside. Protestant sects splinter eight times a week (and Protestantism originally emerged from Catholic Germany and developed in parallel).

If you stretch the definition of isolation to mean any sort of inter-group barrier, including metaphorical ones separating people in close proximity, then I suppose it might be true, but that would seem to weaken your view of a monotonic trend towards homogeneity. If there's a constant churn of values and identity groups over time as people invent divisions within themselves, the nature of interaction will produce endless new varieties.

At equlibrium, either all gullible people have no money left, there are so many call centers in existence that they face hard competition between one another, or it costs more to find a new victim than one can expect to earn.

That's not a stable equilibrium, it's an arms race. Short of running out of conmen or victims (both of which seem to be functionally endless), the system will continue to evolve new attacks and defenses.

You don't seem to model the world as being finite in the same way I do. Many people seem to think that innovation and other such things are "better than zero-sum", such that things improve without bounds. That's a much more pleasant way to view the world, but I have a hard time believing that it's true

I think you're making the common mistake of "harsh truths exist" => "this is harsh, therefore this is true". We have an abundance of positive-sum interactions and an overabundance of people trapped in a zero-sum mindset generating negative sum outcomes.

"African American" is not a group of people as far as I'm concerned - it's a politically correct term for black people in America (possibly from Africa). Slapping new labels on old things is not the creation of new things, it's a purely cosmetic change. Even worse, if we keep changing labels to have lower thresholds, things which are decreasing will look constant or even like they're increasing (like racism).

Old groups do split and change over time, but some traits become less extreme. We're domesticating human beings on a global scale, and have been doing this for a while. The changes are not only cultural, they're also genetic. The "endless new varieties" are all from a restricted set they're unlimited in the same sense that AI-generated content is unlimited. An AI would never create something like LotR or Made in Abyss, it only generates generic (= average = mediocre) content.

But even before AI, there was a decrease in good videogames, books, movies, etc. You don't think that abstract mathematical laws are to blame for all of these trends? I think it might be due to asymptotic convergence, tight coupling and materialistic competition.

I'm basing all of these things on my own intuition, but I don't think my theory is too crazy. In fact, people seem to have studied these exact things. These papers seems a little more optimistic about these dynamics than me, but many of the things that I've described seem fairly accurate. But there's many models, and the conclusions also depend on what assumptions we make about these systems, so it's not trivial. And I might just be worrying too much. Even if I'm right, other people will notice in ~10-20 years and look for solutions. I'm just a little early

Here's a study called "Statistical physics of social dynamics"

"What is the ultimate fate of diversity? Is it bound to persist or all differences eventually disappear in the long run?"

"According to some estimates, up to 90% of present languages might disappear by the end of the 21st century (Krauss, 1992)."

"Two mechanisms that are believed to be fundamental in the understanding of the dynamics of cultural assimilation (and diversity): social influence and homophily. The first is the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact. The second is the tendency of likes to attract each other, so that they interact more frequently. These two ingredients were generally expected by social scientists to generate a self-reinforcing dynamics leading to a global convergence to a single culture. It turns out instead that the model predicts in some cases the persistence of diversity." (emphasis mine)

And here's one called Clustering and asymptotic behavior in opinion formation which also mentions entropy. The abstract includes:

"Because of the finite range of interaction, convergence to a unique consensus is not expected in general. We are nevertheless able to prove the convergence to a final equilibrium state composed of possibly several local consensus"

This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!

The HBDers are going to love this one.

I see and grant your point. However, what I think this actually shows is a remarkable social technology for taking small cultural differences which, in many other contexts would actively hinder cooperation and productivity, and sanding down the sharp edges enough to allow the positive aspects of cream-skimming and viewpoint diversity to take hold.

Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosniaks are extremely closely related from an HBD perspective. But you can't just shove them all together in a lab in Belgrade and expect them to get along - interethnic/intercommunal rivalries would instantly doom that. You can tell the same story with closely-related-but-highly-rivalrous subgroups in many other regions of the world as well.

The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.

Exactly. There actually was a project where Czechs and Slovaks and Germans and Hungarians and Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks and Poles and Ukrainians and Rusyns and other "diverse" peoples lived together for centuries. It was called Austrian Empire. In the end the diversity was not a strength, it broke the whole thing apart.

The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.

Yes. USA was able to assimilate and suppress intercommunal rivalries by fighting and winning a civil war against a "community" that defied centralization and homogenization, going through period of national revival, pushing for American identity using new mass media technologies of radio and TV. Plus fighting and winning two world wars also helped. More importantly the total fertility rate of of 5,6 for native population in year 1900 also helped with not getting overwhelmed, even if foreign born population was 13% at that time.

So if by "ideological diversity" authors mean nationalistic or even outright jingoistic propaganda, having things like English-only movement paired with things like banning German language from public during WW1, widespread flag desecration laws, introducing pledge of allegiance and many other things including basically curtailing immigration in 1924 - then I agree.

The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.

The reason for this is quite obvious. Some cultures share more in common with each other than others do. The early French and English inhabitants of the US were very culturally digestible into each other, with one another and when coupled with the geographic distance and detachment with their country of origin, there’s great opportunity for your differences to erode and dissolve over time.

The other question is to what degree already being homogeneous raises your standards.

The common argument is that nativism is just a standard reflexive response that you have to power through and people react the same way to visible Muslims and visible Irishmen.

You have to wonder if what are now considered irrelevant differences mattered more because people were more similar. Which would mean that you can't really safely assume it'd apply to Pakistani Muslims.

(That said, America is doing much better than, for example, Britain here anyway because the filter for such groups that were barred from immigrating before is still relatively strong)

Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate. It’s widely known that homogeneity enables large scale cooperation and fosters a high trust society between individuals.

But there are multiple ways in which the US has benefitted in certain areas through diversity. One obvious example was the massive brain drain that took place due to the Nazis persecution of Jews in Europe. It was one thing that actually weakened Germany during the war and later played into the US hands in the development of the atomic bomb. Or take another example. One major reason the computer hacker culture took root in the US and not Scandinavia for instance wasn’t just because the digital revolution happened here. It specifically happened because the US was a low trust society coupled with an increasingly individualist culture. If I think you’re not going to pay your fair share of taxes for instance, I’m more inclined to go and look for loopholes for myself.

The important thing to keep in mind with all these arguments is that the cases go in both direction. You can find relevant empirical examples on both sides. The local culture I grew up in was socially and racially exogamous. We were a very colorblind community and really didn’t care about each others race. We could say “the black dude that lives over there,” or, “the white kid across the street” casually without it even dawning on any of us that we had to worry about offending someone. We never even thought twice about it. We were ‘very’ culturally homogenous though. Strict and rigid though as far as norms and standards of behavior went. This cut all across ethnic lines. I grew up in an ethnic composition largely of whites and Hispanics with a minority of Cambodians, Assyrians and blacks. We had a common culture. Played outside with each other. Went to the same schools. Engaged in some church functions. You name it. Many of them are still good friends to this day. So it’s ‘possible’ for people to do more than just tolerate each other and live in largely parallel societies like they do in the UK and Sweden, although both of them shouldn’t have adopted the immigration policies they have in the first place.

You can get innovation out of both collaboration and competition. Sometimes you get it through a mix and balance of both. But it’s not an either/or with one winning out to the exclusion of the other.

Not sure what you mean by “raises your standards,” maybe you can elaborate.

That the more homogeneous a society the more small differences stand out.

Yes, Germans make good Americans when you keep them from speaking German, or giving their children German first names, or identifying as German at all. If only we could learn this lesson and apply it everywhere, like to Muslims, and Indians.

I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names. The Africans and Muslims and Indians are particularly offensive about this, and tend to keep trying to be African or Muslim or Indian instead of American.

T. Roosevelt spoke of this.

T. Roosevelt spoke of this.

As did his arch-rival Woodrow Wilson, who famously said: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets the chance.”

I'll give the Chinese and other East Asians credit, though. They're much more likely to give their children American first names

Actually they still give their children Chinese names, the western name is just an extra. It'd be like if a German immigrant named their child Fritz and then gave him an "American name" of Fred.

Depends on the family. I know plenty of Chinese-Westerners who essentially only respond to their Chinese name from grandparents (and it's not like Westerners aren't prone to similar affectations or shortenings)

Oh, I know. Still, I like that "Tom" Nguyen puts his American name on the flyer he sends me for his landscaping service. It means something.

I'm thinking of all the asian classmates I had who were named Michelle or Emily or Christopher. It really matters, and if they went by their Chinese names, I would have considered them much more foreign, at a much younger age. But Christopher Wing and Emily Lee and Michelle Chan are acceptable in a way that the Mei Lee simply isn't.

Modern society as a whole could never stand treating Indians and Muslims the way Germans were treated before and during WW1.

Then again, when you start looking at ancestry, there's a solid argument to be made that America is more German than English. (English comes in third, with Irish in second.) History is weird.

A lot of that is Americans downplaying British ancestry post 1776. Genetic analysis from 23 and me showed that the US is much more British and Irish than French and German. Scottish vs Irish is hard to tease apart over time.

The US is the only country on earth where iced tea is more popular than hot tea because drinking tea is seen as suspiciously British.

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Iced tea is actually widely popular in hot countries because it tastes pretty good when it's hot outside and is easy to make, including in countries that aren't known for their tea culture. You'll notice that iced tea is popular in the parts of the US that have truly sweltering hot summers.

Well English itself is German if you go far back enough in history. Many of the English kings and nobility were Germanics. Ironically that was one of the things Hitler also pointed out and why he considered the British to be people of “high class” and cultural achievement. It was probably just self-serving on his end. He didn’t consider everything about English culture to be held in high regard:

“It’s a great pity none of our great authors ever took his subjects from German imperial history. Our Schiller never thought of anything but to glorify a Swiss crossbowman. The English for their part had a Shakespeare. But the history of his country had supplied Shakespeare as far as heroes are concerned, only with imbeciles and madmen.”

The Germans were doing fine in the US even when they spoke German (common up to WWI, I believe).

Teddy was wise in this. GK Chesterton wrote similarly...

I tire of these posts often and the kind of comments they enjoin from others. The key word and phrase they’re often looking for is “individualism” and the importance of initial conditions.

I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned. When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind. Or the digitalization of the world for that matter. A lot of these ideas are germs and some get built on and others don’t. Of those that receive work on them some fail and some succeed due to timing effects, wrong approaches, lack of funding, all manner of different things. New developments to some extent always require the free play of ideas, but there’s no reason why it specifically ‘has’ to appear in one place or the other. China first cast iron a thousand years before the Europeans did and for centuries Europe was the technological underdeveloped backwater of the rest of the world. There’s no reason why it ‘had’ to be that way. The Soviets originally had their own competition to the ARPANET that ultimately went sideways to due to their own ideological beliefs. You could argue there wasn’t enough independence of thought. Or perhaps they had the wrong ideological perspective.

Diversity isn’t a good for its own sake. It has both its upsides and downsides and whatever else your opinion of it, you still have to figure out a way to live with it.

Also as a side note to your side note(!) there was a book recently recommended to me by a friend who is eager to get me a copy and read it so I can give him my thoughts on it. In it, he said the author specifically mentions the patent system as one of the markers of a society’s relative decline in cultural and technological achievement. It’s an interesting barometer and one I hadn’t thought of originally. It probably does yield useful insights.

When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind.

As an aside it's a bit inaccurate, or at least incomplete to say Shockley invented the first transistor. Probably more accurate to say "contributed to the invention of" or "developed the bipolar junction transistor."

From the 1956 Nobel citation:

In 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain produced a semiconductor amplifier, which was further developed by William Shockley. The component was named a “transistor”.

Shockley's main contribution to the first transistor was suggesting using field-effect to control a junction, but this had already been proposed by Julius Lilienfeld. He probably does deserve much of the credit for the bipolar junction transistor.

This does emphasis the point that a given invention is confluence of a variety of circumstances such that, as you say:

some fail and some succeed

It is quite a testament to Bell Labs that they not only were able to recruit such a large stable of geniuses, but were able to harness that power in a synthesis of cooperation and competition. It can't have been easy to manage so many (justifiably) huge egos.

Yes. Yes, indeed.

I trust you understand my original point though, I hope.

I’d be curious to know how much innovation is spontaneous in comparison with how much was planned.

It's quite close to 0% planned and 100% spontaneous.

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is probably still the best framework for how human knowledge (science and so, downstream, technology) develops. The long and short of it is that lots of happy accidents often build upon each other. Planning innovation is almost an oxymoron.

The problem then becomes, how do we 'cultivate the garden', so to speak, to make happy accidents more commonplace? Or to shorten the distance between related but unknown nodes that are working on the same problems? The University System and the various Bell Labs / PARC / DARPA orgs of the mid 20th century seem to have done this well. Both had different failure modes which roughly follow red and blue tribe cleavages.

The University System lost to ideological capture but also, more generally, a total remove from practical problems. Instead of a bunch of really smart professors working with Corporations, the Navy, or whomever or an actual problem, "pure" research began to win out. You'd get esoteric improvements in something like photonics that was utterly untenable in a production setting because the supply chain for the super rare materials didn't exist or the apparatus involved couldn't function outside of a clean lab.

The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me. The better answer, though still not "a-ha!" level in my mind is that actually novel and meaningful research is getting harder and taking longer. So, while a corporation may not need its R&D department to come up with something new every quarter, it's harder to not want to cut their budget after 10 or 20 years of nothing new. Furthermore, there's a pretty good argument to be made that corporations shouldn't be trying to shoot-the-moon with totally novel ideas but, rather, really be solving the "last mile" problem of new technology - how to sustain it, scale it, and then make it by degrees cheaper and cheaper. The middle ground that's evolving is something like Focus Research Organizations.

The final players - DARPA and other FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research and Development) kind of kept the spirit alive longer. DARPA has a very specific operating model that nowhere else in government replicates. But they fell victim to GWOT funding strategy - let's make everything about terrorists instead of focusing on, I don't know, time travel and teleportation. The FFRDCs became some of the most egregious leeches of Federal R&D welfare dollars. MITRE is quite literally make work jobs for PhDs. If you can endure living in a Kafka novel every day, you can make $200k per year and enjoy Tysons Corner traffic for your commute.

The real "oh, we fucking suck" moment was GPT-2 in late 2022. Almost every other major American technology development since WW2 could be traced back to some sort of federal, academic, or corporate R&D lab. That the Attention Is All You Need paper came out from a some ML engineers at google fucking around was, in my mind, kind of the tombstone on the "trad" R&D ecosystem.

The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me

I am not as knowledgeable about the other labs, but clearly Bell Labs was a particular cultural entity that was of its time, and the answer as to its decline is simply formalization of education and hiring and workplace employee rules means that the kind of lightning they caught in a bottle at Bell can't be caught anymore. Shockley would be run out of a modern day Bell; Bardeen would never have been admitted to Harvard/Princeton and so never would have done his important grad work and been hired by Bell; Brattain's academics would not have gotten him hired; the kind of bouncing around between government and industry that Shannon did is now very difficult to do; Jewett is probably the person with a backround most likely to actually be in the position he was at Bell in the modern day, but his protege/successor Kelly would never have even gotten an interview now.

This is all painfully and utterly correct.

The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me.

In general "grrr greedy capitalists" is only ever a satisfying answer in the same sense that "grrr Schrodinger equation" is. Technically both ideas explain a whole lot, but if you're ever looking for an explanation for why something changed, say, between 1980 and 1990, you can't solely check in the laws of economics or physics.

In this case, ironically, "Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists"" might be the explanation. Ma Bell was an enormous company with a quasi-governmental monopoly, so they could expect to be able to capture most of the value of even relatively pure and fundamental research ... and then anti-trust action broke them up into a bunch of Baby Bell companies who could only capture the value of research that was sufficiently applied and peripheral to turn a profit before its patent(s) would expire. By what may have been a wacky coincidence, but of course wasn't, Bell Labs got a ton of funding before the breakup and not so much after.

Despite my snark, I believe it's possible that the loss to research was exceeded by the gains of breaking up the quasi-monopoly. I'm old enough to remember land lines, and adding a second phone to the same line by just adding a splitter and running one cable to another room; a little further back in time, this would have required a call to The phone company to get permission and a technician and an extra monthly surcharge. It's easy to imagine that an indefinite continuation of this state of affairs in the USA could have crippled the nascent internet, which for years was only accessible to most residences via modems piggy-backing data over phone lines.

Ideally, handling the collective action problems of research without a giant monopoly (or, at least, with a giant monopoly we all get to control on election day) is what University research is supposed to be for; we try to give University researchers the proper incentives to try to come up with ideas that will be useful decades down the road, not just years. If we did that right, we should have been able to cut up the fabled goose here without losing out on all the golden eggs. To a great extent, University research works, even! I agree with your suspicions that we didn't entirely do that right, and with your explanations for why it doesn't work as well as it should, but I wouldn't want to come to any strong conclusions without trying to quantify those magnitudes somehow.

I don’t think it’s anywhere as lopsided as you might think. I don’t have access to my copy of the book at the moment, but the last I read indicated a much more complex picture than that. A ‘lot’ of innovation actually comes out of big business. The pharmaceutical industry alone is proof enough of that.

When I say “planned innovation” I don’t mean innovation by committee. What I’m saying is the idea may not have originated with them, but they were the ones who did something with it. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the transistor. He had a vision for the early uses of new technology. He had his plans for the tech that made him who he was.

If you want to remain focused on DARPA or Bell Labs for example, that used to be one of the favorite examples anarchists brought up in support of their philosophical aims. The boundary and restrictions were somewhat wide, but while it’s true that many of the pioneers and innovators within those organizations didn’t invent things through top down directive, they still had to meet certain qualifications that their free exchange of ideas had to be valuable serve the mission statement of the institution. Meaning your work still had to be found useful to the bureaucrats. Otherwise you were out.

Even very politically top heavy countries like China are producing an enormous amount of innovation.

I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).

Can you point me towards the community you're referring to? Is this related to roots of progress? I've been a bit underwhelmed by them, but also haven't checked in for a while.

Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.

What do you think is a robust measure, then?

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