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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10069 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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