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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.
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.
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.
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