away from individual grants and towards group work.
I see this in the startup world in the form of a strong bias against sole-founder companies and toward large teams with huge numbers of advisors and even "party rounds" with three dozen VC firms involved. It looks like a football pileup, but hey they can't all be wrong can they?
That strikes at the heart of it, perhaps. The techniques were adopted to reduce variance, but we honestly do not know how they effect the work. Maybe we have fewer failures and fewer out-of-the-park accomplishments, but I would be surprised if that was the only effect.
Notably, I see a world where we are less and less likely to acknowledge truths that violate e.g. tribal ideology, because of in-group pressures. The diversity of opinion and viewpoint that lets you harvest good ideas is typically the same mechanism that's used to put the breaks on them. You grab 100 random Americans and you'll avoid spending millions looking for Noah's Ark in the Black Sea, but you'll also avoid spending money to combat climate change. The problem isn't how difficult the technical challenge is, but how far it is outside the universally-shared worldview.
Comments
I see this in the startup world in the form of a strong bias against sole-founder companies and toward large teams with huge numbers of advisors and even "party rounds" with three dozen VC firms involved. It looks like a football pileup, but hey they can't all be wrong can they?
That strikes at the heart of it, perhaps. The techniques were adopted to reduce variance, but we honestly do not know how they effect the work. Maybe we have fewer failures and fewer out-of-the-park accomplishments, but I would be surprised if that was the only effect.
Notably, I see a world where we are less and less likely to acknowledge truths that violate e.g. tribal ideology, because of in-group pressures. The diversity of opinion and viewpoint that lets you harvest good ideas is typically the same mechanism that's used to put the breaks on them. You grab 100 random Americans and you'll avoid spending millions looking for Noah's Ark in the Black Sea, but you'll also avoid spending money to combat climate change. The problem isn't how difficult the technical challenge is, but how far it is outside the universally-shared worldview.