5 ms·

Interview with Patrick Collison

186 points by jger15 6y ago

atlasunshrugged 6y ago
I had the chance to briefly meet Patrick in Estonia some years ago when he came to our offices at e-Residency. He immediately struck me as an incredibly intelligent person that had a crazy mix of intellect, curiosity, and eq. This interview definitely solidified for me that he is probably one of the best, and underrated, entrepreneurs out there right now.
- cm2012 6y ago
  Underrated by the public but Paul Graham holds the Collison brothers in incredibly high esteem, lots of other SV people do also.
  - danudey 6y ago
    Having worked with them in the past (when Patrick was a newly "on paper" millionaire and not a widely known billionaire visionary), I feel the same way. They're smart, sure, and have great ideas and execution, sure, but they're also just really, really great people, and fun guys to hang out with.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      The one thing that stands out for me - and this goes for both brothers - is their modesty. There are a lot of people thumping their chests all day long about very minor achievements and these guys just plug away at what underpins a very large fraction of all e-commerce. Stripe one day will be really too big to fail.
  - bacon_waffle 6y ago
    My partner cooked for the very-early Stripe crew, and has shared some of her fond memories from that time with them. pc - No telling when we'll get back up to CA, but there's buffalo chicken mac 'n cheese on offer :).
- keithwhor 6y ago
  Patrick is a great many things but I wouldn’t include underrated on that list. I don’t think anybody operating with or around him believes he’s anything but one of the most competent executives on the planet today. If you surveyed 100 venture capitalists and asked them the likelihood of Stripe hitting a $1T market cap, I think 99 would agree and one would be trying desperately hard to appear contrarian.
  - atlasunshrugged 6y ago
    Yeah, for sure not underrated in the valley and by people who know him but I meant generally. I doubt the average person knows much about him or Stripe
    - keithwhor 6y ago
      Stripe’s not a publicly traded company yet — it will be at some point — and I get the sense that Patrick and John are enjoying the relative obscurity while they still can.
      - preinheimer 6y ago
        "relative" I think John was on some sort of an ad on all the transit signs in SF, maybe during Dreamforce a few years back.
    - redisman 6y ago
      The general public only cares about consumer goods. Why would they know anything about a payments processing CEO? The "star" CEOs are all from consumer goods - Steve Jobs, Bezos and Elon Musk are probably the only ones any American can name.
      - kevinmchugh 6y ago
        This is interesting and I'm trying to think of others. You're on to something. Zuckerberg comes to mind. Jack Dorsey, maybe. Warren Buffett - consumer business. I think the Shark Tank cast are probably pretty well-known by now, at least as much as Bezos. Though I don't know if they're known for their companies, so maybe it doesn't make sense to include them. In fact, Daymond John is the only whose business _I_ know, and that one was a consumer business. They're all much smaller time, ofc, than the other names mentioned. Cuban makes me think a bunch of sports CEOs are probably well known. Vince McMahon. Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, and Ray Kroc I think were big deals, back when. Probably there's no value in the CEO of a non-consumer company having celebrity. Nobody's deciding between PWC and E&Y based on a TV appearance by the CEO, so the CEO won't spend time on that.
DonaldFisk 6y ago
Almost 20 years ago, I met Patrick at a Lisp meetup in a pub in London where he talked to us about Croma, the Lisp he developed for Web use. I learned that he was looking for a Lisp machine, and as I had a Symbolics 3630 which I hardly ever used, I arranged for someone to pick it up and deliver it to him. I wonder if it still works and if he is still using it.
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- pc 6y ago
  Donald! It's great to hear from you. I still have your Lisp machine and in fact booted it last time I was at my parents' home in Ireland last year. Using one was quite formative for me... Lisp machines significantly elevated my bar for what developer experiences could be and, on some level, that whole line of thinking is what led to Stripe.
  - kylegill 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing! What a neat moment to observe a friendly in-person interaction, reconnected via the internet years later. To me it seems like this is an example of how "the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet" isn't limited to business opportunity.
    - tim333 6y ago
      Twitter update from pc with a photo of the machine: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1369320446827528192 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1369320446827528192
  - DonaldFisk 6y ago
    Hi Patrick! Glad you that found it interesting and that it still works. I rescued it from a former employer (BT). Initially I was offered a Symbolics 3660 which was a lot bigger and had a 30 amp plug with round pins, but I turned that one down.
ivanech 6y ago
I think picking on the FAA is a little unfair. For the past ~20 years, they've been enormously successful in overseeing commercial airliner operations - I think the last commercial crash in the US that killed all onboard was in 2009
- pjscott 6y ago
  This is what institutional decay often looks like! They can still carry out a set of procedures allowing them to do the same thing they've been doing for a long time -- but they get less efficient, less flexible, more ossified. They are no longer the FAA that figured out how to oversee airline operations; they're the FAA that follows the script left to them by their predecessors. Collison gives a nice example: > The avionics you see in cockpits are bafflingly primitive because it's so hard, slow, and expensive to get the FAA to approve new technology. As a result, pretty much every pilot flies with an iPad running sophisticated flight planning software -- their connection to a world that the FAA doesn't encumber. There was a time when the FAA was much better at dealing with new technology. There was a time when all the technology in their purview was new. Something changed.
  - stillyslalom 6y ago
    iPads can run out of battery or get smashed in turbulence or fall prey to bugs/malware; old-fashioned steam gauges cannot. The FAA's regulations are written in blood - the aviation fatality rate has fallen sharply over the years [0] thanks to a combination of technological advancement and regulation. Aircraft builders are still free to do pretty much whatever they want within the 'experimental' category, provided they mount a placard informing occupants that the aircraft is experimental. [0] https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Accidents-Per-Mln-Flights-1977-2017.jpg https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Acci...
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I think that's entirely the problem. I'm worried it's a sign that the FAA is no longer as effective as it once was, and the problems are going to quickly grow as time goes on. This is a guess, of course. Time will tell.
sroussey 6y ago
In the early days, when I was implementing Stripe and we were about to launch, he gave me his phone number in case anything went wrong or I had an emergency. And he answered (I think it was the middle of the night). :)
cinntaile 6y ago
A bit of a shame that this is not available in audio format, it's quite a long read. I never used Stripe the financial system but I like that Stripe has a book division, the books they have published so far are right up my alley so keep up the good work.
- dbrereton 6y ago
  There's a chrome extension called audiblogs [0] that can convert any article into audio format. Here's the audio version of this article: https://audiblogs.com/share/4ce7e9c6-0970-4fa6-8cdb-ac2441043442 https://audiblogs.com/share/4ce7e9c6-0970-4fa6-8cdb-ac244104... [0] https://audiblogs.com/ https://audiblogs.com/
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    Yes and screen readers are also a thing for people that need audio for accessibility reasons. For anyone else I don't see any point to this... Listening to audio is slower than reading, but it can be more interesting & engaging to hear people's voices and get a glimpse of their personalities in an audio interview format. An automated text to speech translation is the worst of both.
    - dbrereton 6y ago
      This seems unnecessarily dismissive of audio content. Some people prefer audio content to reading. And with audio you can do passive consumption while doing something else. > An automated text to speech translation is the worst of both. I think you're underestimating how much better we're getting at making automated voices sound human. This site is way better than the average text to speech, and technology is only going to get better at it.
pjscott 6y ago
> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. The "how" of science just really matters. One thing I worry about in the US is homogenization in the way science is done. You won't find all that much difference between how scientists operate in California versus how they operate in Massachusetts or Idaho or anywhere else. There's pretty much the same grant application process, same peer review process, same journals, same conferences. And that would be fine if we knew that we were doing things the Right Way -- but as it is, it just feels like putting all our eggs in one basket.
- Kye 6y ago
  Can you expand a little? It's not clear what problem could come from having a standard process for funding, reviewing, and sharing science. I know there are problems, like the replication crisis, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if/how that kind of thing links to the way science is done.
  - pjscott 6y ago
    Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding. One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of the resulting research doesn't seem to be strong, meaning that this process might just be, at least to a first approximation, an ever-more-expensive random number generator. You can certainly imagine other ways to do it. Funding agencies could try allocating money at coarser granularity, e.g. larger grants shared among more researchers with much less specificity about how the money is to be spent; I hear this used to be more common many decades ago. Or they could do a quick-and-dirty screening for what 1-2 page research proposals aren't obviously terrible and send out money to the vaguely plausible ones at random [1], which would at least have lower overhead. Or you could have grant money allocated by individual people instead of committees, with less deliberation and guaranteed fast turnaround time to a yes-or-no decision, e.g. [2] and [3]. In general there's usually more than one way to do something, and I worry about a monoculture getting stuck doing things in a deeply suboptimal way but unable to change. I could tell similar stories about the modern peer review process (a relatively recent thing, and arguably not very good at solving the problem it's meant to solve), or the persistence of bad statistical methods in a lot of fields because they're the standard that everyone expects, or various other things. [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/science-funding-grant-lotteries-research https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/scienc... [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/emergent-ventures-new-project-help-foment-enlightenment.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/em... [3] https://fastgrants.org/ https://fastgrants.org/
phtrivier 6y ago
> France today gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power. Yup, and one of the surest way to loose an election and / or media support in France is to ever mention the fact that you might even consider this to be a not-entirely-terrible thing. Anyway, this person seems really interesting.
- gabagool 6y ago
  > ever mention the fact that you might even consider this to be a not-entirely-terrible thing If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that nuclear power is unpopular in France?
  - phtrivier 6y ago
    It's... complicated, but in a nutshell, yes, it's unpopular . The closest thing we have to data would be polls [1], which shows that the view is now positive only for a minority (although the ratio is 47 / 53, so you might say it's "slighly" unpopular.) It's clearly became a purely political and partisan topic though ; the right-wing, older and upper class will be more favorable than the left-wing and youngster. The French Green party, the most "visible" NGOs, left-wing press and public media are (rather) openly against nuclear. Right-wing press and the industry is only slighly more favorable. Quite surprisingly, even the far-right movement is going "full nuclear" those days. A large part of the population is concerned by security and the handling of nuclear waste ; and too many believe that our nuclear plants are contributing to global warming [2]. The debate is not going to get better any time soon, as we're about to reach both the end-of-life of the 40-year-old plants, and... an electoral year. [1] http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/nucleaire-lopinion-sest-retournee-cinq-ans-desormais-francais-majoritairement-contre/ http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/nucleaire-lopinion-sest-retourne... [2] https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/rechauffement-les-francais-accusent-le-nucleaire-26-06-2019-2321239_28.php https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/rechauffement-les-francais-a...
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draw_down 6y ago
My favorite part is when he calls "GEB" a slog. I think it's one of the most overrated books of the last 50 years.
colmanhumphrey 6y ago
> Nobody in financial services thinks that real-time settlement is a bad idea Maybe this is referring to something else, but e.g. Matt Levine thinks it's a bad idea: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-26/money-stuff-startups-sometimes-stretch-the-truth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-26/money-... discusses how real time settlement on spot prices for electricity would be worse than the alternative. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-25/money-stuff-gamestop-is-happening-again https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-25/money-... discusses how real time settlement would require you to have all money on hand immediately, making trading more difficult and expensive. Also amusingly: > It is not unimaginable that the stock market could move to real-time settlement; you could put stocks on the blockchain hahaha.
alexashka 6y ago
This is a solid example of book smart, real life stupid. He can link and quote what he has read until the cows come home but if his conclusion is always 'I don't know', then why even bother saying anything at all? 'What do you think about X?' 'I don't know. Also, here are some disconnected factoids I read on the topic over the past year and can link you to.' Excuse me, isn't that exactly what Google does, but much better than you? What have you synthesized after all that reading, other than don't know and it's complicated? People really can't seem to tell an aristocrat asshole who spends his/her days reading to impress others over people who actually understand a thing or two about the world. Here's a simple tip: if someone uses words like 'larval' when 'early' will do and it's not for comedic or literary effect, chances are extremely high that you are talking to an asshole.
- steve-benjamins 6y ago
  I think it’s just that the smarter you are, the more likely you give nuanced answers. It’s called epistemological humility but I’m sure you’ll just assume I’m an asshole.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > chances are extremely high that you are talking to an asshole. Pot, meet kettle. Really, this drivel has no place on HN.
- dang 6y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. No more of this please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wonnk13 6y ago
I guess I've drank the koolaide whole, because not landing a position at Stripe is one of my larger regrets in the tech world. Oh how they've grown in the last few years! Curious how the culture is now.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. Interesting comparison, but I offer a different interpretation. First of all, unfair to compare CH (Switzerland) with IT (Italy), instead of IT to FR (France), DE (Germany), ES (Spain), UK (United Kingdom), countries of rather similar population size, economy, land mass, etc. If you look at the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita [0], you find the following: CH: 4th; 27 laureates; 31.6 per 10M people. UK: 10th; 133 laureates; 19.4 per 10M people. DE: 14th; 109 laureates; 13.2 per 10M people. FR: 17th; 70 laureates; 10.6 per 10M people. IT: 33rd; 20 laureates; 3.3 per 10M people. ES: 43rd; 8 laureates; 1.72 per 10M people. In fact, CH is in the same ballpark as Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Smaller countries, richer countries, countries with a better education system overall. In addition to that, of the 20 laureates in science in CH, 4 (20%) were born in other countries [1]. This is not (as it might certainly appear) to be pedantic, but rather to show that interpretation of data can give us a different story, based on what we are looking for. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...
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- adolph 6y ago
  Would you expand on this? I’m missing the “unfair” part about comparing IT to CH. Even compared to FR, DE and UK, IT (and ES) are significantly under-represented by the figures you present.
  - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    It is not an order of magnitude. It is a 2x / 3x difference, and actually Spain performs worse than Italy.
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thundergolfer 6y ago
It's curious that Patrick lists advances in medial technology as a higher need than Climate Change mitigation tech. Does he elaborate on this idea anywhere? It is because we don't actually need better tech to fight Climate Change and it's mostly a socio-political issue?
joshdance 6y ago
Loved the section where he talked about technology the world needs. I took each idea down and started taking notes on it. https://joshdance.medium.com/request-for-technology-from-patrick-collison-6db04a6bd0dc https://joshdance.medium.com/request-for-technology-from-pat...

186 points by jger15 6y ago

I had the chance to briefly meet Patrick in Estonia some years ago when he came to our offices at e-Residency. He immediately struck me as an incredibly intelligent person that had a crazy mix of intellect, curiosity, and eq. This interview definitely solidified for me that he is probably one of the best, and underrated, entrepreneurs out there right now.

cm2012 6y ago
Underrated by the public but Paul Graham holds the Collison brothers in incredibly high esteem, lots of other SV people do also.
- danudey 6y ago
  Having worked with them in the past (when Patrick was a newly "on paper" millionaire and not a widely known billionaire visionary), I feel the same way. They're smart, sure, and have great ideas and execution, sure, but they're also just really, really great people, and fun guys to hang out with.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    The one thing that stands out for me - and this goes for both brothers - is their modesty. There are a lot of people thumping their chests all day long about very minor achievements and these guys just plug away at what underpins a very large fraction of all e-commerce. Stripe one day will be really too big to fail.
- bacon_waffle 6y ago
  My partner cooked for the very-early Stripe crew, and has shared some of her fond memories from that time with them. pc - No telling when we'll get back up to CA, but there's buffalo chicken mac 'n cheese on offer :).
keithwhor 6y ago
Patrick is a great many things but I wouldn’t include underrated on that list. I don’t think anybody operating with or around him believes he’s anything but one of the most competent executives on the planet today. If you surveyed 100 venture capitalists and asked them the likelihood of Stripe hitting a $1T market cap, I think 99 would agree and one would be trying desperately hard to appear contrarian.
- atlasunshrugged 6y ago
  Yeah, for sure not underrated in the valley and by people who know him but I meant generally. I doubt the average person knows much about him or Stripe
  - keithwhor 6y ago
    Stripe’s not a publicly traded company yet — it will be at some point — and I get the sense that Patrick and John are enjoying the relative obscurity while they still can.
    - preinheimer 6y ago
      "relative" I think John was on some sort of an ad on all the transit signs in SF, maybe during Dreamforce a few years back.
  - redisman 6y ago
    The general public only cares about consumer goods. Why would they know anything about a payments processing CEO? The "star" CEOs are all from consumer goods - Steve Jobs, Bezos and Elon Musk are probably the only ones any American can name.
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      This is interesting and I'm trying to think of others. You're on to something. Zuckerberg comes to mind. Jack Dorsey, maybe. Warren Buffett - consumer business. I think the Shark Tank cast are probably pretty well-known by now, at least as much as Bezos. Though I don't know if they're known for their companies, so maybe it doesn't make sense to include them. In fact, Daymond John is the only whose business _I_ know, and that one was a consumer business. They're all much smaller time, ofc, than the other names mentioned. Cuban makes me think a bunch of sports CEOs are probably well known. Vince McMahon. Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, and Ray Kroc I think were big deals, back when. Probably there's no value in the CEO of a non-consumer company having celebrity. Nobody's deciding between PWC and E&Y based on a TV appearance by the CEO, so the CEO won't spend time on that.

DonaldFisk 6y ago

Almost 20 years ago, I met Patrick at a Lisp meetup in a pub in London where he talked to us about Croma, the Lisp he developed for Web use. I learned that he was looking for a Lisp machine, and as I had a Symbolics 3630 which I hardly ever used, I arranged for someone to pick it up and deliver it to him. I wonder if it still works and if he is still using it.

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pc 6y ago
Donald! It's great to hear from you. I still have your Lisp machine and in fact booted it last time I was at my parents' home in Ireland last year. Using one was quite formative for me... Lisp machines significantly elevated my bar for what developer experiences could be and, on some level, that whole line of thinking is what led to Stripe.
- kylegill 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! What a neat moment to observe a friendly in-person interaction, reconnected via the internet years later. To me it seems like this is an example of how "the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet" isn't limited to business opportunity.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Twitter update from pc with a photo of the machine: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1369320446827528192 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1369320446827528192
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  Hi Patrick! Glad you that found it interesting and that it still works. I rescued it from a former employer (BT). Initially I was offered a Symbolics 3660 which was a lot bigger and had a 30 amp plug with round pins, but I turned that one down.

ivanech 6y ago

I think picking on the FAA is a little unfair. For the past ~20 years, they've been enormously successful in overseeing commercial airliner operations - I think the last commercial crash in the US that killed all onboard was in 2009

pjscott 6y ago
This is what institutional decay often looks like! They can still carry out a set of procedures allowing them to do the same thing they've been doing for a long time -- but they get less efficient, less flexible, more ossified. They are no longer the FAA that figured out how to oversee airline operations; they're the FAA that follows the script left to them by their predecessors. Collison gives a nice example: > The avionics you see in cockpits are bafflingly primitive because it's so hard, slow, and expensive to get the FAA to approve new technology. As a result, pretty much every pilot flies with an iPad running sophisticated flight planning software -- their connection to a world that the FAA doesn't encumber. There was a time when the FAA was much better at dealing with new technology. There was a time when all the technology in their purview was new. Something changed.
- stillyslalom 6y ago
  iPads can run out of battery or get smashed in turbulence or fall prey to bugs/malware; old-fashioned steam gauges cannot. The FAA's regulations are written in blood - the aviation fatality rate has fallen sharply over the years [0] thanks to a combination of technological advancement and regulation. Aircraft builders are still free to do pretty much whatever they want within the 'experimental' category, provided they mount a placard informing occupants that the aircraft is experimental. [0] https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Accidents-Per-Mln-Flights-1977-2017.jpg https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Acci...
Judgmentality 6y ago
I think that's entirely the problem. I'm worried it's a sign that the FAA is no longer as effective as it once was, and the problems are going to quickly grow as time goes on. This is a guess, of course. Time will tell.

sroussey 6y ago

In the early days, when I was implementing Stripe and we were about to launch, he gave me his phone number in case anything went wrong or I had an emergency. And he answered (I think it was the middle of the night). :)

cinntaile 6y ago

A bit of a shame that this is not available in audio format, it's quite a long read. I never used Stripe the financial system but I like that Stripe has a book division, the books they have published so far are right up my alley so keep up the good work.

dbrereton 6y ago
There's a chrome extension called audiblogs [0] that can convert any article into audio format. Here's the audio version of this article: https://audiblogs.com/share/4ce7e9c6-0970-4fa6-8cdb-ac2441043442 https://audiblogs.com/share/4ce7e9c6-0970-4fa6-8cdb-ac244104... [0] https://audiblogs.com/ https://audiblogs.com/
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Yes and screen readers are also a thing for people that need audio for accessibility reasons. For anyone else I don't see any point to this... Listening to audio is slower than reading, but it can be more interesting & engaging to hear people's voices and get a glimpse of their personalities in an audio interview format. An automated text to speech translation is the worst of both.
  - dbrereton 6y ago
    This seems unnecessarily dismissive of audio content. Some people prefer audio content to reading. And with audio you can do passive consumption while doing something else. > An automated text to speech translation is the worst of both. I think you're underestimating how much better we're getting at making automated voices sound human. This site is way better than the average text to speech, and technology is only going to get better at it.

pjscott 6y ago

> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. The "how" of science just really matters. One thing I worry about in the US is homogenization in the way science is done. You won't find all that much difference between how scientists operate in California versus how they operate in Massachusetts or Idaho or anywhere else. There's pretty much the same grant application process, same peer review process, same journals, same conferences. And that would be fine if we knew that we were doing things the Right Way -- but as it is, it just feels like putting all our eggs in one basket.

Kye 6y ago
Can you expand a little? It's not clear what problem could come from having a standard process for funding, reviewing, and sharing science. I know there are problems, like the replication crisis, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if/how that kind of thing links to the way science is done.
- pjscott 6y ago
  Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding. One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of the resulting research doesn't seem to be strong, meaning that this process might just be, at least to a first approximation, an ever-more-expensive random number generator. You can certainly imagine other ways to do it. Funding agencies could try allocating money at coarser granularity, e.g. larger grants shared among more researchers with much less specificity about how the money is to be spent; I hear this used to be more common many decades ago. Or they could do a quick-and-dirty screening for what 1-2 page research proposals aren't obviously terrible and send out money to the vaguely plausible ones at random [1], which would at least have lower overhead. Or you could have grant money allocated by individual people instead of committees, with less deliberation and guaranteed fast turnaround time to a yes-or-no decision, e.g. [2] and [3]. In general there's usually more than one way to do something, and I worry about a monoculture getting stuck doing things in a deeply suboptimal way but unable to change. I could tell similar stories about the modern peer review process (a relatively recent thing, and arguably not very good at solving the problem it's meant to solve), or the persistence of bad statistical methods in a lot of fields because they're the standard that everyone expects, or various other things. [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/science-funding-grant-lotteries-research https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/scienc... [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/emergent-ventures-new-project-help-foment-enlightenment.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/em... [3] https://fastgrants.org/ https://fastgrants.org/

phtrivier 6y ago

> France today gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power. Yup, and one of the surest way to loose an election and / or media support in France is to ever mention the fact that you might even consider this to be a not-entirely-terrible thing. Anyway, this person seems really interesting.

gabagool 6y ago
> ever mention the fact that you might even consider this to be a not-entirely-terrible thing If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that nuclear power is unpopular in France?
- phtrivier 6y ago
  It's... complicated, but in a nutshell, yes, it's unpopular . The closest thing we have to data would be polls [1], which shows that the view is now positive only for a minority (although the ratio is 47 / 53, so you might say it's "slighly" unpopular.) It's clearly became a purely political and partisan topic though ; the right-wing, older and upper class will be more favorable than the left-wing and youngster. The French Green party, the most "visible" NGOs, left-wing press and public media are (rather) openly against nuclear. Right-wing press and the industry is only slighly more favorable. Quite surprisingly, even the far-right movement is going "full nuclear" those days. A large part of the population is concerned by security and the handling of nuclear waste ; and too many believe that our nuclear plants are contributing to global warming [2]. The debate is not going to get better any time soon, as we're about to reach both the end-of-life of the 40-year-old plants, and... an electoral year. [1] http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/nucleaire-lopinion-sest-retournee-cinq-ans-desormais-francais-majoritairement-contre/ http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/nucleaire-lopinion-sest-retourne... [2] https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/rechauffement-les-francais-accusent-le-nucleaire-26-06-2019-2321239_28.php https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/rechauffement-les-francais-a...
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draw_down 6y ago

My favorite part is when he calls "GEB" a slog. I think it's one of the most overrated books of the last 50 years.

colmanhumphrey 6y ago

> Nobody in financial services thinks that real-time settlement is a bad idea Maybe this is referring to something else, but e.g. Matt Levine thinks it's a bad idea: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-26/money-stuff-startups-sometimes-stretch-the-truth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-26/money-... discusses how real time settlement on spot prices for electricity would be worse than the alternative. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-25/money-stuff-gamestop-is-happening-again https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-25/money-... discusses how real time settlement would require you to have all money on hand immediately, making trading more difficult and expensive. Also amusingly: > It is not unimaginable that the stock market could move to real-time settlement; you could put stocks on the blockchain hahaha.

alexashka 6y ago

This is a solid example of book smart, real life stupid. He can link and quote what he has read until the cows come home but if his conclusion is always 'I don't know', then why even bother saying anything at all? 'What do you think about X?' 'I don't know. Also, here are some disconnected factoids I read on the topic over the past year and can link you to.' Excuse me, isn't that exactly what Google does, but much better than you? What have you synthesized after all that reading, other than don't know and it's complicated? People really can't seem to tell an aristocrat asshole who spends his/her days reading to impress others over people who actually understand a thing or two about the world. Here's a simple tip: if someone uses words like 'larval' when 'early' will do and it's not for comedic or literary effect, chances are extremely high that you are talking to an asshole.

steve-benjamins 6y ago
I think it’s just that the smarter you are, the more likely you give nuanced answers. It’s called epistemological humility but I’m sure you’ll just assume I’m an asshole.
jacquesm 6y ago
> chances are extremely high that you are talking to an asshole. Pot, meet kettle. Really, this drivel has no place on HN.
dang 6y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. No more of this please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wonnk13 6y ago

I guess I've drank the koolaide whole, because not landing a position at Stripe is one of my larger regrets in the tech world. Oh how they've grown in the last few years! Curious how the culture is now.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. Interesting comparison, but I offer a different interpretation. First of all, unfair to compare CH (Switzerland) with IT (Italy), instead of IT to FR (France), DE (Germany), ES (Spain), UK (United Kingdom), countries of rather similar population size, economy, land mass, etc. If you look at the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita [0], you find the following: CH: 4th; 27 laureates; 31.6 per 10M people. UK: 10th; 133 laureates; 19.4 per 10M people. DE: 14th; 109 laureates; 13.2 per 10M people. FR: 17th; 70 laureates; 10.6 per 10M people. IT: 33rd; 20 laureates; 3.3 per 10M people. ES: 43rd; 8 laureates; 1.72 per 10M people. In fact, CH is in the same ballpark as Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Smaller countries, richer countries, countries with a better education system overall. In addition to that, of the 20 laureates in science in CH, 4 (20%) were born in other countries [1]. This is not (as it might certainly appear) to be pedantic, but rather to show that interpretation of data can give us a different story, based on what we are looking for. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...

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adolph 6y ago
Would you expand on this? I’m missing the “unfair” part about comparing IT to CH. Even compared to FR, DE and UK, IT (and ES) are significantly under-represented by the figures you present.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  It is not an order of magnitude. It is a 2x / 3x difference, and actually Spain performs worse than Italy.

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thundergolfer 6y ago

It's curious that Patrick lists advances in medial technology as a higher need than Climate Change mitigation tech. Does he elaborate on this idea anywhere? It is because we don't actually need better tech to fight Climate Change and it's mostly a socio-political issue?

joshdance 6y ago

Loved the section where he talked about technology the world needs. I took each idea down and started taking notes on it. https://joshdance.medium.com/request-for-technology-from-patrick-collison-6db04a6bd0dc https://joshdance.medium.com/request-for-technology-from-pat...