7 ms·

Why Innovation Prizes Fail

98 points by ohjeez 5y ago

m0llusk 5y ago
This is ignoring that the main competition to prizes are large scale research efforts from governments, labs, universities, or some combination of these. Relative to institutional research prizes have a good record, though the best way to see that is to look at more specific and better run awards rather than what Elon Musk and the Prince of Whales are doing with their spotlight time.
- yvdriess 5y ago
  Not competition as much as complementary or even necessity. Institutional funding funds enables people to have a career in research. A career that allows them to build up the necessary expertise in order to have a stab at the research prize. As with development programs, such prizes tap into an existing reservoir of know-how.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I could do research. I'm smart enough and all that. (we can argue about who is smartest and all that, probably institutions are right to not come knocking at my door trying to hire me - but in the end if somehow I ended up at a university I could do at least okay at research) My day job is not doing basic research though, so it would take me some time to come up to speed on the important hard problems that researchers are working on. Then more time to contribute. There is nothing unique about me above. There are a lot of smart people around who are not doing research. Basic research is important to progress humanity, but for every person in basic research thousands are needed in the more applied areas to take known research results and apply them to life thus making our life better.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Almost all research funding comes from competitive grants. So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. The process is completely broken.
    - yvdriess 5y ago
      > The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that overhead. Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in competitive research grants, research labs can scrap together funding with some form of continuity. What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd students and series of impactful papers, but at some point there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of new research projects.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      > I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research lab is a lot like being a startup founder. But we shouldn't take that to mean that research labs should be startups, with goals like establishing a profitable revenue stream that will assure a self-sustaining operation. That's just not the purpose of research, and trying to make it as such would change the kind of research being done. The other thing is that like a startup, research labs get a significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to get their research agenda off the ground. Depending on the agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a million dollars or more. Third, there is other institutional funding that goes beyond that. It's true that most funded research is through grants, but at the same time it's hard to get grants without some prior research results. That's where institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to a funding agency. > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare quotes, and that is because of a common perception that "research" is limited to the technical work of running an experiment and writing papers (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I disagree with this view, and instead I consider research as also including getting the money. Why? It has to, because getting the money involves setting clear research objectives, communicating those objectives to others in an understandable way, forging alliances with other researchers, navigating regulatory obstacles, hiring competent research personnel, designing research experiments, and most importantly managing the project over a decade or more without the whole thing imploding. That is research, because if you don't do those things you're just doing a "project". Getting something into the world and getting buy-in from external agencies is important precisely because there is no revenue stream and no customers who provide feedback to your venture. Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments, or even writing the paper is important to the scientific research process, but it's still just a part of it. Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper" research, distinct from securing funding. > The process is completely broken. You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that those who are part of the process and those who are outside of it think it's broken in different ways. Sometimes people outside of the process suggest to fix it in ways that will make things worse or are not actually a problem. Sometimes the solution proposed would in fact likely cause more problems that those outside the process can't anticipate, or were fixes to problems that have already been patched. It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a new codebase and start changing legacy code that looks wrong because you know a better way of doing it. Well... maybe it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you just don't know it yet.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Personally I would love to know what the Prince of Whales does with his time. That sounds fascinating
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ape4 5y ago
  *Prince of Wales ;)
rhdunn 5y ago
The issue I have with this type of thing is that it is difficult to work on the goal if you don't already have the funding to do so. This then incentivises institutions like Universities that can front that cost to work on it, and disincentivises independent people from getting together to work on the problem, or from hiring people to help out on the project.
- anon946 5y ago
  Also, a sustainable model, even at large universities, would need to have a source for funding the up-front work. Most obvious source would be to tax the prize money. Long-term, I'm not sure what the end-game would look like, but I have a lot of doubts.
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  This could work in certain sector, like drug discovery. Right now, a drug company (like Pfizer) will spend a billion dollars, then if successful, they have a patent and have to recuperate their investment before expiration (meanwhile, patients and their insurance providers are paying the premium, and those who can't, can't get the drug). But (depending on where you stand politically), these drugs have some public good, and it could be more direct to award prize money, then remove any restrictions on the drug after discovery.
baybal2 5y ago
sidibe 5y ago
But when they're effective it can be really effective. DARPA self-driving challenges really jump started that field for a few million dollars. Even if people were working on it already, the competitions got Sergey Brin and others obsessed enough with the idea to spend billions per year on it much earlier than they would have.
- melling 5y ago
  The author completely left out Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic too. https://www.herox.com/blog/428-history-of-challenges-the-orteig-prize-1919-1927 https://www.herox.com/blog/428-history-of-challenges-the-ort... I haven’t investigated the effectiveness of modern DARPA Challenges but they seems like a good value for our defense dollars, where we spend trillions.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  What? The 2004 and 2005 challenges participants were basically all university teams (i.e., the teams were students & professors who didn't need the prize money in the first place). The participants in those teams then went on to leadership roles in the various self-driving startups, but they didn't start there.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > the teams were students & professors who didn't need the prize money in the first place Weird to phrase it as "need". I look forward to your proposal for replacing supply and demand determine wages with ones based on number of dependents.
  - zip1234 5y ago
    Does pitting these teams directly against each other to achieve a specific purpose advance the field better than letting them do their normal research thing?
    - lief79 5y ago
      In this case, it made it clear what was possible with the currently available technology and some focus. That certainly drove more funding into self driving vehicles, as they no longer seemed like pure science fiction.
TuringTest 5y ago
Why innovation prizes fail? Because past performance isn't indicative of future results. You may want to incentivize discoveries by financing proven talent, but that approach ignores the fact that being successfull has an important component of luck. There's a recent economic model [1] studying the effects of sheer luck in acquiring wealth; and it shows that the richest people end up being those who accumulate a streak of lucky breaks, independently of their talent (above a minimum). The model predicts that the best strategy for getting talented people to deliver results is giving a small amount of funding to everyone equally. This way, you maximize the chances that someone will start a project with the right approach, AND that are least some of them will have the lucky breaks required for it to flourish. [1] https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-youre-not-rich-this-eye-opening-new-scientific-study-tells-you-why.html https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-your...
- credit_guy 5y ago
  "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say the researchers. Yes, but remember, Fortune favors the prepared. I was very lucky many times in my life, but I didn’t follow that with work and grit. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did. So they are where they are, and I am where I am.
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    > Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did Elon Musk was born into an already wealthy family and failed his way upward. Jeff Bezo's wife was already a millionaire when he started Amazon Neither of them had "hard work" or "grit", despite the whitewashing both of them have done of their rags-to-riches story. They are where they are because of generational wealth and familial connections.
    - exolymph 5y ago
      There are a million and one rich kids with generational wealth and familial connections. Yet not all of them turn into Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Luck is assuredly a big component of success, always, but saying things like Musk "failed his way upward"... lol no
photochemsyn 5y ago
Last year Elon Musk announced $100 million to come up with ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I'm not sure why the author is convinced this approach won't work, but there is certainly a better option for any country that wants to address the situation, and it's been done in many other areas. Establish federal funding agencies devoted to the goal, and use those funds to establish dedicated research departments at leading universities, which employ professors and technicians who bring in grad students and postdocs to work in their labs. The result has been very successful in areas like cancer research - childhood leukemia has gone from a almost uniformly fatal disease to one with a 90% survival rate. Why? How many universities have some kind of NIH-funded 'Center for Cancer Research'? However, you won't find any such comparably funded centers for renewable energy research at leading universities, because the US government won't fund them through the obvious agency, the DOE. DOE budgets make for interesting reading, because it becomes clear that the history of the DOE - from Manhattan Project to Atomic Energy Commission to 'DOE' - rather reveals it was set up mainly to deal with the nuclear weapons program, and the vast amount of highly toxic waste it generated. The DOE foray into 'clean coal' initiated around 2000 has been one of the most fraudulent 'scientific' programs ever run in the USA, from bogus nonsense like 'FutureGen' on down. They were characterized by 'public-private partnerships' which allowed DOE partners (coal and oil corporations) to hide the data about their gross failures behind proprietary claims. Literally billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into these rat holes with nothing to show for it for over 20 years. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureGen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureGen This leaves countries who have invested heavily in basic R&D in the solar/wind/storage sector well ahead of the USA. China is certainly the leader in solar, having mastered large-scale production of monocrystalline silicon wafers for high-efficiency, durable PV. Germany and Japan are in a similar position. Australia, even with its heavy reliance on coal, has long funded innovative solar research. The US government instead has devoted itself to funding fraudulent fossil fuel games (whatever CO2 gets captured at DOE-financed plants has almost universally been used for enhanced oilfield recovery, and much of it just gets boiled back off to the atmosphere during crude oil processing). I don't know why the author didn't mention any of this, but if you're going to base an article on a line about Musk's $100 million effort, you might want to dig into that history, right? As far as Musk's approach, here's the latest update on how that's going: https://grist.org/technology/elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal-prize-announces-15-milestone-winners/ https://grist.org/technology/elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal... However, if the USA really wanted to get on top of this and move towards a rapid transition to renewable energy (read: 3% reduction in fossil fuel production and consumption per year, with an equivalent growth in renewable energy to meet demand), it would probably need a new funding agency outside the DOE/NNSA, with a budget comparable to that of NIH, i.e. $30 billion a year. Given that the USA is almost as much of a petro-state, economically speaking, as Russia and Venezuela are, I don't really expect much progress on this from our fearful political 'leaders' (who are, in reality, more like corporate middle managers).
anon946 5y ago
There are lots of problems with the way research is currently funded. But replacing the current system completely, or mostly, with prizes has an issue that I've not seen discussed, and that is the social/organizational aspects of it. In order to fund the work (that might lead to winning), a pool of money will be needed. Where does that pool come from? One way would be tax the winners. If, say, 1 in 20 efforts wins, this tax will need to be quite high. If too high, however, then you've essentially negated the "prize" aspect of it. Then, within the institution, there will need to be internal competitions as to see which proposal(s) gets the funds to go after a prize.
paulpauper 5y ago
It's just bad economics bad incentives. The costs vastly exceed the payoff from the prize.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  This. The prizes are crazy low. If you want a good team to work on something, consider what that good team is giving up.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xyzzy21 5y ago
I'd also say that the strategic problem space is seldom located where the tactical problems space is that "solves" the strategic problem. And we can not know where or how far away the latter is. You see this a lot when you study the history of technology. What often happens is "Survivorship Bias" - you don't hear about all the other attempts that didn't work - so the historic narrative tries to form a story where "They knew all along" and that's seldom substantiated by actual history or facts.

98 points by ohjeez 5y ago

This is ignoring that the main competition to prizes are large scale research efforts from governments, labs, universities, or some combination of these. Relative to institutional research prizes have a good record, though the best way to see that is to look at more specific and better run awards rather than what Elon Musk and the Prince of Whales are doing with their spotlight time.

yvdriess 5y ago
Not competition as much as complementary or even necessity. Institutional funding funds enables people to have a career in research. A career that allows them to build up the necessary expertise in order to have a stab at the research prize. As with development programs, such prizes tap into an existing reservoir of know-how.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I could do research. I'm smart enough and all that. (we can argue about who is smartest and all that, probably institutions are right to not come knocking at my door trying to hire me - but in the end if somehow I ended up at a university I could do at least okay at research) My day job is not doing basic research though, so it would take me some time to come up to speed on the important hard problems that researchers are working on. Then more time to contribute. There is nothing unique about me above. There are a lot of smart people around who are not doing research. Basic research is important to progress humanity, but for every person in basic research thousands are needed in the more applied areas to take known research results and apply them to life thus making our life better.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Almost all research funding comes from competitive grants. So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. The process is completely broken.
  - yvdriess 5y ago
    > The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that overhead. Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in competitive research grants, research labs can scrap together funding with some form of continuity. What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd students and series of impactful papers, but at some point there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of new research projects.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the head of a research group is essentially running a startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research lab is a lot like being a startup founder. But we shouldn't take that to mean that research labs should be startups, with goals like establishing a profitable revenue stream that will assure a self-sustaining operation. That's just not the purpose of research, and trying to make it as such would change the kind of research being done. The other thing is that like a startup, research labs get a significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to get their research agenda off the ground. Depending on the agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a million dollars or more. Third, there is other institutional funding that goes beyond that. It's true that most funded research is through grants, but at the same time it's hard to get grants without some prior research results. That's where institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to a funding agency. > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare quotes, and that is because of a common perception that "research" is limited to the technical work of running an experiment and writing papers (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I disagree with this view, and instead I consider research as also including getting the money. Why? It has to, because getting the money involves setting clear research objectives, communicating those objectives to others in an understandable way, forging alliances with other researchers, navigating regulatory obstacles, hiring competent research personnel, designing research experiments, and most importantly managing the project over a decade or more without the whole thing imploding. That is research, because if you don't do those things you're just doing a "project". Getting something into the world and getting buy-in from external agencies is important precisely because there is no revenue stream and no customers who provide feedback to your venture. Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments, or even writing the paper is important to the scientific research process, but it's still just a part of it. Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper" research, distinct from securing funding. > The process is completely broken. You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that those who are part of the process and those who are outside of it think it's broken in different ways. Sometimes people outside of the process suggest to fix it in ways that will make things worse or are not actually a problem. Sometimes the solution proposed would in fact likely cause more problems that those outside the process can't anticipate, or were fixes to problems that have already been patched. It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a new codebase and start changing legacy code that looks wrong because you know a better way of doing it. Well... maybe it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you just don't know it yet.
netizen-936824 5y ago
Personally I would love to know what the Prince of Whales does with his time. That sounds fascinating
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ape4 5y ago
*Prince of Wales ;)

rhdunn 5y ago

The issue I have with this type of thing is that it is difficult to work on the goal if you don't already have the funding to do so. This then incentivises institutions like Universities that can front that cost to work on it, and disincentivises independent people from getting together to work on the problem, or from hiring people to help out on the project.

anon946 5y ago
Also, a sustainable model, even at large universities, would need to have a source for funding the up-front work. Most obvious source would be to tax the prize money. Long-term, I'm not sure what the end-game would look like, but I have a lot of doubts.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
This could work in certain sector, like drug discovery. Right now, a drug company (like Pfizer) will spend a billion dollars, then if successful, they have a patent and have to recuperate their investment before expiration (meanwhile, patients and their insurance providers are paying the premium, and those who can't, can't get the drug). But (depending on where you stand politically), these drugs have some public good, and it could be more direct to award prize money, then remove any restrictions on the drug after discovery.

baybal2 5y ago

sidibe 5y ago

But when they're effective it can be really effective. DARPA self-driving challenges really jump started that field for a few million dollars. Even if people were working on it already, the competitions got Sergey Brin and others obsessed enough with the idea to spend billions per year on it much earlier than they would have.

melling 5y ago
The author completely left out Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic too. https://www.herox.com/blog/428-history-of-challenges-the-orteig-prize-1919-1927 https://www.herox.com/blog/428-history-of-challenges-the-ort... I haven’t investigated the effectiveness of modern DARPA Challenges but they seems like a good value for our defense dollars, where we spend trillions.
mdorazio 5y ago
What? The 2004 and 2005 challenges participants were basically all university teams (i.e., the teams were students & professors who didn't need the prize money in the first place). The participants in those teams then went on to leadership roles in the various self-driving startups, but they didn't start there.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > the teams were students & professors who didn't need the prize money in the first place Weird to phrase it as "need". I look forward to your proposal for replacing supply and demand determine wages with ones based on number of dependents.
- zip1234 5y ago
  Does pitting these teams directly against each other to achieve a specific purpose advance the field better than letting them do their normal research thing?
  - lief79 5y ago
    In this case, it made it clear what was possible with the currently available technology and some focus. That certainly drove more funding into self driving vehicles, as they no longer seemed like pure science fiction.

TuringTest 5y ago

Why innovation prizes fail? Because past performance isn't indicative of future results. You may want to incentivize discoveries by financing proven talent, but that approach ignores the fact that being successfull has an important component of luck. There's a recent economic model [1] studying the effects of sheer luck in acquiring wealth; and it shows that the richest people end up being those who accumulate a streak of lucky breaks, independently of their talent (above a minimum). The model predicts that the best strategy for getting talented people to deliver results is giving a small amount of funding to everyone equally. This way, you maximize the chances that someone will start a project with the right approach, AND that are least some of them will have the lucky breaks required for it to flourish. [1] https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-youre-not-rich-this-eye-opening-new-scientific-study-tells-you-why.html https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-your...

credit_guy 5y ago
"Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say the researchers. Yes, but remember, Fortune favors the prepared. I was very lucky many times in my life, but I didn’t follow that with work and grit. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did. So they are where they are, and I am where I am.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  > Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did Elon Musk was born into an already wealthy family and failed his way upward. Jeff Bezo's wife was already a millionaire when he started Amazon Neither of them had "hard work" or "grit", despite the whitewashing both of them have done of their rags-to-riches story. They are where they are because of generational wealth and familial connections.
  - exolymph 5y ago
    There are a million and one rich kids with generational wealth and familial connections. Yet not all of them turn into Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Luck is assuredly a big component of success, always, but saying things like Musk "failed his way upward"... lol no

photochemsyn 5y ago

Last year Elon Musk announced $100 million to come up with ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I'm not sure why the author is convinced this approach won't work, but there is certainly a better option for any country that wants to address the situation, and it's been done in many other areas. Establish federal funding agencies devoted to the goal, and use those funds to establish dedicated research departments at leading universities, which employ professors and technicians who bring in grad students and postdocs to work in their labs. The result has been very successful in areas like cancer research - childhood leukemia has gone from a almost uniformly fatal disease to one with a 90% survival rate. Why? How many universities have some kind of NIH-funded 'Center for Cancer Research'? However, you won't find any such comparably funded centers for renewable energy research at leading universities, because the US government won't fund them through the obvious agency, the DOE. DOE budgets make for interesting reading, because it becomes clear that the history of the DOE - from Manhattan Project to Atomic Energy Commission to 'DOE' - rather reveals it was set up mainly to deal with the nuclear weapons program, and the vast amount of highly toxic waste it generated. The DOE foray into 'clean coal' initiated around 2000 has been one of the most fraudulent 'scientific' programs ever run in the USA, from bogus nonsense like 'FutureGen' on down. They were characterized by 'public-private partnerships' which allowed DOE partners (coal and oil corporations) to hide the data about their gross failures behind proprietary claims. Literally billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into these rat holes with nothing to show for it for over 20 years. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureGen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureGen This leaves countries who have invested heavily in basic R&D in the solar/wind/storage sector well ahead of the USA. China is certainly the leader in solar, having mastered large-scale production of monocrystalline silicon wafers for high-efficiency, durable PV. Germany and Japan are in a similar position. Australia, even with its heavy reliance on coal, has long funded innovative solar research. The US government instead has devoted itself to funding fraudulent fossil fuel games (whatever CO2 gets captured at DOE-financed plants has almost universally been used for enhanced oilfield recovery, and much of it just gets boiled back off to the atmosphere during crude oil processing). I don't know why the author didn't mention any of this, but if you're going to base an article on a line about Musk's $100 million effort, you might want to dig into that history, right? As far as Musk's approach, here's the latest update on how that's going: https://grist.org/technology/elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal-prize-announces-15-milestone-winners/ https://grist.org/technology/elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal... However, if the USA really wanted to get on top of this and move towards a rapid transition to renewable energy (read: 3% reduction in fossil fuel production and consumption per year, with an equivalent growth in renewable energy to meet demand), it would probably need a new funding agency outside the DOE/NNSA, with a budget comparable to that of NIH, i.e. $30 billion a year. Given that the USA is almost as much of a petro-state, economically speaking, as Russia and Venezuela are, I don't really expect much progress on this from our fearful political 'leaders' (who are, in reality, more like corporate middle managers).

anon946 5y ago

There are lots of problems with the way research is currently funded. But replacing the current system completely, or mostly, with prizes has an issue that I've not seen discussed, and that is the social/organizational aspects of it. In order to fund the work (that might lead to winning), a pool of money will be needed. Where does that pool come from? One way would be tax the winners. If, say, 1 in 20 efforts wins, this tax will need to be quite high. If too high, however, then you've essentially negated the "prize" aspect of it. Then, within the institution, there will need to be internal competitions as to see which proposal(s) gets the funds to go after a prize.

paulpauper 5y ago

It's just bad economics bad incentives. The costs vastly exceed the payoff from the prize.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago
This. The prizes are crazy low. If you want a good team to work on something, consider what that good team is giving up.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xyzzy21 5y ago

I'd also say that the strategic problem space is seldom located where the tactical problems space is that "solves" the strategic problem. And we can not know where or how far away the latter is. You see this a lot when you study the history of technology. What often happens is "Survivorship Bias" - you don't hear about all the other attempts that didn't work - so the historic narrative tries to form a story where "They knew all along" and that's seldom substantiated by actual history or facts.