6 ms·

How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)

183 points by sebg 2y ago

warkdarrior 2y ago
A lot of these kinds of articles about Bell Labs and other industrial labs with big scientific results read like cargo-culting to me: "if contemporary companies would copy their culture/planning/freedom, scientific breakthroughs are sure to follow." Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.
- Swizec 2y ago
  > Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people. High corporate profit taxes lead to lots of innovation because what else are you gonna do with all that money? Give it to the govt? No no, better pay a bunch of super smart people to just do stuff, maybe they’ll find something. Everything else is downstream of that https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
  - philosopher1234 2y ago
    Stock buy backs
    - wombatpm 2y ago
      Stock buy backs should not be possible within 1 years of a layoff, and should be a taxable expense if a layoff occurs within one year after a buyback. I also think dividends should not be taxed by corporations, and only taxed as ordinary income by stock holders. I’ve been told I’m a crazy socialist.
      - musicale 2y ago
        Wait, so you're saying that layoffs are or are not a means of freeing up cash for stock buybacks? How else are they supposed to raise the stock price without actually improving the business in any way?
        wombatpm 2y ago
        If they just want to do financial engineering and not actually produce something maybe they are in the wrong business?
  - raylad 2y ago
    Exactly. This is why lower corporate taxes hurt the country. Badly. With high corporate tax rates companies are incentivized to invest in tax deductible expenses like: research, employee training and retention benefits, building factories, etc. Higher taxes are good for the country. Lower taxes are only good for wealthy individuals, and only in the short term.
  - SideQuark 2y ago
    The vast majority of these golden years of innovation had corporate tax rates at a fraction of the years following. Maybe your claim is the opposite of the evidence.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      Perhaps you could be specific and actually name the years you consider "the vast majority of these golden years" ?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    Yglesias' argument isn't really valid. He'd identified that companys weren't operating to pay dividends and faced high profit taxes. Fair enough. But there are an infinite number of reasons not to do anything. I could equally observe that companies weren't being operated to bridge the psychic gap between the mundane and the divine and that has equal logical power. That sort of topic requires an active argument of the form "this is why they did that". IE, identifying how Bell's owners and operators were profiting from the work. It probably wasn't by running skunkworks and research labs. And, carthago delenda est, the big change in the US has been the transition to a service economy and financialisation. Since research isn't likely to help that sort of economy but is in an industrial economy this change seems like an obvious candidate for why it got rolled back. Doing research while trying to be a cutting edge producer makes sense.
    - leoc 2y ago
      ‘Sic transit’ is probably the Latin tag you want here.
    - musicale 2y ago
      > service economy and financialisation ... research isn't likely to help Yet Bell Labs was jointly owned by AT&T, which provided telephone service, and Western Electric, which made the equipment used by AT&T to provide telephone service.
  - keybored 2y ago
    Progressives are in an eternal battle with the right-wing since they never rise to advocating for socialism, only for smartypants arguments for why rich people and entities should still exist but with the government nibbling at a larger percent of their wealth and income.
- not2b 2y ago
  I think that the article is useful because it corrects a number of things commonly said about Bell Labs that just weren't correct. They didn't just hire a bunch of geniuses and let them do whatever they wanted.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  I do wonder how much the corporate culture of the time - of hiring people for life - affected Bell Labs, and the mindset of today prevents Bell Labs from being replicable. In particular, the mindset of employees needing to swap employers to get ahead, and of employers not wanting to train up employees when they could instead hire someone already trained for the position. (I know it's more than just a "mindset" and is driven by real, rational financial incentives, but nonetheless it's a cultural phenomenon.) Even if you set up Bell2 Labs, the people you're hiring are still the standard 21st century STEM workers/academics. Perhaps Bell2 Labs would do better if set up in Japan?
  - rednafi 2y ago
    Modern STEM workforce churn is actively causing damage. The “switch or stagnate” mindset makes it hard to hold on to a problem when you’re constantly thinking about switching jobs just to get a promotion or avoid a layoff. Also, companies would rather spend money on acquisitions than retention, and that choice keeps reinforcing the cycle.
- hy4000days 2y ago
  I think it’s more of “if they didn’t do it then somebody else would have,” the outcome from Bell was inevitable regardless of the name. Consider that fusion power is an inevitability, but you don’t know who’s name will be associated with it, nor the correct stock to invest in prior to their success. Hindsight is always 20/20, remember?
- NikkiA 2y ago
  > Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people. They also hired literally thousands upon thousands of researchers.
- keybored 2y ago
  Your own brand of idealism (the maybe) is that this success was about finding a bag of “brilliant people” by happenstance. Which is great man history in another guise.
adwf 2y ago
Seems to me like many research institutions, but well funded, attracting great talent and able to operate for a long timescale - they asked a lot of wrong questions too and we just highlight the great ones.
- jjfjjjjjjjfjjf 2y ago
  Certainly, as does any open-ended research organization. But when there are innumerable questions to consider and maybe 1% are worth-while, a 25% success rate might be incredibly impressive.
- grandempire 2y ago
  I don’t think putting more money into the system makes the ideas better. We have way more money and people in science in the last decade than in 1960.
  - Tostino 2y ago
    It allows more people to do it as a career if the funding goes partially towards salaries. That goes a long way towards making more progress in more fields.
    - typewithrhythm 2y ago
      I'm starting to come to the idea that the rate of progress is more driven by the rate of adoption than by number of researchers. It takes a whole lot of implementation and organisation to make any innovation tangible, so in some ways a bigger overall society slows things down as much as you gain from the total number of researchers. Competition from foreign societies is also a part of this.
      - Tostino 2y ago
        I'd say that's true after a certain point in any specific field. But there are so many fields that do show some future promise with only a few people doing research at any one time. I think a bit more breath of search will do us well
quantum_state 2y ago
The unfortunate fact is places like Bell Labs are gone …
- pratik661 2y ago
  Bell Labs like orgs can only exist within companies that are protected by a rock solid moat (ie ATT monopoly)
  - bayarearefugee 2y ago
    They could exist with government funding but "socialism bad hurr durr"
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      From across the pond, no they don't, even if the government redistributes much more money from the GDP. Government funding tends to have a problem with bureaucratic overreach, the need to persuade committees mostly composed of old ossified has-beens, and the need to produce papers at any cost to "prove" you are not slacking off. France redistributes over 50 per cent of domestic GDP. It has some scientific successes (as measured, say, by Nobel Prizes), but not dramatically more than other comparably developed countries.
  - quantum_state 2y ago
    Kinda of agree. There are some research places funded by private donation, such as Simons Foundation. Wonder if those are properly managed to attract the right people ...
  - spaceguillotine 2y ago
    and a ton of government cash doesn't hurt either. Post war science boom was nearly all funded from government grants that have mostly dried up and are extinct under Trump, its why America started falling behind post Reagan.
  - dv_dt 2y ago
    And a willingness to allow open ended exploration of wide of problems, combined with putting together all kinds of experts. Plenty of companies have this moat now but aren't willing to leave thins as open ended. Sadly our academic institutions and how they are funded by the govt is also hyper focused with grants and goals required to "prevent waste" and require specific results - serving as blinders to wifer ranging exploitation
moandcompany 2y ago
I feel that people like Russell Ackhoff should be mentioned when exploring the topic of asking the right questions and understanding the right problems to solve (at Bell Labs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff
RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
If you look at the very successful research organizations they were basically funded by monopolies, hired a bunch of smart people, and allowed them to think long-term without quarterly or even annual pressure to produce. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are examples of this.
- nullc 2y ago
  Article's point is though that they shoveled useful and relevant problems at them. This is extremely clear if you spend some time reading the BSTJ or the phenomenal "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" books. So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia. In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.
  - greesil 2y ago
    I have known of a hundred person organization that was supposed to do R&D and after six years produced nothing of value. I have seen a team of twenty launch a hardware product in a year. Purpose is important!
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Solutions in search of a problem. Rather than Problems in search of a solution, possibly related to this technology.
  - moandcompany 2y ago
    I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems. They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors
linguae 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this article; this changed some of my perceptions of Bell Labs regarding how free its researchers were, though Bell Labs was certainly one of the most free industrial research labs in history, alongside 1970s-era Xerox PARC. The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems. Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.
- oivey 2y ago
  I agree with your post, but thought I’d point out that the problems those labs worked on weren’t transistors, Unix, etc. Those were the solutions.
- jandrese 2y ago
  Don't get the impression that they were batting 1000 either. Bell Labs spent an inordinate amount of time writing and debugging a driver for a dodgy printer. Several of the projects never went anywhere. How many of you have used pico to edit an image lately?
  - virtue3 2y ago
    I think there’s a huge argument here for what their research inspired others to do as well. Just the small work they did on supporting mice so early on (third system to integrate a mouse?) was pretty massive for changing the way we interact and deal with computers. I know the mouse concept is in “the mother of all demos” but actually first principle integration of the mouse into the system probably belongs to PARC.
    - cma 2y ago
      Trackball predates the mouse though and things wouldn't have been very different if we only had them.
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jgord 2y ago
Ask all the Qns and have a fast fits-reality filter ? Seems like a general recipe useful in startups, science and life. afterthought : We are not doing this now, either in science research or in startups : The current VC model of funding startups is too few large bets, and too many hoops for small startups to jump thru to get to VC money. Wouldn't a more efficient betting stategy be to place a small bet on a promising team/idea/market .. then followup with a larger bet on proof of progress ? I think we are missing out on funding a long-tail of small startups using Reinforcement Learning techniques to solve real problems in engineering / logistics etc. The impedance mismatch means we dont get the useful new tech built, we dont develop talent and VCs take on more risk than needed and miss out on high growth startups. This might be structural in the money supply .. we might need smaller boutique VCs to fit that gap between large capital and small startup .. perhaps more post-exit founders should start small angel firms, and mine the RL niche.
- jgord 2y ago
  A container-style standardization of apply-for-capital process, might help make an open market for small-startups meet small-investors work : standardized questionnaire / pitch format standardized terms trust ratings on both sides, like airbnb reviews common tag set for searching / matching In an auction style market to mix and match small investors and small startups. A similar style market for cofounders / early hires might work. YC cofounder matching has a great pool of talent, but my guess is tag search would be a better way to find good matches.
deleted 2y ago
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cbracketdash 2y ago
Related: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of-importance https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of...
ants_everywhere 2y ago
It's interesting to note that Bell Labs started doing its most famous work around the same time quantum electrodynamics was hitting its stride, Von Neumann was doing his work in computer science, Eniac was being built, and the Manhattan project was going on. This was around 1945. Richard Hamming worked on the Manhattan Project, and John Tukey developed fast Fourier transforms (FFT) in service of the US nuclear program. John Von Neumann shows up as a hidden presence, working with Tukey when Tukey coined the term "bit", and informing Claude Shannon that the mathematical quantity he was working on was a special case of the concept of entropy. There are periods of history like this where major breakthroughs (quantum mechanics and also what we now call computer science) enable new technologies (like physically realizable Turing machines) and those technologies are suddenly in high demand (because of WWII and then the threat nuclear war). Suddenly there are lots of new ideas, insane amounts of money, and the survival of humanity requires getting things done. The other interesting thing to me is that Bell had experience with communication at scale due to their telephone networks. And a lot of early computer hardware and software concepts echo designs from the telegraphy days. Think of things like UART and the progression from telegraphy to teleprinters to keyboards. Concepts like Clos Networks from the 1930s are still used in modern data centers today. So having all these large communication problems at scale fed into what we now think of as computer science but really predated computers. So you may not get the same mileage asking the right questions as Bell Labs did. The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable. We may be getting there eventually with AI, and perhaps climate change will be a pressing enough problem the way nuclear war was.
- jordanb 2y ago
  Bell Labs was involved in the MIT Radiation Lab, which was a rival to the Manhattan Project in importance to the US war effort. They developed Radar and Radar control systems, in collaboration with the British. One thing people don't realize is that we had anti-submarine aircraft that would fly themselves on autopilot using sea-scan radar to attack submarines, radar-guided anti-aircraft batteries that would automatically shoot down aircraft (the only thing the humans were doing is loading the shells), proximity-detecting shells that would explode when they got near a target, and many other amazingly high-tech weapons during WWII. Most of them came out of the Rad Lab and a few other places. Solid-state electronics using semiconductors and masers were both explored at the Rad Lab but it was obvious that they would not be useful for creating weapons so they were set aside, but they were also taken back to institutions like bell for development post-war.
mannyv 2y ago
It's essentially portfolio management. You win some, you lose some. And you work at a phone company, and phone companies have interesting problems. I'm sure at some point everyone there felt somewhat obligated to do something to contribute. And there's plenty of interesting things to do at the phone company.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  You should have seen DuPont in the 1970's.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  "You win some, you lose some." Then the MBAs come in, try to reduce the "lose some" with tightly managed processes and you slowly start losing the wins. A similar thing happened at my company. During summer they would let people go at noon on Fridays resulting in a 36 hour week. Productivity stayed the same, people were happy. New VP comes in "won't we be more productive if we worked Friday afternoon?", back to 40 hours. Productivity still the same, people less happy, more people leaving.
rednafi 2y ago
I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredients—backing from massive monopolies, virtually unlimited funding, and a wave of public interest in what they’re doing. Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Meh. We don't look at Yahoo or ebays attempts in the same way. Adtech was an interesting space but it turns out to have poor explanatory power for whether ads actually have an effect beyond basic notification (poor Coca Cola shareholders...). AI labs may be respected by insiders, but the raw engineering prowess of Bell labs, along with the joint basic and applied research initiatives, are "gone from our sight."
  - rednafi 2y ago
    I agree. It’s kind of like how we always try to explain brain function in terms of whatever tech is trending at the time. In the same way, we’re biased to think the biggest hype lab today is gonna be the next Bell Labs. But that doesn’t mean it’ll actually turn out that way.
- timewizard 2y ago
  There are more ways to not reach that goal that to reach it. I have strong doubts. Their scaling ideology does not seem to be generating the types of returns it should.
hy4000days 2y ago
> Mervin Kelly used to often tell new hires at Labs, “You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here, but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.” Oh but how true this still is today!
logifail 2y ago
I'm certainly showing my age, but despite it being an interesting topic I really struggled with the English style in the piece.
- cbracketdash 2y ago
  The author seems to use many qualifiers in each sentence. So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally". Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.' Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
  - dylan604 2y ago
    If you're writing something for a bunch of nerdy engineers, discussing the mood/feelings/rationale about things is wasted effort. If you're writing for literature people, then all of the extra prose makes a difference and is nuanced. This board is made up of the former, and not the latter. As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text
    - lioeters 2y ago
      > extra text This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.
      - card_zero 2y ago
mdnahas 2y ago
My father worked at Bell Labs. (Take your kid to work day was a blast for me!) My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. This lead to: innovate, innovate, innovate. Many companies admire research. For AT&T at that time, it was their lifeblood.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  This, but also more suprisingly, this is the only comment out of 90 that offers genuine insight instead of repeating pre-existing talking points…
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. No, this still allows the standard method of increasing profits under a cost-plus structure: all it takes is increasing your costs. The more you spend, the better off you are. Doesn't matter what you get for your money. With a three-year lag, you need to be able to pay your operating costs out of savings over a three-year window, but that's it. It's purely a cash-flow restriction. By contrast, lowering your costs will make you a one-time cash bonus this year, at the cost of making you permanently poorer. This is not a sensible trade to make.
  - natpalmer1776 2y ago
    Unless you double dip by increasing your on-paper costs via R&D / capex and decreasing your required expenditure via optimization of the former (while also increasing your revenue potential via infrastructure buildout). While on paper your costs are going up, in practice your profit potential is skyrocketing yoy.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      How so? You have to keep paying for everything, or your profits will be taken away. Your profit potential is always and only limited by your ability to cover costs in advance. Saving on necessary expenditures brings you zero benefit, because any necessary expenditure that you eliminate must be replaced by an unnecessary one, or profits will go down instead of up.
ashoeafoot 2y ago
Curious, intrinsic motivated, self organized experts, that where free of micro management . You can not value or misery-management the unknown, thus you can not correctly assign resources , thus you can not play it safe. The modern management paradigm and processes are pure poison for innovation. In a war of desperation , those playing it safe and conservative are instantly out and all the experts get their day in the sun. All the safe choices become coffins for the ideas of the past.
bregma 2y ago
It was all just fun and games until the invention of the MBA.
ngriffiths 2y ago
> The one hard and fast rule Labs did seem to have was that you could not say no to any request for help from any of the applied folks — or other researchers for that matter. Nice example of a simple policy that changes the culture in exactly the way you want it to. The university researcher types want to say "ugh, stop interrupting me," but when that's not an option everybody keeps each other on track.
- myself248 2y ago
  It's a really important point. Your expertise is valuable beyond your own direct tasks.
fastaguy88 2y ago
I think it is worth pointing out that Bell Labs was an Engineering research lab. Scientists there created new disciplines, but in the service of relatively well defined engineering goals. Contrast this with the NIH, where the science also has a goal - improving human health - but the system to be improved was not engineered. Curing a disease, which has a natural origin, is quite different from improving communications channel capacity. I suspect that managing engineering research is much more amenable to process analysis than research on biological systems.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
How do places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs of old compare to Microsoft Research, Facebook/Meta Reality Labs, and Google X of today? Are the latter modern equivalents so to speak of the former in terms of funding innovative research?
freaktakes 2y ago
Just seeing this now. If any UK-based folks are interested, I just profiled an Oxford org looking for a systems engineer-style person to help with their work applying AI/math to applied science problems: https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-category-theory-inspired-bbn https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-category-theory-inspired-bbn

183 points by sebg 2y ago

A lot of these kinds of articles about Bell Labs and other industrial labs with big scientific results read like cargo-culting to me: "if contemporary companies would copy their culture/planning/freedom, scientific breakthroughs are sure to follow." Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.

Swizec 2y ago
> Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people. High corporate profit taxes lead to lots of innovation because what else are you gonna do with all that money? Give it to the govt? No no, better pay a bunch of super smart people to just do stuff, maybe they’ll find something. Everything else is downstream of that https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-brought-to-you-by-high-taxes.html https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  Stock buy backs
  - wombatpm 2y ago
    Stock buy backs should not be possible within 1 years of a layoff, and should be a taxable expense if a layoff occurs within one year after a buyback. I also think dividends should not be taxed by corporations, and only taxed as ordinary income by stock holders. I’ve been told I’m a crazy socialist.
    - musicale 2y ago
      Wait, so you're saying that layoffs are or are not a means of freeing up cash for stock buybacks? How else are they supposed to raise the stock price without actually improving the business in any way?
      - wombatpm 2y ago
        If they just want to do financial engineering and not actually produce something maybe they are in the wrong business?
- raylad 2y ago
  Exactly. This is why lower corporate taxes hurt the country. Badly. With high corporate tax rates companies are incentivized to invest in tax deductible expenses like: research, employee training and retention benefits, building factories, etc. Higher taxes are good for the country. Lower taxes are only good for wealthy individuals, and only in the short term.
- SideQuark 2y ago
  The vast majority of these golden years of innovation had corporate tax rates at a fraction of the years following. Maybe your claim is the opposite of the evidence.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Perhaps you could be specific and actually name the years you consider "the vast majority of these golden years" ?
- roenxi 2y ago
  Yglesias' argument isn't really valid. He'd identified that companys weren't operating to pay dividends and faced high profit taxes. Fair enough. But there are an infinite number of reasons not to do anything. I could equally observe that companies weren't being operated to bridge the psychic gap between the mundane and the divine and that has equal logical power. That sort of topic requires an active argument of the form "this is why they did that". IE, identifying how Bell's owners and operators were profiting from the work. It probably wasn't by running skunkworks and research labs. And, carthago delenda est, the big change in the US has been the transition to a service economy and financialisation. Since research isn't likely to help that sort of economy but is in an industrial economy this change seems like an obvious candidate for why it got rolled back. Doing research while trying to be a cutting edge producer makes sense.
  - leoc 2y ago
    ‘Sic transit’ is probably the Latin tag you want here.
  - musicale 2y ago
    > service economy and financialisation ... research isn't likely to help Yet Bell Labs was jointly owned by AT&T, which provided telephone service, and Western Electric, which made the equipment used by AT&T to provide telephone service.
- keybored 2y ago
  Progressives are in an eternal battle with the right-wing since they never rise to advocating for socialism, only for smartypants arguments for why rich people and entities should still exist but with the government nibbling at a larger percent of their wealth and income.
not2b 2y ago
I think that the article is useful because it corrects a number of things commonly said about Bell Labs that just weren't correct. They didn't just hire a bunch of geniuses and let them do whatever they wanted.
Qwertious 2y ago
I do wonder how much the corporate culture of the time - of hiring people for life - affected Bell Labs, and the mindset of today prevents Bell Labs from being replicable. In particular, the mindset of employees needing to swap employers to get ahead, and of employers not wanting to train up employees when they could instead hire someone already trained for the position. (I know it's more than just a "mindset" and is driven by real, rational financial incentives, but nonetheless it's a cultural phenomenon.) Even if you set up Bell2 Labs, the people you're hiring are still the standard 21st century STEM workers/academics. Perhaps Bell2 Labs would do better if set up in Japan?
- rednafi 2y ago
  Modern STEM workforce churn is actively causing damage. The “switch or stagnate” mindset makes it hard to hold on to a problem when you’re constantly thinking about switching jobs just to get a promotion or avoid a layoff. Also, companies would rather spend money on acquisitions than retention, and that choice keeps reinforcing the cycle.
hy4000days 2y ago
I think it’s more of “if they didn’t do it then somebody else would have,” the outcome from Bell was inevitable regardless of the name. Consider that fusion power is an inevitability, but you don’t know who’s name will be associated with it, nor the correct stock to invest in prior to their success. Hindsight is always 20/20, remember?
NikkiA 2y ago
> Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people. They also hired literally thousands upon thousands of researchers.
keybored 2y ago
Your own brand of idealism (the maybe) is that this success was about finding a bag of “brilliant people” by happenstance. Which is great man history in another guise.

adwf 2y ago

Seems to me like many research institutions, but well funded, attracting great talent and able to operate for a long timescale - they asked a lot of wrong questions too and we just highlight the great ones.

jjfjjjjjjjfjjf 2y ago
Certainly, as does any open-ended research organization. But when there are innumerable questions to consider and maybe 1% are worth-while, a 25% success rate might be incredibly impressive.
grandempire 2y ago
I don’t think putting more money into the system makes the ideas better. We have way more money and people in science in the last decade than in 1960.
- Tostino 2y ago
  It allows more people to do it as a career if the funding goes partially towards salaries. That goes a long way towards making more progress in more fields.
  - typewithrhythm 2y ago
    I'm starting to come to the idea that the rate of progress is more driven by the rate of adoption than by number of researchers. It takes a whole lot of implementation and organisation to make any innovation tangible, so in some ways a bigger overall society slows things down as much as you gain from the total number of researchers. Competition from foreign societies is also a part of this.
    - Tostino 2y ago
      I'd say that's true after a certain point in any specific field. But there are so many fields that do show some future promise with only a few people doing research at any one time. I think a bit more breath of search will do us well

quantum_state 2y ago

The unfortunate fact is places like Bell Labs are gone …

pratik661 2y ago
Bell Labs like orgs can only exist within companies that are protected by a rock solid moat (ie ATT monopoly)
- bayarearefugee 2y ago
  They could exist with government funding but "socialism bad hurr durr"
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    From across the pond, no they don't, even if the government redistributes much more money from the GDP. Government funding tends to have a problem with bureaucratic overreach, the need to persuade committees mostly composed of old ossified has-beens, and the need to produce papers at any cost to "prove" you are not slacking off. France redistributes over 50 per cent of domestic GDP. It has some scientific successes (as measured, say, by Nobel Prizes), but not dramatically more than other comparably developed countries.
- quantum_state 2y ago
  Kinda of agree. There are some research places funded by private donation, such as Simons Foundation. Wonder if those are properly managed to attract the right people ...
- spaceguillotine 2y ago
  and a ton of government cash doesn't hurt either. Post war science boom was nearly all funded from government grants that have mostly dried up and are extinct under Trump, its why America started falling behind post Reagan.
- dv_dt 2y ago
  And a willingness to allow open ended exploration of wide of problems, combined with putting together all kinds of experts. Plenty of companies have this moat now but aren't willing to leave thins as open ended. Sadly our academic institutions and how they are funded by the govt is also hyper focused with grants and goals required to "prevent waste" and require specific results - serving as blinders to wifer ranging exploitation

moandcompany 2y ago

I feel that people like Russell Ackhoff should be mentioned when exploring the topic of asking the right questions and understanding the right problems to solve (at Bell Labs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

If you look at the very successful research organizations they were basically funded by monopolies, hired a bunch of smart people, and allowed them to think long-term without quarterly or even annual pressure to produce. Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are examples of this.

nullc 2y ago
Article's point is though that they shoveled useful and relevant problems at them. This is extremely clear if you spend some time reading the BSTJ or the phenomenal "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" books. So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia. In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.
- greesil 2y ago
  I have known of a hundred person organization that was supposed to do R&D and after six years produced nothing of value. I have seen a team of twenty launch a hardware product in a year. Purpose is important!
- mjevans 2y ago
  Solutions in search of a problem. Rather than Problems in search of a solution, possibly related to this technology.
- moandcompany 2y ago
  I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems. They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors

linguae 2y ago

Thank you for sharing this article; this changed some of my perceptions of Bell Labs regarding how free its researchers were, though Bell Labs was certainly one of the most free industrial research labs in history, alongside 1970s-era Xerox PARC. The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems. Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.

oivey 2y ago
I agree with your post, but thought I’d point out that the problems those labs worked on weren’t transistors, Unix, etc. Those were the solutions.
jandrese 2y ago
Don't get the impression that they were batting 1000 either. Bell Labs spent an inordinate amount of time writing and debugging a driver for a dodgy printer. Several of the projects never went anywhere. How many of you have used pico to edit an image lately?
- virtue3 2y ago
  I think there’s a huge argument here for what their research inspired others to do as well. Just the small work they did on supporting mice so early on (third system to integrate a mouse?) was pretty massive for changing the way we interact and deal with computers. I know the mouse concept is in “the mother of all demos” but actually first principle integration of the mouse into the system probably belongs to PARC.
  - cma 2y ago
    Trackball predates the mouse though and things wouldn't have been very different if we only had them.

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jgord 2y ago

Ask all the Qns and have a fast fits-reality filter ? Seems like a general recipe useful in startups, science and life. afterthought : We are not doing this now, either in science research or in startups : The current VC model of funding startups is too few large bets, and too many hoops for small startups to jump thru to get to VC money. Wouldn't a more efficient betting stategy be to place a small bet on a promising team/idea/market .. then followup with a larger bet on proof of progress ? I think we are missing out on funding a long-tail of small startups using Reinforcement Learning techniques to solve real problems in engineering / logistics etc. The impedance mismatch means we dont get the useful new tech built, we dont develop talent and VCs take on more risk than needed and miss out on high growth startups. This might be structural in the money supply .. we might need smaller boutique VCs to fit that gap between large capital and small startup .. perhaps more post-exit founders should start small angel firms, and mine the RL niche.

jgord 2y ago
A container-style standardization of apply-for-capital process, might help make an open market for small-startups meet small-investors work : standardized questionnaire / pitch format standardized terms trust ratings on both sides, like airbnb reviews common tag set for searching / matching In an auction style market to mix and match small investors and small startups. A similar style market for cofounders / early hires might work. YC cofounder matching has a great pool of talent, but my guess is tag search would be a better way to find good matches.

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cbracketdash 2y ago

Related: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of-importance https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#the-importance-of...

ants_everywhere 2y ago

It's interesting to note that Bell Labs started doing its most famous work around the same time quantum electrodynamics was hitting its stride, Von Neumann was doing his work in computer science, Eniac was being built, and the Manhattan project was going on. This was around 1945. Richard Hamming worked on the Manhattan Project, and John Tukey developed fast Fourier transforms (FFT) in service of the US nuclear program. John Von Neumann shows up as a hidden presence, working with Tukey when Tukey coined the term "bit", and informing Claude Shannon that the mathematical quantity he was working on was a special case of the concept of entropy. There are periods of history like this where major breakthroughs (quantum mechanics and also what we now call computer science) enable new technologies (like physically realizable Turing machines) and those technologies are suddenly in high demand (because of WWII and then the threat nuclear war). Suddenly there are lots of new ideas, insane amounts of money, and the survival of humanity requires getting things done. The other interesting thing to me is that Bell had experience with communication at scale due to their telephone networks. And a lot of early computer hardware and software concepts echo designs from the telegraphy days. Think of things like UART and the progression from telegraphy to teleprinters to keyboards. Concepts like Clos Networks from the 1930s are still used in modern data centers today. So having all these large communication problems at scale fed into what we now think of as computer science but really predated computers. So you may not get the same mileage asking the right questions as Bell Labs did. The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable. We may be getting there eventually with AI, and perhaps climate change will be a pressing enough problem the way nuclear war was.

jordanb 2y ago
Bell Labs was involved in the MIT Radiation Lab, which was a rival to the Manhattan Project in importance to the US war effort. They developed Radar and Radar control systems, in collaboration with the British. One thing people don't realize is that we had anti-submarine aircraft that would fly themselves on autopilot using sea-scan radar to attack submarines, radar-guided anti-aircraft batteries that would automatically shoot down aircraft (the only thing the humans were doing is loading the shells), proximity-detecting shells that would explode when they got near a target, and many other amazingly high-tech weapons during WWII. Most of them came out of the Rad Lab and a few other places. Solid-state electronics using semiconductors and masers were both explored at the Rad Lab but it was obvious that they would not be useful for creating weapons so they were set aside, but they were also taken back to institutions like bell for development post-war.

mannyv 2y ago

It's essentially portfolio management. You win some, you lose some. And you work at a phone company, and phone companies have interesting problems. I'm sure at some point everyone there felt somewhat obligated to do something to contribute. And there's plenty of interesting things to do at the phone company.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
You should have seen DuPont in the 1970's.
rqtwteye 2y ago
"You win some, you lose some." Then the MBAs come in, try to reduce the "lose some" with tightly managed processes and you slowly start losing the wins. A similar thing happened at my company. During summer they would let people go at noon on Fridays resulting in a 36 hour week. Productivity stayed the same, people were happy. New VP comes in "won't we be more productive if we worked Friday afternoon?", back to 40 hours. Productivity still the same, people less happy, more people leaving.

rednafi 2y ago

I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredients—backing from massive monopolies, virtually unlimited funding, and a wave of public interest in what they’re doing. Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.

tomrod 2y ago
Meh. We don't look at Yahoo or ebays attempts in the same way. Adtech was an interesting space but it turns out to have poor explanatory power for whether ads actually have an effect beyond basic notification (poor Coca Cola shareholders...). AI labs may be respected by insiders, but the raw engineering prowess of Bell labs, along with the joint basic and applied research initiatives, are "gone from our sight."
- rednafi 2y ago
  I agree. It’s kind of like how we always try to explain brain function in terms of whatever tech is trending at the time. In the same way, we’re biased to think the biggest hype lab today is gonna be the next Bell Labs. But that doesn’t mean it’ll actually turn out that way.
timewizard 2y ago
There are more ways to not reach that goal that to reach it. I have strong doubts. Their scaling ideology does not seem to be generating the types of returns it should.

hy4000days 2y ago

> Mervin Kelly used to often tell new hires at Labs, “You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here, but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.” Oh but how true this still is today!

logifail 2y ago

I'm certainly showing my age, but despite it being an interesting topic I really struggled with the English style in the piece.

cbracketdash 2y ago
The author seems to use many qualifiers in each sentence. So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally". Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.' Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
- dylan604 2y ago
  If you're writing something for a bunch of nerdy engineers, discussing the mood/feelings/rationale about things is wasted effort. If you're writing for literature people, then all of the extra prose makes a difference and is nuanced. This board is made up of the former, and not the latter. As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text
  - lioeters 2y ago
    > extra text This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.
    - card_zero 2y ago

mdnahas 2y ago

My father worked at Bell Labs. (Take your kid to work day was a blast for me!) My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. This lead to: innovate, innovate, innovate. Many companies admire research. For AT&T at that time, it was their lifeblood.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
This, but also more suprisingly, this is the only comment out of 90 that offers genuine insight instead of repeating pre-existing talking points…
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. No, this still allows the standard method of increasing profits under a cost-plus structure: all it takes is increasing your costs. The more you spend, the better off you are. Doesn't matter what you get for your money. With a three-year lag, you need to be able to pay your operating costs out of savings over a three-year window, but that's it. It's purely a cash-flow restriction. By contrast, lowering your costs will make you a one-time cash bonus this year, at the cost of making you permanently poorer. This is not a sensible trade to make.
- natpalmer1776 2y ago
  Unless you double dip by increasing your on-paper costs via R&D / capex and decreasing your required expenditure via optimization of the former (while also increasing your revenue potential via infrastructure buildout). While on paper your costs are going up, in practice your profit potential is skyrocketing yoy.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    How so? You have to keep paying for everything, or your profits will be taken away. Your profit potential is always and only limited by your ability to cover costs in advance. Saving on necessary expenditures brings you zero benefit, because any necessary expenditure that you eliminate must be replaced by an unnecessary one, or profits will go down instead of up.

ashoeafoot 2y ago

Curious, intrinsic motivated, self organized experts, that where free of micro management . You can not value or misery-management the unknown, thus you can not correctly assign resources , thus you can not play it safe. The modern management paradigm and processes are pure poison for innovation. In a war of desperation , those playing it safe and conservative are instantly out and all the experts get their day in the sun. All the safe choices become coffins for the ideas of the past.

bregma 2y ago

It was all just fun and games until the invention of the MBA.

ngriffiths 2y ago

> The one hard and fast rule Labs did seem to have was that you could not say no to any request for help from any of the applied folks — or other researchers for that matter. Nice example of a simple policy that changes the culture in exactly the way you want it to. The university researcher types want to say "ugh, stop interrupting me," but when that's not an option everybody keeps each other on track.

myself248 2y ago
It's a really important point. Your expertise is valuable beyond your own direct tasks.

fastaguy88 2y ago

I think it is worth pointing out that Bell Labs was an Engineering research lab. Scientists there created new disciplines, but in the service of relatively well defined engineering goals. Contrast this with the NIH, where the science also has a goal - improving human health - but the system to be improved was not engineered. Curing a disease, which has a natural origin, is quite different from improving communications channel capacity. I suspect that managing engineering research is much more amenable to process analysis than research on biological systems.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

How do places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs of old compare to Microsoft Research, Facebook/Meta Reality Labs, and Google X of today? Are the latter modern equivalents so to speak of the former in terms of funding innovative research?

freaktakes 2y ago

Just seeing this now. If any UK-based folks are interested, I just profiled an Oxford org looking for a systems engineer-style person to help with their work applying AI/math to applied science problems: https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-category-theory-inspired-bbn https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-category-theory-inspired-bbn