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What's the difference between giving your money to Gates vs Musk? Here's one way to look at it: When you give your money to Gates you generally know what you'r
by ekpyrotic 13y ago
What's the difference between giving your money to Gates vs Musk?
Here's one way to look at it: When you give your money to Gates you generally know what you're going to get - stamping up diseases, immunisation and lots of other great stuff.
When you give your money to Musk, you don't. It's much less clear. You don't know what problems he's going to tackle. You don't know how he's going to tackle them. And you don't know if he'll succeed.
1. Giving your money to Bill is like investing in a tried-and-tested branch of science or technology with measurable possible outcomes.
2. Giving your money to Elon is like investing in an absolutely cutting-edge branch of science. At the absolute bleeding-edge. Maybe even beyond the bleeding-edge.
Both are important. Here's a story to show you why.
One day back in the 1930s, before the war, all the academics in the USA found an unusual survey in their pigeonholes. It asked them to rank all the various academic departments in the USA by importance. Most important at the top. Least important at the bottom. They were asked to use their intuitions - what did they feel were the most and least relevant to the future of humanity.
After the academics filled in these surveys, their responses were gathered up and collated into a league table with the 'most important' disciplines at the top, and the least at the bottom. What was at the top? All the usual suspects like branches of physics, chemistry and biology.
What was at the bottom? Right at the bottom was Medieval History. The very least important academic subject. So far, so unexpected. But second to bottom was Nuclear Physics. Before the war it was considered a useless, hypo-theoretical branch of science only studied by nuts and eccentrics.
Of course, not much longer later the US dropped 2 bombs on Japan ending the nuclear war.
If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with obvious tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics departments and the world would have been a very different place.
What I'm saying is that investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential.
Dropping money to people like Bill is important. But so is dropping money to Elon.
One of them ensures that we continue to make sustainable progress - that we continue down the road that we're already walking. The other ensures that we have the opportunity to find new roads, new paths and new routes.
- unethical_ban 13y ago>If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics Departments and the world would have been a very different place. What? Are you suggesting that the US wouldn't have researched Nuclear weapons if we had started sooner?
- md224 13y agoI think ekpyrotic is suggesting that pre-WW2 Nuclear Physics would not have fallen under the category of "things with tangible, well-defined outputs." So the suggestion is that the US would not have researched Nuclear Weapons if they had decided not to fund Nuclear Physics research.
- qwerta 13y agoActually US did not founded atomic research. It was kick started by French, English and to some extend Germans. Manhattan was mostly developed by immigrants from Europe.
- angersock 13y agoNo, the point being made is that we wouldn't have been as far along as we were had we cut funding to such an impractical field. A lot of engineering and basic research seems quite pointless until it, well, isn't.
- robrenaud 13y agoCan you give a citation for this 1930s survey?
- philangist 13y agoI'm not sure whether the survey is real or OP made it up, but I don't think it matters. The point is that "...investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential."
- myke_cameron 13y agoIf its real, a citation would be great. Its a fantastic story worthy of sharing, (presuming its not a fabrication).
- jessriedel 13y agoIt absolutely matters. It's a completely open question under which circumstances and to what extent we should trust expert opinion in planning the future. "...investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential" is a rather useless platitude without further data--as in actual facts--because such long-range projects run the gamat from promising to useless to actively negative.
- tanzam75 13y agoBesides which, we weren't providing that much funding to nuclear physics before the War. We only funded the Manhattan Project after the War had already started, and after nuclear fission had already been demonstrated in the lab. In Germany, mind you. In other words, we didn't get the atomic bomb by lavishly funding the second least useful field of science. We got it by funding what was already known at the time to be the most promising weapon of mass destruction. People had been writing about the possibilities of atomic energy since Rutherford. In fact, H. G. Wells even wrote a book, prior to the First World War, on how nuclear weapons would make it possible to destroy human civilization. (He got the details wrong about how the weapon worked, but he appreciated the enormous energies involved.) A bunch of medieval historians may not have appreciated nuclear physics, but the real experts already knew of its potential. It was, after all, Albert Einstein who helped get the ball rolling on the Manhattan Project, by signing that letter and lending his celebrity to the cause.
- robobro 13y agoConsider also how much money was invested during WWII in mystics and parapsychologists and look at how well all that turned out. I don't think that you can really say that with confidence, that Elon's money is as well-deserved or well-invested as Bill's.
- fiachamp 13y agoHow is Elon Musk comparable to mysticism and parapsychology? A physics-major working on engineering challenges like space travel, electric cars, and renewable energy... Elon Musk's pursuits are at least based in science, its the business viability that is unknown at the beginning
- awakeasleep 13y agoElon Musk's work is based on our best guesses about how the world works. "Crazy" stuff in the past was based on our ancestor's best guesses about how stuff works. The only difference is hindsight. Bullshit artists distort things as much today as they did in the past.
- bogs_carut 13y agoThere's a key difference: Elon Musk is delivering results. The scientific method enables one to deliver results because its models are predictive, not merely explanatory. The engineering and science we do today is also predictive because it relies on models cultivated within this methodology. Equating today's "best guesses" with those in medieval or ancient times is absolutely inane.
- elwell 13y agoMedieval History is important for Christians to study to protect them from making the same mistakes (i.e., The Crusades). Disclaimer: I'm a Christian.
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoI think it is much simpler than you described. Investing in Musk would drive technology up. Technology is great multiplier, if you have infrastructure to multiply it with. Investing in Gates would drive up quality of life and help to build infrastructure in the first place. It is obvious that investing in both is optimal strategy as investment in one increases eventual value of other investment.
- Zelphyr 13y agoI agree that investing in both is optimal. I'm unclear, however, how quality of life builds infrastructure?
- sukuriant 13y agoWhen you're no longer stressing about where you're going to get food for the next day, researching big ideas seems a lot more reachable
- ipsin 13y agoPeople who aren't struggling to survive have the luxury to spend time working on other things, like infrastructure. There's no guarantee that will happen, though.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- netcan 13y agoHow much cheaper or more accessible will the future version of the connected tablet be in 1-2 generations (25-50 years)? 20 years ago mobile phones were rare, expensive and not very good. What if the availability of energy takes a huge leap. Those things can have a profound effect on the productive capacity of a people born into it. Can the third world brands of 'education as a major challenge' be solved to the point where most kids have a decent chance by our standards? If those kinds of changes happen, part of that increase in productive capacity almost certainly will go into building infrastructure. Honestly I think that part of investing on a horizon like this and betting on either ambitious charities, companies or even in scientific research is that it's hard to know. Some people leave their endowments to Art and I'm not sure you can really coherently argue against it.
- tdees40 13y agoIs Musk capital constrained? Does he have projects out there that he'd like to do but can't get investors for? This seems doubtful to me. Whereas stamping out malaria is always capital constrained.
- zanny 13y agoI'm sure if given enough capital he'd love to immediately switch into deploying a Manned mission to Mars, the Hyperloop, mass producing the economy electric sedan at 300 MPC for like $25k. All his businesses have capital constraints, but that just means they are healthy businesses. We should all know what happens when you give a startup too much money too fast.
- logicallee 13y agoYou're kidding, right? He only had enough money to type up a PDF and cannot even afford to host it on its own site, he has to use his companies' sites. http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-201... http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/h... It is on its face obviously severely capital-constrained.
- tensor 13y ago>2. Giving your money to Elon is like investing in an absolutely cutting-edge branch of science. At the absolute bleeding-edge. Maybe even beyond the bleeding-edge. Elon Musk runs engineering companies. They are certainly not at "the absolute bleeding edge" of science though. If you want to fund science, then fund science. Scientists and their graduate students actually do work at the bleeding edge of science and routinely push beyond it with only a small, small, fraction of what these billionaires make.
- robryan 13y agoThe issue is the tangible results. You could put a lot of money in science and end up with a lot of dead ends. I think it would be better to think of it as investing in the cutting edge of science that has already been researched being implemented.
- FD3SA 13y agoPrecisely this. Elon is a genius, and absolutely one of the greatest men alive. But we must understand that he is an engineer, not a scientist. The fact that he had to put his own money into an ambitious engineering project just goes to show how ridiculously conservative most investors are. Is it any surprise then, that basic science funding from profit driven investors is so abysmal? We need the NIH, we need the NSF, we need CERN, now more than ever. Basic science is the only way to get significantly more return from a dollar invested, but nobody wants to pay upfront. That is why we need taxpayer funding in basic science. Scientific breakthroughs will yield such massive dividends in the long run, that citizens would literally be spending on their own well being in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Discoveries such as vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, genetics and others have allowed humans to enjoy a standard of living unfathomable even a hundred years ago. If politicians had any vision whatsoever, they would have instigated a New Deal with massive investment in scientific and engineering research projects. Yet what did they do? Feed banks infinite loans at prime to keep them afloat, so that banks can choose to continue lending on a profit driven schedule. Guess who gets loans at prime from banks? Not the NIH, that's for sure.
- dfc 13y ago
- panabee 13y agosaw this stat today on twitter (from TED 2014): "gutenberg invented the printing press when only 8% of europeans knew how to read"
- jnsaff2 13y agoHaving recently finished Black Swan and Antifragile I would argue for Taleb's investment advice: 80% to Gates earning you a stable and guaranteed, if not boring, improvement. 20% to Musk to provide you the maximum exposure to risk and therefore potentially unlimited upside. The 80% is pretty much guaranteed to be put to good use. And even at the worst case for the rest, you only lose 20%.
- logicallee 13y agovery nice write-up, thanks for writing this. Edit: just so you are not our own little Malcolm Gladwell though, a [1] would have been nice.
- LordHumungous 13y agoEither that story is not true or it is beside the point. Nuclear fission was the huge topic of physics research in the 30's and the potential to weaponize it was widely understood by physicists, and the government aggressively funded it (the government mind you, not private companies). To say that nuclear physics was considered an irrelevant field by the scientific community in the 30's is just not true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Physics_and_politics_in_the_1930s_and_1940s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Phys...
- jacquesm 13y agoAgree with the overall text of your comment but I think this part was not what you meant to write: > Of course, not much longer later the US dropped 2 bombs on Japan ending the nuclear war.