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Actually, there's reason to believe the shift started much earlier -- in The Organization Man, William Whyte describes how in the '50s we shifted away from fund

• e_modad 12y ago
  That's an insightful way of looking at it. Reagan was likely the crest of a wave rather than the start of a new one.
• api 12y ago
  > away from individual grants and towards group work. I see this in the startup world in the form of a strong bias against sole-founder companies and toward large teams with huge numbers of advisors and even "party rounds" with three dozen VC firms involved. It looks like a football pileup, but hey they can't all be wrong can they?
  • hawkice 12y ago
    That strikes at the heart of it, perhaps. The techniques were adopted to reduce variance, but we honestly do not know how they effect the work. Maybe we have fewer failures and fewer out-of-the-park accomplishments, but I would be surprised if that was the only effect. Notably, I see a world where we are less and less likely to acknowledge truths that violate e.g. tribal ideology, because of in-group pressures. The diversity of opinion and viewpoint that lets you harvest good ideas is typically the same mechanism that's used to put the breaks on them. You grab 100 random Americans and you'll avoid spending millions looking for Noah's Ark in the Black Sea, but you'll also avoid spending money to combat climate change. The problem isn't how difficult the technical challenge is, but how far it is outside the universally-shared worldview.