YouSaid · the spoken record

Caleb Watney

lines on the record: 57
first: 2020-09-04
most recent: 2020-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think I would say think hard about like the kinds of questions that you think matter for society and where you might be most effective. So one of the things that I was trying to think about in my own career is I think problems that like the profit motive can kind of be brought to bear on. I just have a higher certainty in my own head that those will eventually get solved. Like if there's money out there, someone's going to solve it. But where there's not, that's maybe where there's more attention worth throwing at it because in some sense it runs like counter.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, totally, yeah. I totally buy, you know, I think at the end of the decadent society, Ross says, you know, one of the more optimistic versions is some sort of like Afro Eurasian futurism, you know, where sort of if you imagine classically European cathedrals being filled by sub-Saharan Africa, that's a great vision and something that could end up providing both a sort of like multiple multicultural society that we want to see while also trying to help solve some of these birth rate problems.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capital technical skills, but partially because you have less time and you're more embedded in a family, you're less willing to work the 18-hour days and to leave your job to go create the new startup. And so that ends up having sort of cultural effects, both in terms of company formation and idea generation and innovation that I think end up resounding. And of course, even young people that are traditionally surrounded by an older society, I think will themselves be less risk-taking too. So yeah, maybe I would still say demographic aging, just given the fact that it's starting to get a bit more attention now, but it has such wide-ranging consequences that, and it's not really talked about in the national discourse in a major way yet.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think. Earlier, I would have said maybe falling fertility rates just because it's only really in the last couple years, especially in the US, but I feel like that's become like a major political phenomenon. But you are starting to see a couple of books now that are starting to discuss that more explicitly. Ross Dalfatz, Decadent Society makes that a big central focus. Madagasias is upcoming 1 billion Americans, talks about that. So I'm glad to see that start becoming a major focus. But it does seem like demographics are just so connected with a wide range of outcomes. Culturally, I think it makes like a society more conservative and less risk-taking when you have an older demographic. Megan McCartle had an interesting example, I think, a couple of years ago when she was writing about this, where she talks about think about an average town that has median age of 27 versus a town that has like an average age of 57. And just, you know, when you're that much older, like, yeah, you are more experienced and maybe you have more, you know, human.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dorado has been paying a lot of attention to this. He's talked about olivine as this kind of mineral that I think you can put on a lot of beaches that ends up absorbing a lot more carbon than traditional sand does, but it has a very similar texture. The main difference from sand is that it's green. So kind of even looks cooler. Or, you know, you could do something like Yellowstone produces just an absolutely massive amount of geothermal energy, partially because there's a massive supervolcano underneath it. And so you could tap Yellowstone for geothermal energy supply, a very high percentage of the U.S. national energy needs, just via that. And you would also be reducing the risk of that supervolcano erupting. So it seems like a win-win. So those are, I think, just a few examples. But I think as an area, it's really underleveraged.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a hard question. I mean, I would say sort of it depends on if AGI does end up being feasible, then probably it's AGI just given how wide-ranging its effects would be across the economy. But of course, that's in some sense begging the question. We don't know if AGI is going to be completely possible to create. There might be difficulties that we're not running into yet that we don't know about. So I think one thing I would like to see a lot more emphasis and research on is sort of big climate mega projects that I think are being very underhyped. We're getting to a point where to really avoid some of the worst outcomes of climate change, we're going to start needing pretty dramatic action now. But I think any sort of political approach that basically just asks consumers to take massive welfare rates themselves is going to be completely untenable. It's not going to get anywhere. But there's lots of big environmental mega projects that we could do.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an advancement for molecular biology, you know, because why would they do that? So the more unpredictable in terms of how is this going to pay off, the less likely companies are to do it. And so I think when you start focusing on what are the kinds of scientific questions that fall into those three buckets, the less relevant the crowd out question is, because again, if private companies are not going to be spending on these areas anyways because it's sufficiently untimely, sufficiently unconnected, and not sufficiently profitable, then yeah, you have way less concern about CATA.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the other thing is we maybe need a better structure or a better theory of what are the kinds of science that we want the federal government to be investing in. So from my perspective, I think Private companies will invest in RD so long as it is sufficiently predictable in sort of what kind of outcomes you're going to get, sufficiently timely in terms of like, is it going to be on a profitable timeline in the next five to 10 years? And I guess sufficiently cost effective has to be like profitable in some sense. But there's a lot of ways in which valuable questions don't fall into one of those three categories and in which previous scientific advancements have not met one of those criteria. I mean, especially in terms of the predictiveness, we're constantly getting scientific advancements in fields completely unconnected from what we think we're going to be studying, partially because scientific advancement, especially breakthroughs, kind of in some sense has to be unpredictable, otherwise it would have already been discovered. That means that there's not really an incentive for Google's Revolution's car division to be pouring a lot of money into something that might suddenly”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, again, a lot of these arguments could be true in the abstract, but not necessarily true on current margins. And I think that's probably an example. So if you look at something like the R&D tax credit, which is probably like the biggest in terms of spending that the federal government does, the nice thing about that is that it's not directed towards a particular thing. It's basically saying, hey, companies, you invest in the R&D that you think is most valuable and we'll reduce the amount of taxes you need to pay on that, basically. And you've seen that a lot of the biggest tech companies today are by far the biggest R&D spenders. If you look at like the top five, it's like Amazon, Google, Apple, Qualcomm, in some order. I can't remember exactly. But it certainly, it seems to be successful in prompting our big tech companies to be able to spend on R&D, which is good.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“RD support from the federal government just keeps on declining as a percentage of GDP, but then also we're just not seeing like a lot of experimentation in the structure of these grants. And so I'd love to see almost like a science of science like how do we know that actually these structures we're using are the best versions of them because I think we're probably pretty far away from the optimal. But given the huge public spillovers of really well-structured, well-targeted public subsidies for R&D, it matters a lot. So I'd love to see a lot more attention on that too.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think we still have a pretty poor understanding of why some of these industrial clusters form in the first place. It seems like sometimes it's like accidents of history, you know, that it just so happened that such and such a company was here and then there was a number of competitors that kind of formed around them. But then how you get from sort of like a fledgling industrial cluster to something that becomes full scale like Silicon Valley, I think it's pretty mysterious and certainly we've had lots of artificial experiments to try to seed new industrial clusters and other places that have failed pretty miserably. But sometimes they work. So I think a much better understanding of how and why these agglomerations form is one of the things that I would love to see. I think also the structure of federal R&D support is pretty understudied. It seems like both as like a percentage of GDP we've seen based”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that would be bad in some ways. Everything is like a series of trade-offs. I would say at this point, I would take a trade-off where we get more high school immigration and more, say, federal R&D or experimentation there in exchange for slightly higher taxes or slightly higher regulations in some ways. But again, I think the better way to try to look at these things is on a case-by-case basis. Of course, at some level, practically you have to choose which of those packages do you prefer. Yeah, that's kind of what I would prefer at this point, but that doesn't mean you have to strategically I'm going to be also trying to push the Biden administration in a better direction in some of these things.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, he's not really talking about many of these things, but in terms of where's the energy within the people that would likely be put into the various cabinet positions.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This would probably be my top three. And on each of those, I think Joe Biden has expressed more interest in those than Donald Trump has.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think almost talking about parties is in some sense, I don't know if it's the best framing partially because the parties are so broad. I mean, if on the one hand you have one party that incorporates everyone from AOC to Joe Biden, on the other hand, you have everyone that incorporates someone from Donald Trump to Jeb Bush. You know, really, I think a better way of almost thinking about it is that there's subparties within the existing national parties and they're competing than whoever wins the primary ends up getting the national thing. But I would say certainly I think a Joe Boeiden agenda would be better for innovation in the United States, I think, than a Donald Trump agenda, especially when you consider what I would see is like the biggest driver's innovation right now that we're missing, which are things like high-skill immigration reform. I think federal R&D reform, a lot more housing in these big agglomerations and these industrial clusters.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right if you look at something like the GDPR, which Europe was touting and still you see tons of conversations in the United States about, oh, well, really we should just adopt the EU approach and have our own version of GDPR. But after the GDPR has gone into effect, it's only increased the market share of Facebook and Google. Because again, it's sort of similar to the immigration discussion. The more you have these large bureaucratic burdens that you need to meet, the easier it is for large companies to be able to handle that because they actually have the staffing resources to be able to have these huge teams of lawyers to make sure that they're compatible. And so yeah, the United States is the one that's actually producing a lot of these top-end companies that are competing internationally. They're by far the most innovative in terms of like patents and where interesting startups are coming from. And then the EU talks a big game, but their regulations in practice just make it even easier for the big companies to succeed there.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there might also be some interesting things you could do with government sector data. You know, the government has lots of data about the business sector and geographical regions. And there's been plenty of examples of times in which the government has made information that they only have and then made it public. And then that's ended. Open source data sets or data sets you could make open source.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even then, even if you have this one-time static flow of data that totally misses the dynamic flow of data that actually matters because it's what happens when you make a change in your platform and then you can see the results are. And so I think, yeah, there might be like one-off isolated cases where I'd be in favor of interoperability, but I think we want to be pretty careful about that because also trying to make data useful in the first place is a very expensive operation. You know, it requires building a massive internal infrastructure where you have data engineers that can collect the data in the first place or think carefully about what kind of data you're trying to collect, how can you process it, actually turn it into useful insights, and then how can you apply it. And so you actually need lots of talent, again, at each step of that phase to be able to turn raw data into something useful, which is, I think, actually in some sense where the barrier is.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just one example of a policy lover I think you could pull that wouldn't be artificially tearing down these big tech companies, but would be making it easier to compete against them. And I think you could try to do similar things for data. I think on the data side, we sometimes get confused if we think of data as this homogenous thing, but like, oh, just the more data you have, always the better it is. Data's not context dependent. It's just, you know, reams and reasons of data, and the more you have the better it is. In reality, data is very context dependent. It almost has no value outside of, you know, almost the original circumstances that created it. And in trying to almost utilize data is itself, it requires like a massive infrastructure, internal operation to be able to utilize the data. If someone gave you all of the data from Amazon Web Services or from Google search results, it's like pretty unclear how you could use that, even if you're trying to build a competition or competitive.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduate programs, but then in actuality, the immigrants are way more likely to work at the big firms because that's the only place that they can actually end up getting an immigration visa. And so if you could find ways to make it just as easy for startups to have access to this high skill talent, I think you would sort of unlock a whole pool of entrepreneurial talent that right now is currently stuck at big tech firms.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then that further increases the evidence we have that maybe they are efficient, they are competitive, and if they end up falling because now some new startup has outcomed them, then congrats you've gotten the outcome that you wanted. So I think as a meta strategy, I would prefer to at least at first try the strategy of really increasing the level of competition they're faced with, not by artificially tearing them down, but by making it much easier to compete with them. And so that's sort of the broad strategy I was trying to lay out in that AI paper. One thing kind of briefly connecting this to the immigration discussion is the fact that I think a lot of these big tech companies have a huge advantage in the immigration market because they actually have large HR departments that are capable of braving the immigration bureaucracy. If you look at the career preferences a lot of these top-end talented immigrants, a lot of them say they would prefer to work at startups or start their own company at a much higher rate than American native born workers in these same.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's So there's a lot there. Obviously, we can try to break down into Chunk. I think in broad strokes, I would say that Again, if we're looking at this in expected value terms, there is some probability that if you broke up these big tech companies, maybe you get lots of innovation. Personally, I would assign a pretty small value there. I just think it's unlikely given many arguments that we can talk about in just a little bit. But in Brussels, I think it's pretty unlikely. The other factor is that it's a very high risk strategy. So if you break them up and you're wrong about the effective innovation, then you've just destroyed like, you know, the few golden geese actually producing productivity gains in our economy. And that's extremely bad. And you've given an edge up to China and so I think a much lower risk strategy that maybe gets at some of these same concerns would be sort of like a big national push to tear down entry barriers, make it much easier to compete against these companies in a variety of ways and sort of reduce the maybe moats they have around them in some sense, increase the gale of creative destruction to use the Schumpeterian term. And then if they can survive that level of increased competition.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I would consider it my number one lever right now simply because. I guess it's so far away from optimal. So if we look at maybe, say, trade policy as an analog, right? You could talk about the free flows of people and the free flows are good. Right now, the free flow of goods is like pretty close to optimal, right? We still have tariffs and we still have dumb regulations and in various things that prevent us from getting to some hypothetical free trade optimal. But moving another five percentage points in favor of free trade on the margin just matters not that much. But we're so far away from the global optimum on immigration policy that a 5% change in how many really smart skilled, talented people can come to the United States could make a very large difference. And I think also if you kind of follow the idea that people are in some sense the ultimate resource, right? They are sources of creativity, innovation, then of course if you're trying to affect innovation, you want the thing that can most directly come up with new ideas, which are people.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, again, I think you can see that we have lots of economic evidence about the regions that have higher rates of H1B historically have higher rates of job growth for native workers. They have higher wages. So again, I think if you're looking at in a positive some sense, even like a pause doesn't necessarily make sense. One, because also the kinds of job categories that have been the hardest hit by the pandemic are not the ones where H1B employers are typically going to be hiring from. And so I think it's mostly service sector jobs or jobs that require a lot of in-person interaction with customers and whatnot. So I think it's pretty unconnected from the specific job market issues of this pandemic.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has not given a lot of details. He's certainly spoken very positively about trying to undo some of the damage of the last four years and make it clear that the United States wants to be the destination for a lot of these high-skill immigrants. But I think understandably voters have not shown a strong preference for really detailed policy plans. And so I don't think that's his highest priority right now. But I think in the months after the election, if he wins, then there will be a lot of attention to actually getting the details on board.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is yeah, yeah, so it's very hard right now, you know, you really have to be like top, top hub hub end, and even then it's like a 500 length or 500 page length petition process, which is awful. But again, because it's so subjective and because the congressional mandate is so broad, I think that means that the scope for possible reform without even necessarily needing to go through Congress is also very broad.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tied with one employer. So you could use an 01 to then start a business or work for a startup or any number of things. So that's just a few examples.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be ideal Which kind of gets to, I think, the larger meta problem that the H1B is just pretty poorly structured to actually both attract and integrate the kind of talent that we want. And so I've been looking at alternative programs, one that I'm particularly excited about is the 01 visa for immigrants of extraordinary ability. It's a pretty underleveraged visa right now. But in principle, it's very flexible because congressionally it has no cap. It's just supposed to be for immigrants of extraordinary ability. And then USCIS has like sort of an eight-factor test evidentiary criteria for choosing who then fits into that. And so you could conceivably have a new USAIS director come in and either issue new regulations to change those criteria or even just rewrite the internal guidance documents that they use to make these decisions and end up letting in dramatically more really challenged, really exceptionally individuals through that program. And the nice thing is unlike the H1B, that's not category.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make it easier for H1B workers to switch between. Between employers or to even start their own business because oftentimes you have people that come here want to live and work in the United States and maybe they even have an interesting startup idea, but they end up having to work at a big company for six years while they're in line for green card. And then finally, once they get permanent residence, then great.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offers. And so some suggestions have said, oh, maybe we should do a salary ranking where basically the higher up you have as a salary offer, then the higher priority you should have in the queue. I would be open to something like that, but I would also want to modify it to include equity because there's a lot of times small startups can't compete on just a salary wage, but they can offer pretty lucrative equity packages. And so I think so long as you have some sort of equity adjusted salary ranking, I think that would be one easy way of making the H1B much better targeted. Another issue with the H1B is that it's tied categorically to like a very specific employer and then it's kind of hard to transfer. And this leads to some of the complaints people have that, oh, well, maybe you can be underpaying workers because they really have no other option. But again, that's not like a problem with the workers or them being in the United States and bringing their talents here. It's a problem with the structure of the visa that doesn't let them switch. And so you could either try.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say I have a number of specific reforms for the H1B, but then almost as a meta thing, I think since the H1B is like an overrated visa program, and I would like us to almost move our focus more broadly, but I'll start with the specific reforms to H1B. So there's a couple problems here you could try to address. One is the fact that the current lottery system that's used, it adds a lot of unnecessary uncertainty and also doesn't prioritize the most highly skilled candidates that we care about because it's just a lottery if you've met certain qualifications, it gives kind of equal weight to the top-end machine learning engineer who has a salary offer of $400,000 from some top firm with the IT specialist that is still important but would be making $60,000 or $70,000. And I just think if this is a high skill immigration program, we should be giving priority to those that have like the higher salary.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say though that I think there's a lot of complaints against the H1B program that are completely valid and I have a long list of reforms that I would like to see the H1B undertake. But just taking it as it is and sort of like cutting in half or slashing it I think would be very counterproductive.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of a word game about oh, is there a stem shortage or not? But I think, again, not particularly relevant because it is true that to make progress on the cutting edge of emerging technologies, you just need more really smart people working in a conducive environment. And the more really smart people you have working in a conducive environment, the faster your progress will go. And so again, I would prefer the United States to have that progress and say, I want all of the best and brightest world talent to be coalesced in the United States. And I'd say as one additional point, there's also some interesting, I mean, there's a long line of academic research, I think, backing up. There's a very strong case for high-skill immigration. But there's a new paper recently that came out in BR that specifically showed when you cut down programs like the H1B program, it actually increases offshoring because when companies don't have the option of bringing their talented people that they would like to hire here in the United States, it's sometimes easier to just move your headquarters somewhere else where you can hire them.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, again, that's pretty silly. I think it really misses the positive sum nature, especially fields in technology. Yeah, so I think, yeah, he's completely missing the positive sum element of this. And I think in some ways.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big or small, the problem actually is. You hear tons of anecdotes or tentational stories, but it's hard to know systematically kind of by the nature of espionage, how widespread this is. And so I would certainly be supportive of more narrowly targeted ways of trying to say, do more background checks before Chinese nationals are working on sensitive government projects or receiving government funds for research or whatnot. I think there's a number of more carefully targeted, or we can run counter espionage networks. Or additionally, sometimes it's the uncertainty about Chinese students' ability to stay in the United States that ends up giving the CCP leverage. And so if you give them a clear path to say permanent worker status in the United States upon completion of their degree, I think that reduces a lot of the leverage of the CCP has. So broad story, I would say, yeah, we could certainly take many more targeted actions than we should to reduce the threat of espionage, but to take overly broad actions that end up playing into this.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Future. So they've been pretty explicit in the fact that, yeah, talent retention is their biggest issue. They're undertaking a bunch of programs to try to fix that. They have the thousand talents program and the thousand foreign talents program that are both aimed at trying to recruit both Chinese nationals that are brought back home and even just generally talented scientists from abroad and recruit them back home. And so in some sense, if we took extremely broad measures to just shut down all Chinese students from coming here to learn STEM, we'd be really doing them a huge favor because that's exactly what they're in sense hoping for, you know, like, great, now we can keep all of these, you know, smart Chinese STEM students here in China rather than in the United States. So I think one, yeah, it would sort of play into the CCP's hands there. Two, I don't want to downplay and say that Chinese industrial espionage isn't a problem because, yeah, there are certainly many examples of it. One problem is we don't have a good sense of how”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a pretty foolish argument, and it would be even worse if we ended up actually running some version of that. I think that there's a number of factors here. One, it's good to recognize what does the CCP themselves recognize as their biggest barriers to actually achieving some sort of technological leadership role. And they've consistently pointed to their lack of talent acquisition. They've said multiple times that they're really innovation strategy is a talent-first strategy because one of their single biggest problems in the regime is that all of their best and brightest don't want to stay in China. Instead, you know, go to the US, go to Australia, go to other foreign universities, and then want to stay and work there. So if you look at something, say AI PhD students from China that study in the United States, when given the opportunity, you know, 90 plus percent of them end up staying in the United States. And that's a really big problem for China if you're then trying to develop the cutting-edge AI companies of the future.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah, there's, I mean, yeah, the whole meta problem here of can you even break through the current sclerosis enough to be able to do things that would test the level of sclerosis. And it comes almost circular in some sense.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just randomly distributed funds to projects that met some qualified metric. And I think so far they found it to be pretty successful. And they were trying to randomly distribute it so it would have some sort of external validity. But you can imagine running 10 different versions of that experiment in the United States where you're tweaking little variables within the current science funding apparatus and seeing how each of those randomizations end up making the results better or worse. And then you can then take those results and depending on how willing the current bureaucracy is to incorporate those results, then decide whether you want to reform or tear it down.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have strong priors on that. I think it's going to be for some of these questions, it's really a matter of like political opportunism. You kind of have to play with the cards you're dealt. And so I would certainly guess that reform seems much more likely than outright abolishing these institutions or creating new ones. But if the chance presents itself to create new ones, then that might certainly be worthwhile. Part of it, I think, is we're almost trying to create like a governance infrastructure that can easily scale to the kinds of problems that we see ourselves facing or to the kinds of new roadblocks that existing institutions are running into. So for example, with science funding, I think one of the easiest lowest cost things we could start doing is to introduce more like almost randomized control trials within science funding. So you saw, you know, I think it was New Zealand that an interesting experiment recently where instead of going through this lengthy science funding application process.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Governance institutions are much more sclerotic than they used to be. If you look at, you know, would the Vanauer bushes of today be willing to work in the NSF? And I think you could have a pretty compelling case that they wouldn't. There's just so many more roadblocks to wanting to be an inventive, you know, interesting person who is trying to push out the frontier in useful ways and also working at government that I think means that even if maybe we get our cultural attitudes right, maybe our institutions are just too squerotic to really be able to kick into high gear in the way that they once were.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's again certainly within the range of possibilities. So it does ring true that the United States seems to sort of coast for long periods of time. And then when they feel particularly threatened by another great power, they kind of kick into a whole nother gear that a lot of the world kind of forgets that we have. You look at how galvanizing it was for the US, you know, when the USSR was able to launch Sputnik and get into orbit before the US was, that kind of was a great political awakening. And there is something to, I don't know, you could use the term techno-hegemony on the idea that the United States is traditionally, or at least maybe since the 1940s or so.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or when I go online class is supposed to do, I mean, after you have the first five really good ones, I don't know what the other 45 are really getting you. And so, yeah, I do think you see sort of Issues like that, but I think the other point here is that regardless of whether or not China stagnates, it's good on the merits by itself for the United States to try to play this role. And so it's sort of like if China does end up playing the threat that we fear, but it's also good even if they end up stagnating and don't. It's kind of a win-win either way.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I share some of those same concerns. Again, I would kind of look at this in an expected value model, right? So there's like some probability that China kind of stagnates or can't really, you know, maybe they're really good at catching up to the technological frontier, but it's just an entirely different kind of question than actively pushing out the technological frontier. That's actually where I'd say maybe likelihood is, but we can't completely rule out the chance that they're going to continue making progress in the way they have. To that point, I do think that there are a number of I think it's called Good Heart's Law, you know, the idea that when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric. And you do see, I think, lots of examples of that in China. One of my favorite examples is they made a big push recently for AI and they were saying, you know, we're going to have 50 world-class leading AI textbooks and 50 world-class leading AI online classes, which kind of seems to like miss the point of like what a good tech.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that doesn't, you know, that only works so long as a policy is equally conducive in both kind of cultural and environments. And I would say that right now the United States is certainly not playing into its role as the global R&D hub of the world. And we're shooting ourselves in the foot in many ways that end up undermining our own ability to play that role.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that's true, but we certainly can't have complete confidence in that. I think if you were comparing a lot of predictions of liberal democratic economists from 20 years ago about what China's expected development path is, they've certainly outplayed, I think, the vast majority of predictions. And some of that might be catch-up growth, but they have much higher rates of catch-up growth than almost any other country. much bigger and they've maybe had other issues that they've been able to overcome. Kind of surprisingly The other thing is I wouldn't underestimate our ability to kind of shoot ourselves in the foot. So I would say that absent actively bad policy, this sort of free liberal democratic model should work or should outcompete, I think especially because the nature of innovation kind of relies on free thinking and iterative thought that's different from the consensus that tends to I think work better with these sorts of cultural values.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About intellectual property law, about a huge number of different sort of choices that you end up baking into your platforms. And so I think if we were in an alternative universe where all of the main social media companies being used globally were Chinese or run by the Chinese Communist Party especially, there would be very different values embedded in those platforms and that would end up really shaping the direction the technology plays. And so especially as we're starting to look into the future of technologies that might even be more monumental like artificial intelligence, I think it is worth thinking very carefully about where the leading firms are geographically and what kind of cultural attitudes or social infrastructures you end up building in. And I prefer one who would much prefer that the United States and their sort of broadly liberal democratic values are the ones ending up building into the”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. I think one thing you've seen, and this last generation of communications technologies is actually an interesting example here, that there are a lot of cultural values that are conveyed in the building of especially technology platforms that end up becoming the underlying infrastructure that are used in the rest of the world. And the technology has a great degree of path dependence. Sometimes it's easy to be a technological determinist and say like, oh, whatever is the best technology will always win out. And that's true, obviously, within some bounds. But it's also the case that sometimes we can get really caught in a particular infrastructure. And that can be either like a physical or digital infrastructure or even like a cultural infrastructure. And so if you look at a lot of the social media platforms, you know, the Big Swints internationally are primarily American firms. And they've built into those platforms certain kinds of cultural mores around, say, free speech or the separation between the private and the government sect.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think they have reduced it to some extent. Idea generations sort of in groups. I mean, of course, you have some lone geniuses that are introverts or something, but I think that's a pretty small minority of the population. Another way to maybe think about this is how long Silicon Valley has lasted already and how high the rent costs have gotten. The fact that everybody continues to live in Silicon Valley and pay these absorbent rent fees despite the fact that all of this online technology has gotten so good is perhaps evidence that the benefits, the productivity benefits of being in those clusters is actually really quite high.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter, others that are moving to all remote work for the foreseeable future. And again, I think you kind of pinpointed something in your earlier comment. There's both productivity within the firm that I'm sort of concerned about, but in some ways you could say that that's internalized. You know, if the companies themselves are seeing lower productivity measures, lower idea generation, then they should be able to internalize that themselves. But the thing I'm particularly concerned about from a public policy perspective is the public spillovers, the fact that you have fewer new firms being formed. And of course, Facebook doesn't internalize that cost. And so they have no reason to consider that. But as a matter of public policy, we do care about new firm generation and the kind of ideas spillovers that are generated in these public externalities.”
2020-09-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source