Ben Reinhardt @Ben_Reinhardt Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Ben Reinhardt

@Ben_Reinhardt

9,550

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523

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Dare mighty things! Journeyman wondersmith @spec__tech . Past: AI @MagicLeap , Space Robots @NASA + @Cornell , medieval history @Caltech 🏴‍☠️🪐🐉

Princeton/NYC (1 Day/Week)

https://t.co/FS1uKfjRm4

Joined November 2013

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

1/ For the past year, we’ve been building a new research organization: Speculative Technologies ( @spec__tech ) exists to create an abundant, wonder-filled future by unlocking powerful materials and manufacturing technologies that don’t have a home in other institutions.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

I wonder if 50 years from now we're going to look back at how we've redesigned our world around computers with the same regret that people look back at how we redesigned cities around cars. 🤔

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

I have a unsubstantiated hunch that this is also what killed corporate research with huge positive externalities. Over the course of several decades, companies realized how little value they could actually capture from deep research and got it off their books.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

"Most people don't do interesting things, unless they're in a community where that thing is normalized" - @slatestarcodex I found this extremely truthy and triggered some correlaries that I don't see talked about much:

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

TIL the US has a PvP zone

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

1/ Did you know that Vannevar Bush (you know, the guy who helped enable everything from radar to the manhattan project, the NSF to memexes) wrote an autobiography? Turns out that yes he did, it's been out of print since the 70's, and it's *excellent* BOOK REPORT THREAD

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

1/ Recently finished "Where’s my Flying Car - A memoir of Futures Past" by J Storrs Hall. It's simultaneously extremely critical of the state of atom-based technology and presents a precise and aggressively optimistic vision of possible futures. BOOK REPORT THREAD 🧵

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

This but for new institutions

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

11 months

To tack my personal opinion to this awesome historical anecdote: We're not setting people up to be 25-year-old Manhattan Project contributors. Instead of encouraging highschoolers to go incredibly deep on science, we tell them to be well rounded and do a million activities.

@slaterstich

Slater Stich

11 months

Age distribution for the Manhattan Project:

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

The subtlety is that both computers and cars are amazing tools! But the trick is that at some point remaking the world in service of a tool might start to go against serving people.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

6 months

This isn't just a story about defense. It's a story about the hollowing out of a once vibrant ecosystem for doing weird research.

@alexthegrreat

alex 🇺🇸

6 months

incredible graph

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

5 years

~80% of the times I go to the website of an organization I've never heard of, I end up going to wikipedia to figure out *what they actually do.* This seems like a problem.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

I’m excited to release something we’ve been working on for a long time:

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: How could you follow DARPA's narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it? My answer:

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Shifting the imposible to the inevitable: A Private ARPA user manual

🤖🖥🛰🔬💡🤔

benjaminreinhardt.com

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

I went to the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) last week. It's a ginormous trade show devoted to CNC mills, grinders, robot arms, metrology, CAD, 3D printing etc. Felt like a new world (especially compared to Twitter) so I thought to share what struck me 1/

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

Lots of people are talking about lab-grown meat. What about lab-grown wood? Lab-grown shells? Nature is an existence proof that proteins are able to create incredible materials. We're getting good at proteins -- what materials could we unleash with them?

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

Slack (in the systems sense) seems to both lead to amazing things and flies in the face of efficiency, justification, and rationality. Over time, we've killed slack in more and more domains in the name of efficiency.

@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 months

With the spotlight on the effects of Boeing's relentless drive for measurable efficiency, I wanted to re-up this great piece: Slack is the illegible dark matter behind a lot of good stuff in the world. It's also the first thing to get cut.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

I backed a Kickstarter for a visual encyclopedia of megastructures a while ago and it's everything I was hoping for! It's striking how this aesthetic and ambition has taken on a connotation of "unseriousness" -- a thing for children and dreamers.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

24/ Alexis de Tocqueville was basically a prophet.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

1. We should strive to live in a world where Elon Musk is unremarkable. “Oh yeah, that guy getting to Mars. He’s cool but I’m a fan of the guy building a tunnel between China and the US”

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

1/ Recently finished "The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions" by Narayanmurti and Tsao. The book lives up to its grand name! It feels like a (fuzzy) image of the elephant that is "how research works" where everybody else is feeling a snake or a tree. BOOK REPORT THREAD🧵

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

Another unsubstantiated hunch is that ambitious people are drawn to startups because it's one of the few domains with slack provided by VCs willing to make wild bets.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

1/ Recently finished "Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization" by Donald Braben. It's a sobering (but hopeful!) exploration of the stagnation in what I would call "paradigm shifting research" and what to do about it. BOOK REPORT THREAD 🧵

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

One like = one opinion (+reason) about Elon Musk. Took the @vgr bait to do a one-opinion-per-like personal challenge. Live-fire stress test of your brainstorming capacity

@vgr

Venkatesh Rao ☀️

4 years

@Ben_Reinhardt Elon Musk

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

5 months

This is pretty wild

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

5. Elon’s popularity* is a signal of latent desire for ambitious projects in the physical world. People don’t see how they can contribute so they root for him. The logical conclusion is that we need more outlets for that enthusiasm. *even detractors say “sweet, but won’t work”

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

The Szilard point - when more value is wasted applying for a grant than the value of the grant 🤦‍♂️

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

Some rough power consumption numbers: Human: 100 W House: 1 kW , peak 10 kW Car: 50 kW, peak 200 kW Small city: 20 MW MIT Campus: 18 MW I found it especially surprising that a car uses roughly an order of magnitude more power than a house!

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

Anybody who mocks someone for trying to build something is my enemy.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

5 years

Has anybody compiled a list of optimistic sci-fi for inspiring crazy new ideas?

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

Trying out a potentially disagreeable assertion: It’s almost impossible to simultaneously focus on solving a need and building a new technology because in the early days of a technology there are almost always better ways to address that need.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

5/ The coupling between energy+power and technological paradigm shifts is surprisingly tight. There are a massive number of things where the key technical constraint is cheaper and denser energy that we've just stopped thinking about.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

It's hard to find people who want to work on an area that does not yet exist.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

It was delightfully object level. Nobody talking about transforming human interaction or web3 enabled AI for industry 4.0* — they’re like “this tool cuts metal really well — look at it cutting metal. Here is a piece it just made” *Ok, almost nobody: there were some startups 3/

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

11/ A good point that when people with dim views of the future have *power* bad things happen.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

11 months

You read histories about these people and (most) weren't varsity-athlete, club-starting, straight-A influencers. They were obsessed with taking things apart, putting them together, and how stuff worked and spent all their time on that. That doesn't get you into good schools.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

6/ Hall introduces the concept of the "Machiavelli Effect." It's effectively the known phenomenon of entrenched interests - ties it into Kuhnsian paradigm shifts, and argues that the effect has become much stronger over time.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

2/ The core of the book is the question "Why didn't the future that people expected in the 50's come to pass and how could we get back on track?" This question is not new, but Hall's approach is the most precise and brutal treatment I've seen.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

@arram My hunch is that the differently structured property control also leads to things like underpasses being filled with cool little bars instead of needles and garbage.

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What the World Can Learn From Life Under Tokyo’s Rail Tracks

The spaces beneath elevated railways generally get a bad rap. At least that’s the case in the U.S. and mainland Europe, where they are often considered dark, dangerous and noisy.

www.bloomberg.com

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

8. People forget that Elon was basically treated like a crackpot for *years* before SpaceX successfully launched. The question it raises is “how many projects have died because their crackpot leaders weren’t well-connected decamillionaires?”

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

Whoah. I'd had a hunch this was a case but never saw it in graph form. Explains a lot.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

1/ It's always surprised me how many people who are interested in technology are unfamiliar with Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs.) It's a great framework for communicating a technology's maturity and it's time for them to be used outside of aerospace.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 months

A thing I'd love to see: A time-lapse video of a construction site that is annotated with how much everything we're seeing costs and comments like: "These two machines aren't being used because ..." "Nothing is happening for three days because they're waiting on..."

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 months

Is academia an outdated and irredeemably broken system or is it a critical piece of modern civilization? I want to make a subtle (gasp!) argument that it's both: Academia is broken, but has unique gems at its core. The way to fix it is to focus on those and unbundle the rest.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

Realized that the soul-sucking nature of bureaucracies is that it's always your fault, never the system's or a bureaucrat's. For not filling out the form correctly, for waiting in the wrong place, for not satisfying all of the potentially contradictory requirements.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

Freeman Dyson died today. A thread because 1. Many people who haven't heard of him who should! 2. He's a gestalt person, so many people only know a few of the pieces - physicist, theoretician, builder, science fiction inspiration, literary critic, institution defier ...

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

4/ A core theme of the book is the coupling between how much energy we can harness, atom-based technology, and how we deviated from an exponentially increasing curve in energy use in the 1970's.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

29/ Carl Sagan ftw. We need to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true. When there is a paper for everything, as is now the case, it allows people to find peer reviewed evidence for any opinion.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

7/ Of of the 🧐😮 arguments is that civilian government R&D funding is *anti* correlated with quality-of-life improvements.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

6 years

@EricRWeinstein My response whenever someone says "people say/think/feel": "which people, precisely?"

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

@slatestarcodex As more community interaction moves online, things that are more transmissible through the internet become normalized more easily than those that aren't. eg. Essays, tweets, short-form videos

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

6 months

1. Really impressive that CRISPR went from discovery to helping people in ~20 years! 2. That 20 years is a pretty characteristic timescale for deep research to become products (let alone create huge companies)

@pdhsu

Patrick Hsu

6 months

The first approved CRISPR medicine in the world for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia! A huge victory for biotechnology, patients, and humanity

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

8 months

Not entirely serious thought: What if the way that large language models actually accelerate the economy is by enabling good enough communication with animals that they become much more productive? Who needs robots when you can negotiate with birds and monkeys

@mathemagic1an

Jay Hack

8 months

Parrots are clearly intelligent enough to understand video UIs They also apparently prefer watching videos of other parrots 🤔 This implies an opportunity for a "parrot streaming" platform. Looking for a team who is as excited about this opportunity as Iam

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Ben Reinhardt

6 months

I want to live in a world where technology creates more of these feels.

@SpaceX

SpaceX

6 months

Liftoff of Starship!

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

What would you want to ask someone who: - Worked at Bell Labs during its golden age - Ran a national laboratory - Started the engineering school at Harvard ? (Interviewing Venkatesh Narayanamurti later today)

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

@slatestarcodex But it's much harder to transmit doing cool physical things, and so it's harder for them to become normalized and harder to get into community where they are normalized. (I'm guilty of this myself! See the fact that I'm doing the normalized weird thing of writing a tweet thread

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 months

Bring back patronage as a prestigious thing! There are a few people who genuinely want to produce public goods and can do so effectively with two people's worth of salary (themselves + an assistant). Much more effective than university buildings! Let's make it as prestigious

@StefanFSchubert

Stefan Schubert

@StefanFSchubert

4 months

Some philanthropist should fund Dwarkesh; he provides a great public service. I'm surprised that's not already the case. Potentially many philanthropists underestimate the value of producing and disseminating high-quality ideas.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

A thread of ongoing arguments in innovation/tech/science, etc. All credit for this idea goes to @ganeumann

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

Good morning! Don't forget that we're putting a freaking helicopter on Mars today.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

Just realized that English is the Javascript of people languages.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

Realization: There are secretly three kinds of experts: 1. Experts with Power 2. Experts with Platform 3. Experts with Proficiency Ideally “Experts” are 1+2+3 but that’s often not the case. Hence arguments over “should we listen to experts?”

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

11 months

I would like to live in a world where this happens more often! h/t @tomgauld

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

2/ Before you even start, it has one of the best forwards I've ever read* and like much of the book, doesn't feel dated at all. "I have drawn on the wealth of the vocabulary of the youth of our times. Theirs is a pungent stock of words, and action marks most of them"

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

A distinction I'm starting to believe is secretly huge: People who have done 'physics-bound' work and those who haven't. (contra, 'technical' vs. 'non-technical', specific fields, etc.)

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

12/ Dwight Eisenhower was aware of the danger from coupling research to government contracts in the 1960's

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

@elidourado

Eli Dourado

1 month

@Ben_Reinhardt As a wise person once wrote, “A sober accounting of all the challenges an idea is going to face in deployment will very often lead to people not trying it.”

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

8 months

@patrickc @NickPinkston At its peak, railroad building was 3% of us gdp, which would be ~$750B

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 years

I wonder how many projects fall into the "fusion never" zone

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

21/ I realize it's purely correlational but this graph is great. (In the 🤦‍♂️ way)

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

I have a weirdly strong conviction that people consistently overestimate what can be achieved in five years but we underestimate what can be achieved in 20. Is this a real phenomena? Is there any evidence behind it?

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

@slatestarcodex Are these the things that we want to see normalized? I'm not so sure. On the margin, I don't think we need more smart ambitious online people devoting themselves to writing or coding. (This is one way that I disagree with a lot of people I respect!)

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

More on disconnect between impressive/imporant and market value: Some of the top machine tools companies -- these are the folks that enable basically the entire modern manufacturing stack -- have market caps of ~$400M. 5/

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

9/ So many good examples of Clarke's Law "When a elder preeminent scientist says that something is impossible, he’s probably wrong. When a elder preeminent scientist says something might be possible, he’s probably right."

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

8 months

This. Extremely tight 1-pagers are also one of the most compelling ways to get other people on board to help you do the hard stuff.

@eshear

Emmett Shear

8 months

How to do hard stuff: write down a 1 page doc with your key assumptions, the hypothesis/goal you want to test, and your plan to do it now read it with a maximally critical eye…does it make sense? are there gaps? iterate until you can’t find any now go execute like crazy

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

9 months

Emergent ventures but for people doing weird science/technology stuff

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

It's still mind-blowing what a big difference having a serious context-of-use makes for learning something new (tool, body of knowledge, etc.) Sitting down and saying "I'm going to learn this now" vs. "I NEED to learn this for important thing X"

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

5 years

Let's stop calling software companies 'tech' companies.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

You need to earn your place higher on the ladder of abstraction by doing hard work in the abstraction trenches.* *imho

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

There's such a disconnect between how impressive/important a tool is and its market value. Companies that are doing crazy things like building-size gantries that can both deposit material and mill it out with five-axis heads are only doing yearly revenues of $50M 4/

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

3. Elon set a precedent of “you need to go make a bunch of money in software before you can work on sweet sci fi shit” My hunch is that this is net negative because of the number of people who go for the first part and get stuck.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

7 months

@slatestarcodex There's also a "medium is the message" thing going on as well: The vast majority of the ways we share on the internet boil down to entertainment. Even serious things that are meant to start real discussions succeed or fail based on their entertainment value.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

8 months

There's a fuzzy, unnamed, but obscenely important skill that keeps coming up when you dig into successful technology managers across worlds/disciplines: Roughly, it's the ability to know how hard something is - Whether someone is slow because they're slacking or it's impossible

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

2 years

Dumb question: has anybody done serious, detailed work on the mechanisms that drive technological s-curves? They're this empirical phenomenon that most people seem to just accept as fact, but what determines the parameters? Are there mechanisms creating a true sigmoid?

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

11 months

The trend continues in college -- everybody is grade obsessed and doing a million activities so that by the time they graduate, many people barely know enough to even start the journey of not being useless in a research lab.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

How do you interact with folks who are lovely humans, but are part of a profession that you think is actively making the world worse?

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

@matthewclifford 41. Elon's consistent playfulness is underrated. See: twitter, tesla in space stunt, cameos in shows/movies, etc. Playfulness in general is underrated - I suspect it's a hard-to-fake indicator of thinking for yourself. Adults, esp in public, are expected to have decorum.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 months

I want to build a world where people don’t need to be Elon-level to create and scale awesome hardware. It’s not a law of physics that it needs to be as hard as it is!

@balajis

Balaji

3 months

Hardware is hard. That’s why Elon is by far the greatest founder of all time. Remember — countless startups die just while trying to put stationary beige boxes on desktops. Very smart people get crushed by supply chain disruptions, or China tariffs, or lockdowns, or shipping

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

@vgr I suspect what people actually want is to live in a medium-big city that has a few good third spaces where you can consistently run into people and good transportation so the overhead to visit is not too high.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

3 months

I want to double down on this one! My mental update is that drastically cheaper energy production might not just be the key to an abundant, wonderful future, but an existential imperative as well. More available energy is what keeps us out of fragility-inducing zero sum games

@WorksInProgMag

Works in Progress

@WorksInProgMag

3 months

From the Archives: The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free. @Ben_Reinhardt writes:

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

32/ Hans Rosling has a good framework for thinking about wealth in terms of transportation. The last sentence is the gut punch.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 year

The vast majority of Earth is uninhabitable without technology. It's easy to forget that clothes, fire, and hand-axes needed to be invented before we could expand from Africa. Space is harder, but no different. The question is: what are the new fire and hand axes?

@dwallacewells

David Wallace-Wells

1 year

“We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive.”

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Ben Reinhardt

4 years

17. Elon's precise communication style completely makes you forget that he's not actually the best orator. Most people do the opposite - they use superb oratory to obscure imprecise thought.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

1 month

@ByrneHobart

Byrne Hobart

1 month

@Ben_Reinhardt The meta corollary is that R&D pays if you have a monopoly. IIRC Bell Labs paid for itself by reducing the amount of lead AT&T had to use.

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Ben Reinhardt

4 years

23/ Arguably, we wouldn't even have normal cars under the current regulatory regime.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

22/ And this is why better technology doesn't mean you'll win.

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 months

Every year I do a one-year planning process that looks back at a five year plan that I first created in 2019. This is the first year I needed to go back and evaluate myself on my five-year goals - it's kind of shocking how well I managed to do on them!

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

57. Elon's 'project generation function' looks like*: 1) Find old idea that had a fundamental constraint that has been relaxed by new technology 2) Figure out what can be done by 10-20 people with ~$10-50m in 1-3 years 3) Do it *From the outside, obviously

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@Ben_Reinhardt

Ben Reinhardt

4 years

13/ More arguments that research funding is not strongly correlated to actual awesome stuff

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