The Decline of Unfettered Research with Andrew Odlyzko [Idea Machines #31‪]‬ Idea Machines

A conversation with Professor Andrew Odlyzko about the forces that have driven the paradigm changes we’ve seen across the research world in the past several decades. Andrew is a professor at the University of Minnesota and worked at Bell Labs before that. The conversation centers around his paper “The Decline of Unfettered Research” which was written in 1995 but feels even more timely today. 
Key Takeaway
The decline of unfettered research is part of a complex web of causes - from incentives, to expectations, to specialization and demographic trends. The sobering consequence is that any single explanation is probably wrong and any single intervention probably won’t be able to shift the system.
Links
The Decline of Unfettered Research
Andrew's Website
A Twitter thread of my thoughts before this podcast
(Automated, and thus mistake-filled) Transcript
 
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[00:00:00]  In this conversation. I talked to professor Andrew Odlyzko about the forces that have driven the paradigm changes we've seen across the research world. In the past several decades. Andrew is a professor at the university of Minnesota and worked at bell labs for that our conversation centers around in his paper, the decline of unfettered research, which was written in 1995, but feels even more timely today.
I've linked to it in the show notes and [00:01:00] also a Twitter thread that I wrote to get down my own thoughts. I highly recommend that you check out one of them either now or after listening to this conversation.  I realized that it might be a little weird to be talking about a paper that you wrote 25 years ago, but it, it seemed when I read it, it sort of blew my mind because it seemed so like all of it just seemed so true today.
Um, and so I was, I was wondering, uh, like first do you, do you, do you sort of think that the, the core thesis of that paper still holds up? Like how would you amend it if you had to write it again today? Oh, absolutely. I'm convinced that the base thesis is correct. And as the last quarter century has provided much more evidence to support it.
And basically if I were writing it today, I would just simply draw on this experience all those 25 years. Yeah. Yeah. Cause, okay, cool. So, so like, um, I sort of wanted to [00:02:00] establish the baseline of like asking questions about it is still, is still super relevant. Um, So, uh, just, uh, for, for the, for the listeners, um, would you sort of go through how you think of what unfettered research meets?
Because, uh, I think many people have heard of, of sort of like, like basic or, or curiosity driven research, but I think that the distinction is actually really important. Mmm. Well, yes. So basically unfettered researchers, emotional curiosity, driven research, very closely related to maybe some shades of difference with the idea here is that you kind of find the best people.
You can most promising researchers and give them essentially practically complete freedom. Give them resources, making them complete freedom to pursue the most interesting problems that they see. Um, and that was something which, uh, kind of many people still think of this as being the main mode of operations.
And that's still thought [00:03:00] the best type of research in that case, but it's definitely been fading. Yeah. So, uh, would you, would you make the art? So what, like, what is the, is the most powerful argument that unfettered research is actually not the best kind of research. Well, so why is it not the best kind of research?
So again, this is not so much an issue of world's best in some global optimization sense. And so on my essay. It wasn't really addressed to the forces that were influencing conduct of science technology research. Um, and, uh, I'm not quite saying that it's kind of ideal that it was happening. I said, well, here are the reasons.
And given the society we live in and the institutions, the general framework here is what's happened and why it