I think that the case of Aubrey de Grey, the leader of SENS, is a good case study.
He seems to think that his high-level anti-aging research strategy is novel and tractable. All he needs is the funding to hire enough researchers and equipment to implement it, and the knowledge will flow.
To develop that strategy in the first place, he needed to be plugged into a network of other scientists studying various aspects of aging, both to gain knowledge and credibility.
His SENS foundation and book, Ending Aging, are both aimed in part at broadcasting his message and expanding his network. He’s not trying to increase his knowledge (of aging or of making money) in order to put together the cure or the cash for himself. Instead, he’s trying to expand his network, to convince government or private funders to support his vision.
I think that to make progress on evaluating these hypotheses (effectiveness is bottlenecked by network vs. by knowledge), we need to figure out how to distinguish them clearly.
For example, parts of the psychological research community seem bottlenecked by their collective lack of knowledge about statistics. But if they committed to collaborate more closely with some statisticians, that would probably help. Does that represent a “knowledge bottleneck” or a “network bottleneck?”
Likewise, I currently have only vague guesses about the specific skills/knowledge that would make me an effective tissue engineer. That’ll become much more clear once I’m working in a lab next year. So is my problem that I’m bottlenecked by lack of knowledge about the specific needs of the lab I’ll be working in, or is it that I’m not plugged into the social network at that lab?
I think that the distinction might rest more in written vs. unwritten knowledge.
Aubrey de Grey, the psychologists, and myself, are all bottlenecked by our lack of unwritten knowledge (how to meet an anti-aging billionaire, how to initiate a collaboration with a statistician, which lab I’ll end up working in and what their needs are). Unwritten knowledge tends to be stored in social networks.
It’s just the fact that people often think of “knowledge” as book knowledge that creates this confusion. So perhaps I should restate this hypothesis:
It may also be that above a certain level of rationality, access to unwritten knowledge, not one’s ability to learn and practice publicly-available skills and knowledge, become the bottleneck.
I think that the case of Aubrey de Grey, the leader of SENS, is a good case study.
He seems to think that his high-level anti-aging research strategy is novel and tractable. All he needs is the funding to hire enough researchers and equipment to implement it, and the knowledge will flow.
To develop that strategy in the first place, he needed to be plugged into a network of other scientists studying various aspects of aging, both to gain knowledge and credibility.
His SENS foundation and book, Ending Aging, are both aimed in part at broadcasting his message and expanding his network. He’s not trying to increase his knowledge (of aging or of making money) in order to put together the cure or the cash for himself. Instead, he’s trying to expand his network, to convince government or private funders to support his vision.
I think that to make progress on evaluating these hypotheses (effectiveness is bottlenecked by network vs. by knowledge), we need to figure out how to distinguish them clearly.
For example, parts of the psychological research community seem bottlenecked by their collective lack of knowledge about statistics. But if they committed to collaborate more closely with some statisticians, that would probably help. Does that represent a “knowledge bottleneck” or a “network bottleneck?”
Likewise, I currently have only vague guesses about the specific skills/knowledge that would make me an effective tissue engineer. That’ll become much more clear once I’m working in a lab next year. So is my problem that I’m bottlenecked by lack of knowledge about the specific needs of the lab I’ll be working in, or is it that I’m not plugged into the social network at that lab?
I think that the distinction might rest more in written vs. unwritten knowledge.
Aubrey de Grey, the psychologists, and myself, are all bottlenecked by our lack of unwritten knowledge (how to meet an anti-aging billionaire, how to initiate a collaboration with a statistician, which lab I’ll end up working in and what their needs are). Unwritten knowledge tends to be stored in social networks.
It’s just the fact that people often think of “knowledge” as book knowledge that creates this confusion. So perhaps I should restate this hypothesis: