But realistically not all projects will hoard all their ideas. Suppose instead that for the leading project, 10% of their new ideas are discovered in-house, and 90% come from publicly available discoveries accessible to all. Then, to continue the car analogy, it’s as if 90% of the lead car’s acceleration comes from a strong wind that blows on both cars equally. The lead of the first car/project will lengthen slightly when measured by distance/ideas, but shrink dramatically when measured by clock time.
The upshot is that we should return to that table of factors and add a big one to the left-hand column: Leads shorten automatically as general progress speeds up, so if the lead project produces only a small fraction of the general progress, maintaining a 3-year lead throughout a soft takeoff is (all else equal) almost as hard as growing a 3-year lead into a 30-year lead during the 20th century. In order to overcome this, the factors on the right would need to be very strong indeed.
But won’t “ability to get a DSA” be linked to the lead as measured in ideas rather than clock time?
Maybe. My model was a bit janky; I basically assume DSA-ability comes from clock-time lead but then also assumed that as technology and progress speed up the necessary clock-time lead shrinks. And I guesstimated that it would shrink to 0.3 − 3 years. I bet there’s a better way, that pegs DSA-ability to ideas lead… it would be a super cool confirmation of this better model if we could somehow find data confirming that years-needed-for-DSA has fallen in lockstep as ideas-produced-per-year has risen.
But won’t “ability to get a DSA” be linked to the lead as measured in ideas rather than clock time?
Maybe. My model was a bit janky; I basically assume DSA-ability comes from clock-time lead but then also assumed that as technology and progress speed up the necessary clock-time lead shrinks. And I guesstimated that it would shrink to 0.3 − 3 years. I bet there’s a better way, that pegs DSA-ability to ideas lead… it would be a super cool confirmation of this better model if we could somehow find data confirming that years-needed-for-DSA has fallen in lockstep as ideas-produced-per-year has risen.