The thing I don’t get is—if that’s right, why is stuff so good? I feel like my life is generally enriched by high-quality products made by big corporations. Not only is the stuff good, but it’s improving over time—surely that can’t just be because of inertia, right?
Examples of good stuff made by big corporations where I think quality has improved over time:
laptops
smartphones
pens
jackets
snacks (they are at least good at being delicious)
Are those things that good? I don’t feel like I notice a huge quality of life difference from the pens I used ten years ago versus the pens I use now. Same with laptops and smartphones (although I care unusually little about that kind of thing so maybe I’m just not tracking it). Medicines have definitely improved although it seems worth noting that practically everyone I know has some terrible health problem they can’t fix and we all still die.
I feel like pushing the envelope on feature improvements is way easier than pushing the envelope on fundamental progress, and progress on the former seems compatible, to me, with pretty broken institutions. In some respects, small feature improvements is what you’d expect from middle manager hell, kind of like the lowest common denominator of a legible signal that you’re doing something. It’s true that these companies probably wouldn’t exist if they were all around terrible. But imo it’s more that they become pretty myopic and lame relative to what they could be. I think academia has related problems, too.
To be honest I actually do use the same pens as I used 10 years ago. Laptops have faster processors at least, and I can now do more stuff with them than I used to be able to. I don’t have a terrible health problem I can’t fix and haven’t died yet.
I totally believe that we’re doing way worse than we could be and management practices are somehow to blame, just because the world isn’t optimal and management is high-leverage. But in this model, I don’t understand how you even get sustained improvements.
Maybe the whole moral mazes theory is false and this is just BS.
When you have a reasonable feedback loop, the costs imposed here add up to a “significant diminishing marginal return”, but maybe don’t actually turn negative. “Big organizations have diminishing returns to more labor” was already part of my model before Moral Mazes, and Moral Mazes just happen to be one of the mechanisms.
Hypothesis 1: innovation mostly happens in startups, and then they eventually get bought or copied by big corporations. (I think this hypothesis is actually false in many ways – my understanding is that serious research R&D type innovation tends to happen in huge companies like IBM, Google, etc, and startups do something more like “combining obvious ideas in simple ways.” But, still seems at least somewhat relevant)
evidence for Hypothesis 1: DeepMind was created originally as a small lab, that was later bought by google.
evidence against: Google seems to have other reseearch departments doing at least somewhat comparable research (but, I don’t actually know offhand where Google Brain came from, maybe it was also a small lab that got bought?)
Hypothesis 2: The innovation we see in big companies comes from R&D departments that are somehow particularly-sheltered from goodhart dynamics. (Maybe a big company has lots of random pockets of organization within it, which vary in maziness, there’s just some selection effects on where innovation happens)
My understanding is that Amazon-in-particular has a fairly parallelized structure, which seems less vulnerable to hierarchical-goodhart dynamics. Someone in the comments here noted that Walmart might be reasonable maze resistant by “lots of the employees work in a place where the object level work is right in front of them”, which also seems reasonably parallelized. (Amazon and Walmart are the two largest companies by employee-count.
Some progress comes from incremental engineering. Some comes from deeper research. When I about my day-to-day working at LessWrong, there is just a lot of obvious stuff to work on / improve.
Experiment to run: Check for the highest rated progress (on Amazon? On some kind of consumer reports? On wirecutter?). See which companies produced the best product. See how big the companies that produce the best products are. (I think operationalizing the prediction here is a bit tricky, requires getting good data, dealing with some confounders and stuff. Will think on it)
Google Brain was developed as part of X (Google’s “moonshot factory”), which is their way of trying to create startups/startup culture within a large corporation. So was Waymo.
The thing I don’t get is—if that’s right, why is stuff so good? I feel like my life is generally enriched by high-quality products made by big corporations. Not only is the stuff good, but it’s improving over time—surely that can’t just be because of inertia, right?
Examples of good stuff made by big corporations where I think quality has improved over time:
laptops
smartphones
pens
jackets
snacks (they are at least good at being delicious)
beverages (e.g. kombucha, fizzy water)
medicines, I think?
Counterpoint to “the stuff is good and it’s improving all the time”. (More.)
As ever, Gwern has good content here.
Are those things that good? I don’t feel like I notice a huge quality of life difference from the pens I used ten years ago versus the pens I use now. Same with laptops and smartphones (although I care unusually little about that kind of thing so maybe I’m just not tracking it). Medicines have definitely improved although it seems worth noting that practically everyone I know has some terrible health problem they can’t fix and we all still die.
I feel like pushing the envelope on feature improvements is way easier than pushing the envelope on fundamental progress, and progress on the former seems compatible, to me, with pretty broken institutions. In some respects, small feature improvements is what you’d expect from middle manager hell, kind of like the lowest common denominator of a legible signal that you’re doing something. It’s true that these companies probably wouldn’t exist if they were all around terrible. But imo it’s more that they become pretty myopic and lame relative to what they could be. I think academia has related problems, too.
To be honest I actually do use the same pens as I used 10 years ago. Laptops have faster processors at least, and I can now do more stuff with them than I used to be able to. I don’t have a terrible health problem I can’t fix and haven’t died yet.
I totally believe that we’re doing way worse than we could be and management practices are somehow to blame, just because the world isn’t optimal and management is high-leverage. But in this model, I don’t understand how you even get sustained improvements.
I agree that’s confusing. Some thoughts.
Maybe the whole moral mazes theory is false and this is just BS.
When you have a reasonable feedback loop, the costs imposed here add up to a “significant diminishing marginal return”, but maybe don’t actually turn negative. “Big organizations have diminishing returns to more labor” was already part of my model before Moral Mazes, and Moral Mazes just happen to be one of the mechanisms.
Hypothesis 1: innovation mostly happens in startups, and then they eventually get bought or copied by big corporations. (I think this hypothesis is actually false in many ways – my understanding is that serious research R&D type innovation tends to happen in huge companies like IBM, Google, etc, and startups do something more like “combining obvious ideas in simple ways.” But, still seems at least somewhat relevant)
evidence for Hypothesis 1: DeepMind was created originally as a small lab, that was later bought by google.
evidence against: Google seems to have other reseearch departments doing at least somewhat comparable research (but, I don’t actually know offhand where Google Brain came from, maybe it was also a small lab that got bought?)
Hypothesis 2: The innovation we see in big companies comes from R&D departments that are somehow particularly-sheltered from goodhart dynamics. (Maybe a big company has lots of random pockets of organization within it, which vary in maziness, there’s just some selection effects on where innovation happens)
My understanding is that Amazon-in-particular has a fairly parallelized structure, which seems less vulnerable to hierarchical-goodhart dynamics. Someone in the comments here noted that Walmart might be reasonable maze resistant by “lots of the employees work in a place where the object level work is right in front of them”, which also seems reasonably parallelized. (Amazon and Walmart are the two largest companies by employee-count.
Some progress comes from incremental engineering. Some comes from deeper research. When I about my day-to-day working at LessWrong, there is just a lot of obvious stuff to work on / improve.
Experiment to run: Check for the highest rated progress (on Amazon? On some kind of consumer reports? On wirecutter?). See which companies produced the best product. See how big the companies that produce the best products are. (I think operationalizing the prediction here is a bit tricky, requires getting good data, dealing with some confounders and stuff. Will think on it)
Google Brain was developed as part of X (Google’s “moonshot factory”), which is their way of trying to create startups/startup culture within a large corporation. So was Waymo.