I want to help people start historically great labs. Operational histories on history's best R&D orgs.

I’ve always viewed FreakTakes as a small applied research shop. Discontented geniuses set out to run new science orgs or ambitious scientific philanthropies; I produce pieces that help some of them make decisions that determine parts of how to structure their orgs. I can’t do what they do — I wish I could. They do not have the time to look into the minutiae of the R&amp;D operations from history that inspire their work.

Eric Gilliam

An applied research shop becomes a bit more applied

A New Chapter At FreakTakes

Unlike the rest of the FreakTakes ARPA series, today’s piece does not have the usual narrative structure. It is, instead, a set of personal notes cleaned up and re-structured as a post. While the post is atypical, the ARPA series would be incomplete if I did not outline the factors that mark key regime changes at the agency over time.

Three variables that mark key regime changes in ARPA history

A Note on the Changing Faces of (D)ARPA

Bottom Line Up Front: Recently, large pots of federal funds have been set aside for chip research. A significant portion of these funds should find their way to research teams that operate like the best research groups from the prior, vertically-integrated era. Two ideal teams to learn from are BBN — the prime ARPAnet contractor — and CMU’s early autonomous vehicle teams, who laid much of the groundwork for the autonomous vehicle revolution.

Alternative Title — How to optimally build at the top: the case for BBN-model orgs

Everything Old is New Again: Old research models for new-era semiconductor research

This piece covers how Kelly Johnson managed Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works. In its early decades, Skunk Works continuously produced novel aircraft that pushed the aviation industry forward. Its three most iconic aircraft were the U-2 “spy plane,” the Sr-71 Blackbird — still considered a cutting-edge aircraft 60 years after it was built — and the partially DARPA-funded F-117 Nighthawk — the first stealth bomber.

And Many Stories About the Maleffects of Bureaucracy on R&amp;D

Managing Lockheed’s Skunk Works

This piece is a part of a FreakTakes series. The goal is to put together a series of administrative histories on specific DARPA projects just as I have done for many industrial R&amp;D labs and other research orgs on FreakTakes.

Three North Star Applications Projects from DARPA's Strategic Computing Portfolio

The Autonomous Land Vehicle, Pilot's Associate, and Battle Management

Today’s piece was put together with the help of several conversations with Answer.AI co-founder Jeremy Howard.

Lessons Answer.AI can learn from history’s greatest R&amp;D labs

This piece is an accompaniment to today’s MOSIS piece. So please read the MOSIS piece before starting this one.

This piece is an accompaniment to today’s MOSIS piece.

Strategic Computing's Machine Acquisition Program

I’ve taken to calling the pieces I write for FreakTakes “administrative histories.” The reason I opted for that name instead of “progress studies histories” or “metascience histories” is that it was the name that drew the fewest confused stares and/or eye rolls from the scientists and engineers whom I hope to attract.

Coming Soon...Diving into ARPA History

DARPA's varied approaches to developing early parallel computers

ILLIAC IV and the Connection Machine

Works in Progress released a piece from me diving into Thomas Edison’s Herculean contributions as a technical entrepreneur. He was not often the first to invent the technologies which his name has become synonymous with, but he did not even see himself as an ‘inventor.’  We have a word for people like him now: technical entrepreneur And he was the best ever.

Thomas Edison, Technical Entrepreneur

This piece is noticeably longer (twice the length) than the others on this Substack.

A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology

Hey Team! As you know, a lot of what I do is outline the details of how scientific systems and research institutes of the past worked. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking my first step in doing this kind of profile with one of the present, well-known, new science orgs! I’ll be spending a week on the ground (as well as more time in the coming months) at the lab interviewing, observing, etc. I already have a list of things I plan on looking into.

What would you like to know about how the new science orgs are run?

(Spotify link here if you prefer) To accompany my piece in the coming issue of

 Works in Progress

on Thomas Edison, I’ve put together the first-ever podcast episode for this Substack. It mostly dives into stories that didn’t make it into the

 Works in Progress

piece, so please check that out in a few weeks!

What was it truly like inside the great man's lab?

Tales of Edison's Lab

Subscribe now I’ve finally updated the “About” section of this Substack. For months and months, I put it off because I was so busy working a job and writing at night. Then, I began writing full-time and concerned myself wholly with making sure I kept up producing novel pieces as a “professional.” Today, I finally got to it. And I realized this was the perfect opportunity to do something I’ve never done: a subscriber push.

I’ve finally updated the “About” section of this Substack.

Update: What is FreakTakes "about"?

To this point, I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this Substack covering the work of scientists from the early-to-mid-1900s — a golden era of American science and innovation — in a familiar setting: the university.

Irving Langmuir, the General Electric Research Laboratory, and when applications lead to theory

If you’re interested in the structure of scientific institutions, we’re living through remarkably exciting times. This past week I was corresponding with Gerald Holton, whose 1952 work I covered in my piece When do ideas get easier to find?. Holton, now 100 years old, is obviously spending less time actively working and keeping up with the fields in which he was prolific in his heyday.

How Karl Compton believed a research department should be run

The MIT Series

Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen opened their 2019

 Atlantic

piece that helped jump-start the progress studies movement with the following passage: In my eyes, MIT is entirely deserving of this honor: being used as the authors’ first example of an organization that generated progress.

A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 1: Training the engineers who built the country

Subscribe now  Since the last article on WW2-era German science was so well-received, I’ve decided to keep the theme of great pieces of scholarship about scientific history going. This week’s post is largely drawn from the essays of Gerard Holton. Holton’s work is, similar to the scholarship covered in the previous post, criminally under-talked about in the progress studies community.

And why progress studies may be much older than you think

When do ideas get easier to find?

Subscribe now In most Engineering Innovation posts, I try to provide some new, evidence-based argument on how to improve the innovation pipeline. The posts try to bring readers on the journey through the academic evidence and relevant history that informs the argument. But this post will be different. In this post, I won’t be taking a stand at all.

Would you rather lose 10% of your researchers or 10% of your labs?

Bombs, Brains, and Science

America’s sub-optimal use of applied and basic grants is a major problem.

Is America’s applied and basic research really “applied” or “basic”?

Speaking as a social scientist…real scientists are the coolest

I love progress studies and metascience. I’ve loved it since before I knew it had a name. I initially stumbled into the field while doing background research on the Manhattan Project for a project I was working on at my job.

Creating a New Ecosystem of Research and Innovation

Welcome to the Data Barguments section of Freaktakes! This is the whimsical part of the Substack that I do for fun. The other section of the Substack, Engineering Innovation is where I do my serious writing on metascience and progress studies related things. Data Barguments are the articles that nobody asked for, nobody needed, but people think are pretty damn fun.

Welcome to the Data Barguments section of Freaktakes!

I answer the questions you'd argue with your friends about at the bar...but with data

Corin Wagen

Don Swanson’s career started on a path familiar to many who read this blog.

The Past and Present of Computer-Augmented Hypothesis Generation

In this ‘Short’ I’ll share a few excerpts from Feynman’s oral history that give readers an idea of:

Feynman on journal reviews, conferences, and the open-mindedness of the physics profession

ARPA's early decades of success have made the ARPA model iconic.

A Scrappy Complement to FROs: Building More BBNs

We’ve all heard that “DARPA invented the Internet.” But few have heard of BBN, the contractor that did the most work to bring the ARPAnet into existence.

“The Third University of Cambridge”: BBN and the Development of the ARPAnet

From a historical perspective, the burden of knowledge hypothesis is flimsy. For those who don’t know, I’m referring to the hypothesis that scientific ideas get significantly more difficult to find as knowledge continually progresses. My lack of faith in the hypothesis does not stem from some knee-jerk reaction against hypotheses that imply human progress will slow down. In fact, I used to assume that the burden of knowledge hypothesis was true.

An alternative hypothesis to the 'burden of knowledge' theory of the slowdown

Math and Physics’ Divorce, Poetry, and the Scientific Slowdown

Several subscribers (mostly involved with the deep tech VC community) have requested that I write some pieces that look deeply at some programs that are already doing things well.

Unpacking the ‘idea’ of entrepreneurship: A case study in successful translational medicine

It has been about three weeks since the last piece for the Engineering Innovation Substack. I apologize for the delay, but I think the delay will be worth it. I’ve been working on a series of (at least) three pieces that serve as a bit of a (short) progress studies history of MIT. This is a set of pieces that I specifically had in mind when I started this newsletter and I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to share them with you all.

And a piece you might love that you probably missed

Coming pieces from the Engineering Innovation Substack

Each piece in the MIT series can stand alone for the most part, but I’ve written them in such a way that they build off each other.

A Progress Studies History of Early MIT— Part 2: An Industrial Research Powerhouse

Subscribe now The importance of grant-funding panels in science cannot be overstated. Every year in the US, tens of billions of dollars of scientific grant-funding get allocated based on the whims of these panels. The opinions of panels have a massive influence over what can and cannot get researched.

How to solicit expert opinions without stifling creativity

New ideas for making optimal use of experts in grant-funding

I just finished Warren Weaver’s ludicrously underrated autobiography,

 Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science

(It’s so out of print that the only copies I could even find were $80+ and they were few and far between)

 .

I’m working on a long-form post about some major takeaways from the book, but, in the meantime, I couldn’t resist releasing a Short covering a few other interesting pieces of the book.

Also: why the ‘burden of knowledge’ might be more of a social problem than a knowledge problem

How fast can a bureaucracy grow in a government scientific department?

Subscribe now

 This Week’s Article

The primary reason I’m writing this update is to inform subscribers that the article that was slated to come out this Friday will be a few days late. I came down with an infection this week and progress was a bit slow as a result. The planned article will incorporate a lot of ideas from Gerald Holton, a physicist/science historian and all-around fantastic thinker.

This week's article, a new partnership coming soon, and who I am

Engineering Innovation Updates

Yesterday, I stumbled across a dataset of California STD rates from 2001 until a couple of years ago…and..well…this article pretty much wrote itself. As a responsible social scientist, I obviously had to lay out my hypothesis before conducting my data work because that’s what responsible social scientists do when they’re pretending to be real scientists.

Which California County Has the Highest STD Rates? (It’s SF)

This was initially a section of my larger Bell Labs post. It would have come between the “Freedom comes in many forms” and “The mobile phone system” sections. I am publishing the section in a separate post because it would have been needless detail to ~85% of the readers.

This was initially a section of my larger Bell Labs post.

Bonus: More details on how Bell Labs operated

This piece contains some longer excerpts from Watson’s writing about the discovery of DNA that tell the story far more beautifully than I ever could.

Watson’s Double Helix, one small clue, and the importance of knowing what you don’t know

This post is the first of my new Substack, the Engineering Innovation Newsletter. Every piece in this newsletter shares a common goal: to propose concrete ways forward for those looking to help shape the future of technological research and innovation.

The Engineering Innovation Newsletter. Every piece in this newsletter shares a common goal: to propose concrete ways forward for those looking to help shape the future of technological research and innovation.

What should new-age research organizations be optimizing for?

A large chunk of Twitter is furious.

In the wake of Tom Brady winning his 7th Super Bowl Ring, the consensus NFL GOAT (Greatest of All Time) has started to be called the "GOAT of GOATS." Brady's Super Bowl win this last week was with a new team and a shortened offseason due to Covid-19. This seemed to solidify to most doubters that the fabled "Patriot Way" may have been the "Tom Brady Way" all along.

The GOAT of GOATS

Check out my guest post for the ChinaTalk Substack on recent innovation in the sport of jiu-jitsu and how it can help us think about OpenAI’s future.

How Recent Innovation in Jiu-jitsu Helps Us Think About OpenAI’s Future

Tristan Wagner

In the previous Engineering Innovation post, I detailed how America’s research ecosystem has become less applied and less exploratory since the mid-1900s. To most, the concept of true exploratory research is fairly intuitive. But wrapping one’s mind around research that is truly applied isn’t so obvious. In today’s piece, I’ll provide a concrete example of a possible course of applied research from the field of economics.

The Industrialist: An applied R&amp;D lab bringing the insights of development economics to Indian factories

Listen now | The centerpiece of today’s post is an extensive interview with Chuck Thorpe. Thorpe, now President of Clarkson University, spent over two decades at Carnegie Mellon University. These years were largely spent as a student, project manager, and PI working on Carnegie Mellon’s autonomous vehicle vision research.

An Interview with Chuck Thorpe on CMU: Operating an autonomous vehicle research powerhouse

Many new science orgs are looking to pursue research that has the positive aspects of both “applied” research and “basic” research. To me, this is a very reasonable approach. After all, the “applied vs. basic research” distinction has always been a rather arbitrary one. Some research projects feel like they are squarely in one bucket or the other, but it’s not always that clear.

Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer

How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?

This Substack was largely born out of me sitting on a mountain of fun facts about early 1900s science and the economics of innovation. Some of that, less than 10%, makes it into the longer pieces which make quite coherent, fleshed-out points. But, sometimes, there’s just a fun quote or graph that can stand alone that I think you all would get a kick out of. To this point, sadly, I’ve been leaving these fun tidbits out of the Substack altogether.

And how they are very relevant to progress studies

Four fun anecdotes from the Feynman Oral Histories

I made my first podcast appearance on the Foresight Institute’s podcast! The episode turned out to be a phenomenal one-hour summary of the most important ideas FreakTakes has covered. YouTube and Spotify embeddings are below.

Where I discuss Bell Labs systems engineers, giving away $100 million like Warren Weaver, and more.

My Appearance on the Foresight Institute Podcast

I’m excited to announce that this is the first post of the Engineering Innovation Newsletter in partnership with Good Science Project. Good Science Project is a new organization dedicated to improving the funding and practice of science.

We won the war on infectious diseases, but now we need to learn from it

Erik Hoel, who writes

 The Intrinsic Perspective,

has just announced that he is leaving his position at Tufts to pursue Substack writing. If that name does not ring a bell, readers of this Substack may know him as the “guy who wrote the

 Why we stopped making Einsteins

piece” on aristocratic tutoring. Hoel is a great thinker who integrates fields seamlessly, and that’s part of the reason he chose to leave academia.

Erik Hoel is a great thinker who integrates disciplines seamlessly. Here's why he's leaving academia.

Birds, Frogs, and...Squirrels?

MOSIS

This post is an accompaniment to Tony Kulesa’s excellent piece on the history of Y Combinator.
 

Many in Silicon Valley think of Y Combinator (YC) as the sum of its services. The services are, in short: cash, a network, and guidance for early-stage (mostly software) founders. The YC model and its effectiveness have become widely known and understood in Silicon Valley.

Marrying early YC's goals with systems from the mid-20th C. deep tech pipeline

An Alternative Approach to Deep Tech VC

A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 3: The end of the beginning

Author’s note: After publishing this, the graphic in this article ended up making the front page of Reddit and that was really cool! If you're anything like me you've probably wondered, "What do white people actually do for fun?" Are their weekends just golf and skiing if they're on the rich end? Building decks and fishing if they're more working class? Is there a lot of bocce ball involved?

What's Whiter than Golf and "Horse Girls"?

Subscribe now  Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann.

What his career can teach us about the nature of scientific creativity.

John von Neumann: A Strange Kind of Bird

As some readers know, I’ve recently joined Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil). While I hope to put many ideas from FreakTakes into practice at RenPhil, I’ll be particularly focused on one goal: building more BBNs.

How the Topos Institute tackles problems in complex systems