Review of Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization
Written by Donald W. Braben, published by Stripe Press
Drunk on the Elixir of Civilization
The world around us is born of the fruits of scientific progress, so why not progress faster? Donald Braben’s book is primarily about how to stimulate scientific progress in a meaningful way, why progress is important, yet has slowed, and how his past experiments in science patronage helped augment our understanding of nature.
Braben starts with a survey of scientific achievement, and how most aspects of our lives today have been improved by these new ideas. Specifically, we can think of extremely famous scientists who radically changed our understanding of reality such as Einstein, Crick and Watson, and Planck. Thanks to their discoveries, we live much more comfortable, enriched lives than our ancestors. However, scientific progress severely slowed around the year 1970, and of note, all of the benefits of new inventions have slowed with it.
This is bad for a number of reasons, from the mundane (Folding clothes hasn’t gotten easier) to the existential (We might not beat dinosaurs in the “surviving an asteroid” game). The mundane help that technology provides us seems so small that it fades to the background, helping us without intruding. Consider, how comfortable are you right now? If you are too hot or cold, how easily could you fix that?
When scientific progress slows down, we are also forgoing the benefits of saving the lives of people who died, but for better technology. Better supply chains would deliver food and shelter to those in dire poverty. Better medicine would save the lives of those dying of terminal illness. Better car safety would prevent deaths from trauma. This is not to say that we could not still save lives with today’s technology, and perhaps have a moral obligation to do so. Instead, better technology would reduce the effort and work needed to do the same amount of good for the world.
Braben refers to the great scientists of the 20th century as the Planck Club, a catch-all for the scientists who did basic research in a new direction and made discoveries that changed our world. Thanks to their work, we enjoyed fast economic growth and rising standards of living for much of the 20th century. Given their contributions to our world, we should make sure that the same kinds of research are always being done in some capacity.
The kind of basic research in question revolves around new approaches to new problems, with no specific short term goal in mind, but rather, expanding the state of knowledge on a topic for its own sake. The benefits of doing this can be immense, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in short term benefit, and the costs should be low. In Braben’s opinion, transformative research represents a fairly low risk and extremely high return activity. While the precise returns created as a result of this research can be difficult to measure, his survey of the scientists that he funded show that they frequently came up with really interesting work with a few examples of scientists making a ton of money.
Sharpening the Sword of Damocles
My favorite literary technique to make me pay attention is to threaten my life and the lives of my loved ones, and Braben does a terrific job at this. He creates a scenario called a ‘Damocles Zone’ where our civilization could be pushed into a collapse scenario, and there is nothing that we can do to stop it. Moreover, we would not necessarily see the danger coming until it was too late! We are normally shielded from these kinds of scenarios by feedback mechanisms that prevent very bad things from happening very quickly. One of the most important mechanisms for preventing civilizational collapse is scientific progress, which allows us to dull Swords of Damocles before they run us through.
Braben’s worry here is that scientific progress is being slowed by concerns about efficient rates of returns strangling creativity. One of my favorite sentences of his: “We now live in an age in which efficiency—that is, perceptions of efficiency—is paramount, particularly in resource allocation and use. But the relationship between efficiency and creativity is not understood” (55). To take speed as an example, if we are only concerned with making better running shoes, we will ignore the person who jumped on a horse. In search of incremental improvements, we would abandon the radical breakthroughs that serve as the engine of economic growth. I think that this might be unfair to incrementalism. Many problems do not need to be solved by creating an entirely new form of knowledge that upends our understanding of the Universe. However, without flipping a field on its head, we will be waiting around for a very long time waiting for incremental improvements to make a utopia, if we ever get there at all. Braben thinks this problem could be solved by funding basic research done by scientists who have radically new approaches.
Very Important Research
The most important phrase of the book is “Transformative Research” referring to huge scientific progress and, I hope, vast wealth and status conferred onto the genius who made the discovery. My favorite implication of this chapter is that believing the Big Bang model is wrong, and transformative research would show us what actually happened. Braben says, “References in the literature today imply that it is established fact, a tablet of stone…but the model’s status as hypothesis is rarely mentioned” (68). Picking a fight with physicists was extremely popular in high school, and it’s good to see Braben bringing it back.
More seriously, a scientist engaged in transformative research must be willing to challenge a fundamental axiom of our understanding, such as the Big Bang model, in order to transform a field. Challenging the consensus is not done in order to bully nerds, but because the consensus happens to be in the way of a deeper, more correct understanding of reality. Finally, and most grating on our usual perceptions of how we spend our money, transformative research cannot be funded with a target in mind. Support must be so open-ended that a scientist could work on any subject at all, with the possibility that something interesting will come of it. Transformative research sounds so risky because there is no specific goal, and indeed there cannot be a goal. In order to get creative work done, the scientist has to be able to pursue their interest in a principled, but unconstrained way. The problem with any constraints that you could create is that you do not know which groundbreaking work would fail due to your constraints. It sounds slightly maddening. “Please mail a check to this address, where a smart and disagreeable person will use it to do what they feel like. No follow up questions.”
Democracy VS Olympians
Claiming to belong to the same club as Einstein or Planck would be bold, but Braben points out that no famous scientist from that period knew that his discovery would upend the world before he made it. No rainbows appeared when they were born, and their status as Olympians came after their discovery. However, current day Scientific Olympians (Love that title), have their interests smothered by Democracy. Specifically, the peer review process prevents transformative research from happening because one’s peers are the substrate of consensus. In the same way that you find out what is fashionable from observing others, you would find the scientific consensus by undergoing peer review. That is a huge problem because peer review fails what Braben dubs “The Planck test”. If Einstein had to undergo peer review for his work, he would have been rejected for a lack of proof and ignoring the current consensus in physics. We cannot benefit from transformative research if democratic consensus smothers it in the cradle.
The other really terrible part of incrementalism, which we now see is guarded by peer review, is that we are increasing our spending on research and development as a civilization, and at the same time getting less for our money. Incrementalism is a scam! Maybe not quite that strong, but if we do not have as many breakthroughs at the same time as we increase our spending, then Braben states that the implication would be that the selection criteria for funded research might grow even tighter and more vicious. Since the selection criteria is already driving us towards danger, we are only accelerating ourselves off a cliff.
I think that this is overly pessimistic. Humans are not robots, and organizations are capable of looking at their process and wondering if the whole thing is broken, rather than assuming that they just aren’t trying hard enough. Evidence in favor of Braben is that we have been doing this for about 50 years now and have not significantly deviated from that path. Evidence in favor of my side is that really cool new advancements in science happened in late 2020 from rapid vaccines to stable, reusable rockets to step-function changes in protein folding. The book was written in 2007, prior to these changes which admittedly came much after the book, but I still claim to be right in the current day.
Hijacking as a Low-Risk Activity
Groundbreaking new research is often viewed as a high risk activity, with the odds stacked against the scientists willing to stick their neck out to try something totally new. Being fair to this viewpoint, doing this when we were hunter-gatherers would, in fact, get you killed most of the time. My favorite quote from this chapter, “Responsibility shared is responsibility declined…consensus opinion would opt for safety first as it usually does…” (109). Unfortunately, safety used to be really important, so the agenda needed to be set by those who were most intolerant of risk. Even when this agenda is supposedly hijacked, claiming that the organization is now engaged in “High-risk” research, this is not very likely to work. If you knew you were probably going to fail, and everyone around you expected you to fail, would you seriously make an attempt?
The boldest claim of the book is that we can pursue low-risk, high-reward research, as long as we go about the enterprise correctly. Braben actually quantifies how well his Venture Research Initiative did, proving that he got a massive return on investment, and consistently and radically changed scientific understanding through supporting the right researchers. My first ask about this is whether or not these results could be reproduced, or if Braben essentially got lucky. His results are groundbreaking and covered thoroughly at the end of the book. I sincerely hope that he is right, because if so, science takes dedication, but it is not slowing down simply because it is hard.
Science is About Trust
The university is the traditional font of scientific knowledge and was previously the best possible location to find a Scientific Olympian. Unfortunately, under our current funding regimes, professors who previously would have received tenure and been able to conduct transformative research can no longer do so. At the same time, universities had a new social obligation to their country to increase their enrollment. This change means that universities are no longer just repositories of talented scientists and researchers, and those who would aspire to be the same, but also must have a vastly larger infrastructure to accommodate those who are going to school to gain more knowledge, but without the specific goal of becoming a scientist themselves. This is a very interesting critique, but I wonder what the fix is. You need smart scientists to explain complicated concepts as far as I know. However, if you sap these smart scientists by making them repeatedly teach basic concepts, you rob them of the time they would spend to do transformative research. On the other hand, Feynmann himself was a huge fan of teaching.
A Sea of Mundanity
The difference might be in the specialization of scientists between explicators and researchers. Additionally, Braben says, “How do they expect that the university’s once automatic association with excellence can continue unquestioned when 50% is the proportion usually associated with average?” (132). This section is worth reading in its entirety, as Braben walks a very fine line here. He believes that because enrollment has increased, potential researchers must spend more of their time teaching undergraduates. While this in itself would not prevent research, multiple problems arise. First, certain subjects are claimed to have a lower worth, with ‘media studies’ given as an example. Next, Braben claims that a good teacher must necessarily be doing good research. The problem is that if you spend your time teaching (and grading) massive numbers of students, you will not have the time to do transformative research.
From my own experience as an undergraduate, students also suffer from this regime. I had to take many classes in huge lecture halls, receiving canned lectures on canned powerpoints, getting canned homework assignments, and taking canned tests. At worst, the point seemed to be to waste time, and vacuum money from the student body. Especially in my classes which were most similar in style to ‘media studies’, I knew that the teacher also had absolutely no way to conduct research. If you need to grade an essay from every student in a large room, you would really struggle to provide good feedback, let alone deeply think about the frontier of knowledge in your field. Instead of optimizing for producing transformative research, we are optimizing for doing the absolute bare minimum to keep the system working. Of course this system produces mostly incrementalism, because time constraints force research to be done very quickly.
Returns on Investment for Transformative Research
Braben, having diagnosed the problem and proposed a cure, then delves into his own experience funding research. Of note, he claims that more than half of his funded projects ended up actually transforming thinking in their field. In the late 1980's, he was able to do this at a cost of 100,000 pounds a year. While the average person could not fund their own venture research, the average corporate juggernaut would not even blink. The wisest among us would frown deeply and say “So what gives?”. Braben’s own research unit was shut down because, in his words, BP did not want to signal to their shareholders that they were not concentrating on their core businesses. We face Braben’s ancient and terrible foe: Bureaucrats. He references them throughout the book, but I did not want to mention them because naming a group to hate which is causing all the world’s problems and without which we would be much better off is just so…overdone. Fixing a system is much more boring than blaming a group, but I wish he would have tried harder than doing the latter.
Overall, his research group seemed to be very successful, relative to what is normally done, but I wonder about the counterfactuals here. A person who is enough of a contrarian genius to succeed at Venture Research might have also been smart enough to succeed in the peer review process. Did Venture Research directly compete over the most brilliant scientists on Earth, who might have succeeded anyway? Braben claims that funding would go to scientists who had mostly been rejected by other funding mechanisms anyway, so hopefully he was actually creating new opportunities which did not exist before, rather than siphoning top talent from larger communities into a smaller one.
Where are the Flying Cars?
We do miss certain concepts in the book. At the risk of what-aboutism, where I just claim that the book forgets to solve world hunger, world peace and world stubbed toes, I think that transformative research is not, in itself, enough. Until I can go buy a product that was made as a result of transformative research, new science is just a highly detailed piece of canon. Interesting to read, but not directly helpful. Basic research is a highly speculative field, but it only survives at the whims of the organization within which it resides. For that reason, maybe a sequel could be made “Good organizations: The Elixir of Civilization Factory”. This is a totally separate area, but necessary to fund the Scientific Olympians. We all hope that a multi-year quest to make flying cars succeeds, and our lives would be a lot better if they did. On the other hand, rent is due at the end of the month. If you can’t pay, nobody gets to solve interesting problems. This might be why we so rarely see transformative research. You need a whole lot of financial security in order to provide scientific funding, but you always need to deal with short term costs.
Transformative Research for a Better Life
I am sold on the idea that transformative research is important, and I think that we should do more. However, this might apply to your own life as well. How do you spend your time? Are you getting incrementally better or staying the same at activities that you value? Are there massive contrarians in your field of interest who claim that achieving much better results is possible? Rather than burn that person at the stake, perhaps you could attempt their approach. At the limit, you could come up with your own approach in a totally novel way, and try really hard to make it succeed. If that doesn’t work, then you can always burn yourself at the stake later to admit that you were wrong. Bring marshmallows!