Some Announcements
Come Work With Me : Podcasts : Policy Ideas
Hi everyone-
I’ve got a bunch of announcements this week, so I spun them off into their own newsletter.
Come Work With Me at Open Philanthropy
I lead the Innovation Policy grantmaking program at Open Philanthropy and am looking to hire someone to help me run the program. The goal of the program is to support the safe acceleration of scientific and technological progress, primarily by recommending grants to people and organizations. Some of the grants we’ve recommended include J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative, the Institute for Replication, Speculative Technologies’ Brains training program, the Talent Mobility fund, and the Institute for Progress. However, there are many more promising ideas worth investigating and I need help! I’m looking for someone to identify, investigate, and manage grants within Innovation Policy. Concretely, this role would involve things like researching new funding opportunities, analyzing and evaluating the potential impact of grants, checking in with grantees, and more. I'm excited about someone joining my team and this role's potential for driving scientific progress. Learn more about the position here!
Podcast Tour
By random luck, I was on three podcasts that were released in the space of two weeks. Each one covers completely different topics that should be interesting to readers of this newsletter. In order of release:
80,000 hrs: I spent a big chunk of 2023 writing a report titled “The Returns to Science in the Presence of Technological Risk”, that looked at whether the historical benefits of scientific research were larger than forecast costs from the misuse of future biotechnology. That’s a big question (with serious implications for innovation policy grant-making, and much else!) and examining all the angles took more than 100 pages. You can read the whole thing here. Or you can listen to this podcast with Luisa Rodriguez! As a bonus, the podcast also ends with a discussion of why I remain skeptical that AI will usher in 10x faster economic growth.
Entrepreneur’s Ethic: I spoke with my former colleague Kevin Kimle at Iowa State University last week in a wide-ranging interview on what social science has to say about innovation. We talk about risk aversion in innovation, the social roots of entrepreneurship, differences between innovation at large and small firms, and more.
Macroscience: Lastly, Tim Hwang’s newly released Macroscience podcast provided a nice venue to share a framework I have for thinking about the dynamics underlying productivity growth and applying that framework to science (as a human institution). In brief, I argue that productivity growth tends to happen when there are forces for experimentation, selection, and reinforcement; I then talk about the extent to which I think those dynamics are strong or weak in different parts of science, such as in the funding of science or the performance of research.
US science and technology policy Impact
Do you have an idea for something the US government could do to improve science and technology? The Day One 2025 initiative, from the Federation of American Scientists, is looking to source ambitious ideas and work with authors to develop them into implementation-ready policy briefs that will be communicated to the relevant people in government. Some examples from the previous iteration include Mike Stebbins and Geoff Ling’s memo laying out the case for ARPA-H, Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques’ memo proposing the creation of “Focused Research Organizations,” and Lauren Shum’s memo about lead pollution from aviation fuel. Areas of interest this time around include R&D and Innovation, Emerging Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Energy and Environment, Federal Capacity, Global Security, and more. Learn more and submit an idea here by July 15.
Cheers everyone!
Matt