3min chapter

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Flying X-Wings into the Death Star: On Investing and Tech | Marc Andreessen & Richard Hanania

CSPI Podcast

CHAPTER

The Journal Game, Right?

In the last half of the 20th century, we've spent a lot of time basically gaming the games. We put this set of games in place because we thought we were system sizing away of achieving excellence. And so now they just like sharp and young and hungry and aggressive and ambitious,. You know, you look around you at the, I hear this all the time, right? The response to worse and worse results is to fund them even more lavishly.

00:00
Speaker 1
And then, you know, you've got universities, you've got this whole, you know, you've got the journal game, right, with publications, right? You know, in this weird thing where you get scored based on the journal articles that you publish in these journals that nobody can afford to buy, right? That, that, you know, that nobody, you know, very few people read, you know, but that's somehow how you get scored. And so, or, you know, the tenure, right, the tenure track and how you kind of navigate through that game. And so we put this, this set of games in place and we did, we put these games in place because we thought we were system sizing away of achieving excellence, right? If you go back and you read the people in the 1920s, you know, you're like, the end of our bush, like, for example, is, you know, FDR, a science advisor who kind of basically codified modern university research in the 40s. You know, he, he thought that he's basically creating optimized system for maximum output of high quality research. But it's, it's the incentives from your point, which is basically, and everybody who knows the business knows this, which is like any time you define, every time you define a metric, immediately people will start to gain the metric, right? And so if you tell me as a researcher in the university that I need to publish journal articles, right, I'm going to publish journal articles. Now, you know, will anybody read them, right? Will anybody cite them? Will anybody care? Like, do they actually move the field ahead? You know, maybe, maybe not, right? And so forth and so on through all these different games. And so I think it's possible that like we spent as a society, like 50 years kind of assembling these systems in these games, you know, in the first half of the 20th century, and then we spent the last half of the 20th century basically gaming the games. Right. And so, and you see this just in the sense of like, the sense of kind of these institutions going more about, right? You know, these institutions, these institutions broadly that were created in the first half of the 20th century, just like generating the first half of the 20th century. Just like generating worse and worse results. You know, the response to worse and worse results is to fund them even more lavishly, right? And so, you know, this, you know, sort of in this loop where they're headed in the wrong direction. And then, you know, I would say finally there's, you know, there's, there's, there's this sort of adverse selection component that I alluded to, and honestly, like in my day job, I really bent this, which is, you know, a lot of our founders, right, are people who 50 or 75 or 100 years ago, I think would have stayed in academia, right, as an example, right? Or I think they would have, you know, worked in big businesses their whole lives, right? And so I think they might have, you know, stayed at Stanford their whole life, or they might have stayed at IBM their whole life or something like that. But now they just, you know, if you really like sharp and young and hungry and aggressive and ambitious, you know, you look around you at the, I hear this all the time, right? I hear this all the time from our founders is I looked around at what I saw was just like, incredibly depressing. And I realized I had to get out of there, right? And I had to get into a position where I could build my own thing, because I actually want to be part of a high performance environment that doesn't tolerate all this bullshit. And so, you know, I guess I'd say everything I'm describing is kind of depressing for a societal standpoint, but it's, it's, you know, it's the full employment act for what I do day to day. And, you know, look, maybe, maybe that's fair. Like maybe, maybe that's just where we're at is, you know, we could have a long conversation about this, but like, is it even worse trying to do institutional reform, you know, at this point? Or is the correct answer just to build institutions and, you know, venture capital startup formation is a way to build new institutions, you know, this part from perfect, but like, it seems to work quite well. And maybe we actually just need like a much more revolutionary mindset when it comes to trying to build new institutions.

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