What history can teach us about doing better science – Eric Gilliam

Eric Gilliam studies how organizations like Bell Labs, early MIT, and the Rockefeller Foundation helped drive scientific progress — and what made them unusually effective.

In this conversation, we explore how those models worked, why many of them disappeared, and what it would take to bring them back. Eric explains why fast-moving, engineering-driven labs like BBN (which built the first nodes of the internet) may be essential to accelerating progress in fields like AI, biotech, and beyond.

We also cover:

• Why most funders underuse applied history
• How systems engineers at Bell Labs identified billion-dollar problems
• What a $100M research organization should do differently
• What makes Eric hopeful about the future of meta-science

Eric runs FreakTakes, a Substack focused on the organizational infrastructure of scientific progress. He’s a fellow at the Good Science Project and works with ARIA UK and Renaissance Philanthropy to support new models for R&D.

Full transcript, list of resources, and art piece: https://www.existentialhope.com/podcasts

Existential Hope was created to collect positive and possible scenarios for the future so that we can have more people commit to creating a brighter future, and to begin mapping out the main developments and challenges that need to be navigated to reach it. Existential Hope is a Foresight Institute project.

Hosted by Allison Duettmann and Beatrice Erkers

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