In Search of Opportunity

My aims for this newsletter

I think it’s worth laying out explicitly what I’m trying to do here at Rough Diamonds.

This is a multi-topic newsletter — I’m looking at a wide range of fields of science, technology, and industry, most of which I have no formal background in.

But I do have a specific outlook and approach, which I try to apply across topics.

Goals: Identifying & Assessing Science/Tech Opportunities

My aim here at Rough Diamonds is to find and write about high-impact, underrated science and technology opportunities.

The ideal opportunity in this context, the prototypical “rough diamond,” is:

1. some new (or little-known) technology or application of a scientific discovery, which could make a big positive difference to human welfare if it works

2. relatively early-stage or underfunded, such that grants/donations/investments of <$10M would actually make a difference

3. has a natural “next step” in the R&D process that someone should clearly try working on

Wearable continuous biosensors are an example of the kind of project Rough Diamonds is designed to call attention to. Several recent technological improvements coming together, barely anything commercialized yet, potential to make a big difference to health.

The thing I’m trying to do with this newsletter is something less like science journalism and more like “techno-economic analysis” or “scientific due diligence.”

• How well does the tech work?

• How close is it to being cost-effective?

• How does it compare to other technologies that aim to do the same thing?

Plus a bit of “explainer”-style information:

• How does the tech work?

• Who is working on it?

• How much traction does it have so far?

Mostly, science news articles don’t have this information, or have it at a pretty superficial level.

If you want apples-to-apples comparisons of the costs and performance specs of different battery technologies, for instance, you won’t find it in science journalism. You will find it in academic journal articles, but those are less understandable to the layman and take longer to write.

So I think there’s a niche for blog posts that are intermediate in depth between news articles and academic articles, aimed at the educated layman, assessing and explaining potential opportunities in science and technology.

My goal for each post is:

• If you work in the field I’m writing about, you’ll find my overview basically accurate.

• If this is the first time you’re reading about the field at all, you’ll still be able to understand my post.

• If you’re in a position where you’re deciding what technologies to work on, use, fund, invest in, or otherwise make a decision about, you’ll find the information in my post useful and decision-relevant.

I’m trying to produce usable resources, not just interesting content.

Background Frame: The Abundance Agenda

This newsletter is broadly pro-science, pro-technology, pro-industry, and pro-commerce.

I’m interested in ways knowledge can be used for the “relief of man’s estate” — how humanity can learn things, build things, and grow richer, safer, and happier.

“Everybody can have lots of everything they want” is the utopia I think is worth aiming for.

I’m mostly writing for an audience that shares assumptions like, all things being equal,

• global economic growth is good

• automation is good

• more energy production is good

• more efficient manufacturing, construction, and agriculture is good

• life extension is good

• space exploration is good

and I’m basically aligned with perspectives like Derek Thompson’s, Marc Andreessen’s, the stuff on Works in Progress and Roots of Progress and Institute for Progress, and so on.

Where does Rough Diamonds fit into that ecosystem?

Well, if you’re trying to promote progress and abundance, you need to figure out how. What’s the roadmap from here to utopia? Where are the key technological bottlenecks to having more nice things?

It’s useful to know, say, that lab-grown meat and gene therapy are both bottlenecked on the high cost and poor reliability of mammalian cell culture, but that there are probably things we can do to make cell culture vastly more productive.

Think of a futuristic technology you’ve heard “buzz” about: stacked agriculture, artificial wombs, deep geothermal, you name it.

Unless you’ve looked into it carefully, or unless it’s your own field, you don’t have much sense of how far it is from being a practical reality. Overhyped vaporware, or the dominant trend of the near future? Or something where a (fairly) cheap experiment could tell us a lot more than we know now?

Technology assessment is one place where a layman’s information-gathering can be useful. Sure, I’ll know less about any given field than the experts; but I’m also not pitching my own technology or my own scientific research. I have less conflict of interest.

Heuristics: Hulk Prefer Big Simple Thing

Some general opinions, presented without justification:

• measurement & data collection is good.

  • actual experiments almost always beat simulations or theories.

  • good organizations track metrics.

  • spreadsheets and graphs are useful.

  • exploratory data analysis is your friend.

• look for big effect sizes on outcomes that matter.

  • complicated statistical models are easy to game.

  • proxy outcomes are suspect.

  • what you want is a really big measured impact on the thing you actually care about.

• simple interventions are best.

  • fewer moving parts = fewer things to screw up.

  • low-tech and low-touch is good.

  • avoid anything that looks like make-work for bureaucrats.

• look for indications of sincerity.

  • accidental discoveries

  • forgotten discoveries from before 1990

  • “unglamorous” or little-hyped

  • use in competitive industries with fast feedback loops

  • researcher motivated by solving a problem that personally affects him/her (like treating one’s own disease)

  • researcher with exceptional personal qualities

    • child prodigy

    • overcame adversity

    • noteworthy achievements in unrelated fields

• follow curiosity.

  • if you’re bored, you have the wrong framing question.

  • all else equal, focus on learning about stuff that seems cool and exciting.