Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.
I disagree, fundamentally. Institutional knowledge is a set of "truths" that are respected, so necessarily prune the solution space. The only way to get those pruned branches back is to disregard it, by reconsidering, and re-traversing that solution space.
My time working with some of the brightest minds in my industry taught me that they aren't necessaily some visionary, nor super genius, nor even some workaholic putting 20+ hours a day into their craft (though I have met a few I would describe as such). The gap between me and them wasn't over some raw intellect. It was many times a matter of me thinking of an idea and them talking about how that was tried 5-20 years ago and why that lead down a huge rabbit hole.
Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true.
> to some extent
This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
As of now, this same mentality is used to push AI into everywhere. Not only is the intent bad, but the tech doesn't even work. That's not "resisting change". That's experimenting and realizing the hype was just that.
>This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
The comment itself definitely reveals more than a light suggestion.
This was precisely my point in [1]. It's fundamentally the same: a pruning of the solution space without re-traversal.
> why it's very similar to an old idea.
And, with diligence, you verify that the new context is exactly the same as the old. You do this by knowing that it might not be, in other words, you temporarily suspending your trust in that knowledge, and re-traverse it with the current context.
It's a thin line of wisdom and conservatism, but an important distinction. People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod. But that's exactly what tends to be proposed: big multi month initiatives, not some prototype to test over a sprint.
The important question I learned to ask was "what problem am I trying to solve". One aspect of this thin line tends to be a muddy answer to this question. When you can only suspect and make grand showings instead of showing pragmatic use case you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
Exactly, the ability to innovate ceases. Risk is most easily avoided by leaning on the existing institutional knowledge to direct new decisions even though they may be in new contexts.
> you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.
By definition, iteration is not innovation. Innovation is new ideas. New ideas aren't possible without experimentation, otherwise they would be known ideas.
Most large companies move from innovation to acquisition for a reason: the risk of innovation is too great for a large company to stomach.
The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization. This is often much more than what is formally codified into the processes and training materials. As such, it can lead to loss of capability when there is too much turnover.
You seem to be conflating it with some other kind of bureaucratic conservatism or group-think. While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.
Yes, that't is my definition. But, that knowledge has very real practical effects and influence on the org. It has weight and momentum, especially when approaching new problems, or reconsidering old problems. The mechanism for that can be anywhere from "this is industry standard, lets not risk it" to "the director says we should focus on this approach".
That is quite the absolute statement. Could you share some data to back this up?
There's more to life than "innovation", but what you say tracks, I was part of an organization that became extremely innovative but went bust in the process.
> we have Space X.
Which is amazing for earth-orbit commercial launches, but doesn't move the needle for the many other things NASA concerns itself with, like research as mentioned elsewhere.
Jim Keller’s own biography kind of dispels this notion. He worked at DEC for 16 years when he was a young engineer (24-40 years old).
No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels.
But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.
Is the future going to be completely defunding science for 4 (or 8) years and then whipsawing back to normal levels once the republicans lose power?
It seems like as long as the parties are close to popularity of each other and one party is explicitly anti science there is no way to build anything sustainable. This is no way to run a country.
I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X.
There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective: you need to restart every some years, to not stagnate.
From what I've seen, if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.