Don't optimize Instagram ads, come work on medical problems

And 2 other takeaways from The Technologic Republic

I read Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic recently and wanted to highlight three points from this book I think are applicable to life sciences/medicine/biotech today.

• Be multidisciplinary, no silos (Munger-esque)

  • “As of 1481, the library at the Vatican, the largest in Europe, had around 3500 books and documents. The limited extent of humanity’s collective knowledge made possible and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach that would almost be certain to stall an academic career today. That cross-pollination as well as the absence of a rigid adherence to the boundaries between disciplines was vital to a willingness to experiment”

  • Charlie Munger stated that much of his success in investing came from learning principles from psychology, chemistry, biology, and other non-investment fields.

  • Medical knowledge doubles every 73 days. Nobody can keep up with that. But, the premise holds. People working on problems in medicine should have multidisciplinary backgrounds and interests. Study things like economics, art history, math, and physics AND learn medicine.

  • Looking further, medical students interested in cardiology often end up doing just cardiology research and work. I argue that to-be cardiologists should work hard on problems in seemingly disparate fields like oncology or psychiatry at least for a year or two in medical school.

• Always ask yourself what the incentives are (Munger-esque view)

  • “At that salary, [Jerome] Powell is essentially volunteering his time to the country. His compensation as an employee of the federal government is negligible with respect to his net wort which has been reported to be in excess of 20 million, and he has said publicly that he essentially lives off his significant savings. But, why are we, as a country, the world’s wealthiest, asking for a volunteer to run the Federal Reserve? What incentives does that create and how dramatically does that winnow the pool of potential candidates who might be interested in the job. We complain about the influence of money in politics only to remain silent as wealthy individuals increasingly dominate political races. The unintended consequences of our approach to public sector compensation is that an increasingly disproportional number of the world’s wealthiest are running for and winning public office, both in the US and around the world.”

  • “In November 1994, Lee Kuan Yew, who served as the first prime minister of Singapore, was caught in a debate with other members of parliament regarding his proposed increases to government salaries. Lee had instituted a system under which the compensation of the island nation’s public officials was set based on comparable salaries in private sector professions, including banking and law. By 2007, for example, the average annual salary of the country’s ministers would rise to 1.26M per year. Lee’s critics argued that increasing salaries would attract the wrong type of candidate, those motivated to pursue government work for personal gain as opposed to public service. At a parliamentary debate on the mater, Lee responded that politicians ‘are real men and women, just like you and me, with real families who have real aspirations in life’. He continued ‘So when we talk of all these high-falutin noble lofty causes remember at the end of the day very few people become priests’.”

  • “It is skepticism of incentives in the domains that are are most important to our collective good that may be part of what is holding us back. Why should we, the public, cede the use of incentives to the finance and banking industries as well as the technology sector”

• Work on hard problems not instagram ads

  • “The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait”

  • We can disagree on what other advances should have been prioritized but I think having some of the smartest scientific minds out there working on instagram ads is not a good thing. The problem is that the incentives have been set up to encourage this behavior, and therefore you cannot fault the individual engineering graduate who makes this choice.

• Eliminating hyper-structured corporate hierarchies preferentially select for employees who just want to get things done and not play status games. These ideas may be relevant when thinking about how to build life science/biotech/medicine organizations.

  • “One can also more readily identify pockets of talent and motivation within an organization once the veil of status, the constricting gaze through which everything is perceive in corporate life, is lifted”

  • “We undoubtedly have some form of ‘shadow hierarchy’ within the company, power structures that are no telegraphed explicitly but exist nonetheless. The lack of organizational legibility comes at a cost, increasing the price of navigation internally, for employees as well as for outside partners who often simply want to know who is in charge. But many discount the amount of open space that a de-emphasis on internal signs and signifier of status, for thousands of employees, can create. The benefit of it being somewhat unclear of ambiguous who is leading commercial sales in Scandinavia for example, is that maybe that someone should be you. Or what about outreach to state and local governments in the American Midwest”

  • “The point is only that voids or perceived voids within an organization in our experience have repeatedly har more benefits that costs, often being filled by ambitious and talented leaders who see gaps and want to play a role but might otherwise have been cowed into submission for fear of venturing onto somebody else’s turf.”

  • Meeting, committees, subcommittees make up the so called “meeting-industrial complex”. “Such meetings are mechanisms by which the ambitious self-promoter within an organization telegraph their status and power and many talented but less manipulative colleagues simply choose to relent at a significant cost to the institution.”

Three more points that I think are interesting. I would think about these three points as sections of the book that piqued my interest but I don’t know exactly how to think about it yet.

• “Rather than resist, we might see this next era as one of collaboration, between two species of intelligence, our own and the synthetic. The relinquishment of control over certain creative endeavors may even relieve us of the need to define our worth and sense of self in this world solely through production and output.” Then, how do we define our sense of self worth and what do we do with that time? Whatever you would like to for the sake of doing it. Spending time with your family, starting an ice cream shop, become a master tea maker. This reminds me of Daniel Ek’s conversation with David Senra where Daniel suggests that AI will make the good a pretty easy bar to achieve but will not replace the exceptional or master of their craft.

• Previous generations were more pragmatic

  • “Nothing of consequence is built in a straight line. A voracious pragmatism is needed as well as a willingness to bend one’s model of the world to the evidence at hand, not bend the evidence.

  • “A certain ravenous pragmatism and insensitivity to calculation had been lost on the current generation. After the end of World War II, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies launched a massive and secret effort to recruit Nazi scientists in order to retain an advantage in the coming years in developing rockets and jet engines. At least 1600 German scientists and their families were relocated to the United States. Some were skeptical about this late embrace of the former enemy. An officer in the US Air Force urged his commander to set aside any distaste for recruiting the German scientists to this new cause writing in a letter that there was an immense amount to be learned from the German-born information if only we are not too proud.”

• Endless possibility is not a superpower

  • “When Odysseys asked his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship as it sailed past the Sirens and their bewitching call, he warned his men, “if I should entreat you and bid you set me free then “with still more fetters bind me fast”. He was intentionally restraining his own range of motion, his ability to respond to the outside world and to the risk of being diverted by its enchanting and indeed deadly temptation. A freedom of motion, to maneuver at will, can masquerade as an imitation of power. A willingness to constrain choice, to cast oneself to the mast, is often the best, if not only, route to creative production for either a company or a culture”