Erik Hoel, who writes The Intrinsic Perspective, has just announced that he is leaving his position at Tufts to pursue Substack writing. If that name does not ring a bell, readers of this Substack may know him as the “guy who wrote the Why we stopped making Einsteins piece” on aristocratic tutoring. Hoel is a great thinker who integrates fields seamlessly, and that’s part of the reason he chose to leave academia.
In this ‘Short’ I’ll share a few excerpts from Feynman’s oral history that give readers an idea of:
This Substack was largely born out of me sitting on a mountain of fun facts about early 1900s science and the economics of innovation. Some of that, less than 10%, makes it into the longer pieces which make quite coherent, fleshed-out points. But, sometimes, there’s just a fun quote or graph that can stand alone that I think you all would get a kick out of. To this point, sadly, I’ve been leaving these fun tidbits out of the Substack altogether.
To this point, I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this Substack covering the work of scientists from the early-to-mid-1900s — a golden era of American science and innovation — in a familiar setting: the university.
If you’re interested in the structure of scientific institutions, we’re living through remarkably exciting times. This past week I was corresponding with Gerald Holton, whose 1952 work I covered in my piece When do ideas get easier to find?. Holton, now 100 years old, is obviously spending less time actively working and keeping up with the fields in which he was prolific in his heyday.
Each piece in the MIT series can stand alone for the most part, but I’ve written them in such a way that they build off each other.
Each piece in the MIT series can stand alone for the most part, but I’ve written them in such a way that they build off each other.
The MIT Series Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen opened their 2019 Atlantic piece that helped jump-start the progress studies movement with the following passage: In my eyes, MIT is entirely deserving of this honor: being used as the authors’ first example of an organization that generated progress.
It has been about three weeks since the last piece for the Engineering Innovation Substack. I apologize for the delay, but I think the delay will be worth it. I’ve been working on a series of (at least) three pieces that serve as a bit of a (short) progress studies history of MIT. This is a set of pieces that I specifically had in mind when I started this newsletter and I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to share them with you all.
Several subscribers (mostly involved with the deep tech VC community) have requested that I write some pieces that look deeply at some programs that are already doing things well.
I’m excited to announce that this is the first post of the Engineering Innovation Newsletter in partnership with Good Science Project. Good Science Project is a new organization dedicated to improving the funding and practice of science.
