The synthesis of narrative and technical proficiency.
How do we create better stories without compromising on innovation.
When I posted my previous essay, I had some replies that would say something like “but stories aren’t a limiting mechanism. Innovation and research depend on funding and incentives”. And to that, I say, YES. Of, course they do! The fact that someone would even think that I would disagree with what is common knowledge definitely leads me to think that there was an element of bad faith there.
It is the internet after all.
I mean, I have written on the nature of perverse incentives and how the decline of research by certain entities has led to a decline specific to American productive innovation.
That said, the point of my previous essay was to state a very simple way of inspiring a younger generation to pursue technically demanding projects despite the financial risks that may come with it.
I wanted to lay out a way to inspire smart people to pursue ambitious projects such as SpaceX, compared to working in finance. This isn’t to say that financial stability is a bad thing. It is however to say—as Elon did— that we have too many smart people working in Finance, and not enough working on herculean feats of engineering (which we quite obviously need).
There are pragmatic ways to address this. As Rutger Bregman realized in his wildly successful Utopia For Realists:
Whereas in 1970 twice as many male Harvard grads were still opting for a life devoted to research over banking, 20 years later the balance had flipped, with one and a half times as many alumni employed in finance. The upshot is that we’ve all gotten poorer. For every dollar a bank earns, an estimated equivalent of 60 cents is destroyed elsewhere in the economic chain. Conversely, for every dollar a researcher earns, a value of at least $5 – and often much more – is pumped back into the economy.
For this, he proposes this:
Higher taxes for top earners would serve, in Harvard science-speak, “to reallocate talented individuals from professions that cause negative externalities to those that cause positive externalities.”
And that would be an easy policy-oriented way to get more smart people to pursue necessary innovations. Basic economics after all emphasizes the taxation of that which is less useful and the deregulation of that which we want more off.
My point on narratives however is a basic one. I realized the stunning similarity between people we consider to be some of our brightest minds, and narratives that inspired them to believe and pursue a world better than our own.
Examples of this include Jeff Bezos, whose inspiration for founding Blue Origin was:
to build space hotels, amusement parks and colonies for 2 million or 3 million people who would be in orbit. 'The whole idea is to preserve the earth' he told the newspaper ... The goal was to be able to evacuate humans. The planet would become a park
Or Thiel who noted that all members of the Paypal mafia were equally obsessed with Star Wars:
The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek. Most important, we were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments. For the company to work, it didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.
Or Snowden, whose revelation of the NSA’s role in world espionage would change our conception of privacy; an endeavor that would upend his life for the worse but one done with principle regardless. He like many in cybersecurity seem to have been inspired by Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother series.
That said I should have laid down some principles concerning the creation of narratives; narratives that actually help people pursue innovation and herculean feats rather than run contrary to it.
And so here are the very few I could think of. I hope to build on this list significantly as time passes:
The definition of narrative I employ is this one by Marriam Webster:
a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values
The primary goal of a narrative concerning science, technology, and innovation should be to inspire people to pursue the possibility of a world that does not yet exist. Sci-fi and more specifically cyberpunk have inspired a generation of cybersecurity professionals, scientists and engineers.
Rarely are people inspired by the equations that govern fluid dynamics as much as they are about what those equations could say in a much larger context about the world we live in. Rarely are people inspired merely by running a nmap scan, they mostly get inspired by the narrative of what they will be able to do. Rarely are people inspired by Elliptic Curve Cryptography, they do care about the potential confiscation of their wealth though. Hence the rise of Bitcoin.
The narrative should not in any way take precedent over achieving technical proficiency. Doing the contrary is detrimental to innovation. We already know how that ends. Another way to put this is to say that a story can’t be the end in itself, but should be what inspires others to do stuff. In the words of George Hotz: “Hype is great, just don’t lie about your tech.”
Think of it as saying that a great narrative inspires one to build a project as ambitious as SpaceX or Blue Origin(Bezos did hire Neal Stephenson during its inception ), but that a bad narrative may be the use of it to drive the growth of a Nikola or Theranos. These last two used the promise of a given technology to hide their own shortcomings to the detriment of many.
The strength of narratives lies in inspiring us to be and do more. They in themselves do not change the world around us.
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