The Macroscience Podcast

This week on the Macroscience podcast: an interview with Jon Askonas, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. Inspired in part by “Technological Stagnation is a Choice” — Jon’s terrific review of Vaclav Smil’s Invention and Innovation — I wanted to have Jon on the show to think through the ideological underpinnings of the movement around progress and abundance. We discuss metascience as a technocratic endeavor, the aesthetics of progress, the fundamental irrationality of breakthrough innovations, and why progress needs to bring greater moral force to its visions for the future. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.macroscience.org

This week on the Macroscience podcast we interview Matt Clancy, proprietor of the excellent living literature review New Things Under The Sun and a Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy. We discuss the attributes of systems that are able to adapt and improve with time, and how those attributes shape different facets of research productivity. Along the way, we discuss the philanthropic imitation game, the bright sides of peer review, cream skimming phenomena, synthetic market forces, and the demand for HwangCo brand microscopes. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.macroscience.org

Good news: Macroscience is officially starting up a new podcast. We’ll be interviewing researchers, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other good people working in and around this broad, shifting community that we call “metascience.” First up: Ben Reinhardt, who is CEO of Speculative Technologies, a non-profit research organization supporting a wide range of exploratory work in the sciences. One program that I’m particularly excited about — BRAINS — is a “Y Combinator for coordinated research programs.”We talk about the failure of the innovation ecosystem to invest in pre-commerical, exploratory research, and what it takes to get more of it into the world. Along the way, we get into why research groups are effective, the practice of research leadership, and whether wildcat research orgs like SpecTech can shape the incentives of much larger institutions in science. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.macroscience.org