Why Does DARPA Work?
benjaminreinhardt.com
Why Does DARPA Work?
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#2I'd like to write a comment but I generally prefer to have read the entire article before I do... see you in a week or so.
Jokes aside, I agree with the author (I think) that DARPA has been a surprisingly effective org in an age of frequent failures of other orgs with similarly lofty goals.
DARPA is effectively what things like the SoftBank Vision Fund should've been (wanted to be?). It would certainly be interesting to see what it would look like to have a privately run clone of DARPA if you injected as much cash as the Vision Fund did. Per the article, about $400M/y is spent on actual R&D by DARPA, where as Vision Fund has injected that amount into single companies many times over.
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#3Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there was a minor scandal in the community because postdoc who struggled with reproducing the effect and complained about the results was abused and railroaded by the PI in charge of the project. Shortly thereafter the PM didn't seem to be a PM anymore.
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#4Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there…
...so your best anecdote about why DARPA doesn't work is that they fire incompetent PMs?
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#5The irony is palpable:
> I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take action than by a broad audience who will find it merely interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for indulging me!
I'm glad of course it was shared here. As a distillation - I think the author's theme lies with enabling more _researchers_ rather than business people to take moonshots and do foundational knowledge building and discovery that redefines a field and then focus on commercialization from a birds eye view by technically capable visionaries.
This is the SBIR [1] model (also a US Gov requirement to fund small business research for any federal agency with >$100M in funding), the Bell Labs model (which yeilded amazing foundational work like UNIX and the transistor and was a direct result of AT&T's monopoly and excess resources), and perhaps even the YC model (though that one is obviously focused on a shorter horizon and more on commercializing existing tech and more rarely on foundational research).
I've personally thought about this problem a lot and done this at a small scale and would love to expand upon it. https://augmentedlabs.org Would love to hear others experiences and thoughts.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Innovation_Re...
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#6Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there…
Oh to make things even funnier, last I checked, said ex-DARPA pm was working on a biotech startup around diagnostics frommicro-blood draws. You can't make this shit up.
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#7Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there…
...so your best anecdote about why DARPA doesn't work is that they fire incompetent PMs?
Yes, after being promoted to the head of the division with several people speculating that they were being groomed for even higher posts. And it took a scandal to get rid of them. Person should never had been a PM in the first place.
You never hear people say "it's proof that Congress works because they ejected that pedophile (sending lewd messages to the pages) from their seat".
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#8It seems that this would be a much better way of funding research in a general sense, since that seems to be the general process of their problem solving. The only thing is that to apply this to other fields, the barrier for getting people that are equally motivated and intelligent about analyzing if the research is 'going' somewhere is high
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#9Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too long after I interacted with them, there…
...so your best anecdote about why DARPA doesn't work is that they fire incompetent PMs?
Facebooks building 8 was run by a former darpa chief and went up in smoke. Also anecdata but it was enough to make me question how good their process really is
Re: Why Does DARPA Work?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
...so your best anecdote about why DARPA doesn't work is that they fire incompetent PMs?
Yes, after being promoted to the head of the division with several people speculating that they were being groomed for even higher posts. And it took a scandal to get rid of them. Person should never had been a PM in the first place. You never hear people say "it's proof that Congress works because they ejected that pedophile (sending lewd messages to the pages) from their seat".
Hate to break it to you, but "an incompetent person rising through the ranks quickly before crashing and burning" is something that happens in pretty literally every large org.
Any 60 year old organization with a large budget is going to have multiple instances of this happening.