Jason Crawford

Not just that it doesn't want to wait, not just that it shouldn't wait, not just that it can't afford to wait, not just an economic reason for, you know, to be experimenting at the boundaries of what is known.

But maybe we actually need a separate and overlapping set of incentives.

Maybe we need to point science into different corners than it would otherwise go if it weren't for invention getting out ahead and tugging at it.

After all, I mean, I think it's certainly clear that we do need the incentives of pure curiosity.

If we only had the incentives of technology and practical applications, if we were like very myopically utilitarian and like we're only going to focus on things where we can see direct applications, well, then we'd be nowhere because much of science has come from just exploring, just trying to understand the world, that pure curiosity.

There's nothing wrong with that pure curiosity motive.

It exists.

It's important.

it has driven us to, you know, to explore and understand the world.

And then that understanding that comes from pure curiosity gives us applications that are amazing and transform things.

Um, but I think, but, but it's, it's one lens on the world, right?

That curiosity.

And it's, it directs science into a certain set of, of, uh, of corners of the universe to explore.

And, uh,

Technology, practical applications, it's just a different overlapping set of incentives that points you maybe into different corners that you wouldn't.

So I think that maybe experimentation towards an invention is actually necessary, not just valuable, but needed to uncover the right phenomena and to point science to things that it wouldn't otherwise be looking at.

To wrap up this part, where the naive linear model is wrong is that science is not upstream of technology in a couple of ways.

Technology gets ahead of science.

I'm arguing here that, in fact, it must get ahead of science.

And then technology feeds back into science.