I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to get back to you.
In hindsight, the way I worded this was overly strong. Cultural explanations are possible, yes.
I guess I see this evidence as a weak update on a fairly strong prior that the burden of knowledge (BOK) is increasing – given the range of other variables (e.g., age of innovation, levels of specialisation), and similar trends within patent data. For example, you couldn’t attribute increasing collaboration on patents to norms within academia.
I’d be interested to compare # researchers with # papers. The ratio of these two growth rates is key, for the returns to research parameter from Bloom et al. Do send me this, if you have remembered in the intervening time.
I don’t have the time right now to find exactly which comparison I am thinking of, but I believe my thought process was basically “the rate of new people getting AI PhDs is relatively slow”; this is of course only one measure for the number of researchers. Maybe I used data similar to that here: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/FaEBwhhe3otzYKGQt/p/AtfQFj8umeyBBkkxa
Hi Aaron,
I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to get back to you.
In hindsight, the way I worded this was overly strong. Cultural explanations are possible, yes.
I guess I see this evidence as a weak update on a fairly strong prior that the burden of knowledge (BOK) is increasing – given the range of other variables (e.g., age of innovation, levels of specialisation), and similar trends within patent data. For example, you couldn’t attribute increasing collaboration on patents to norms within academia.
I’d be interested to compare # researchers with # papers. The ratio of these two growth rates is key, for the returns to research parameter from Bloom et al. Do send me this, if you have remembered in the intervening time.
Charlie
I don’t have the time right now to find exactly which comparison I am thinking of, but I believe my thought process was basically “the rate of new people getting AI PhDs is relatively slow”; this is of course only one measure for the number of researchers. Maybe I used data similar to that here: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/FaEBwhhe3otzYKGQt/p/AtfQFj8umeyBBkkxa