Eric Gilliam
@eric_is_weird
Followers
4,236
Following
1,259
Media
258
Statuses
2,998
I write about how 20th C. R&D orgs operated and advise new R&D orgs @GoodSciProject | Formerly @Stanford I want to help people start historically great labs
Chicago, IL
Joined February 2017
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
#BUS_KnockKnockKnock_KhonKaen
• 861799 Tweets
Bama
• 106794 Tweets
スプリンターズS
• 88287 Tweets
CRかるび
• 33761 Tweets
ナムラクレア
• 24772 Tweets
サトノレーヴ
• 19357 Tweets
三原じゅん子
• 19322 Tweets
WIN AT TODAY SHOW
• 19309 Tweets
ママコチャ
• 18951 Tweets
西村騎手
• 18405 Tweets
ショアキーパー
• 16955 Tweets
西村淳也
• 16008 Tweets
マッドクール
• 14245 Tweets
#njdest
• 11406 Tweets
ドゥラメンテ産駒
• 10391 Tweets
ピューロマジック
• 10017 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
Today's piece of the ARPA Playbook profiles the ARPAnet's main contractor: Bolt, Beranek, & Newman
BBN's structure and philosophy even drove many MIT professors to resign and work at the firm. If you only read one piece in the series, make it this one.
5
27
78
When
@Harvard
launched their engineering school in ~2007, they talked ad nauseam about how they would have merged with MIT 100 year prior if not for a few "technicalities"
They forgot to mention the real issue was MIT ppl hated Harvard and its culture. A brief 🧵 1/6
60
420
4K
It was real hatred. MIT was something like a trade school where the ethos was, "what better way to systematically solve day-to-day industrial problems than to learn science?"
The local Ivy Leaguers often looked down on MIT's working class culture, but MIT was proud of it
2/6
6
51
1K
MIT faculty also felt Harvard had no clue how to deal with real engineers/applied scientists as faculty
Harvard only granted sabbaticals for theoretical research/book writing. How were MIT profs supposed to stay current and be useful if they couldn't go out and do real work? 5/6
3
42
1K
But MIT was also a young upstart university and quite poor
So, periodically, Harvard would offer mergers. They wanted MIT's engineering status. MIT Presidents who seemed *too* interested could get ridiculed by staff and students. The following excerpt is one example: 3/6
3
37
1K
None of the mergers ever went through. The culture was too different. The reason MIT Presidents often entertained the offers was money
But MIT found ways to continue to scrape by. They were proud of their culture. To Tech, that was worth a lot more than money 6/6
3
34
1K
It just didn't make sense to MIT folks.
They felt Harvard babied its students to the point it was impossible to make them practically useful in industrial environments. What were they going to do with those kids around?! 4/6
2
31
952
@dieworkwear
1) I’m shaking with excitement. Tysm for doing a whole thread on my question
2) Going to the store as soon as I can to put your advice into action
4
1
927
When I was an undergrad I was briefly an RA for Francis Fukuyama. I only took one lasting lesson from being around him:
If one is committed enough, they can just read and read history until they're drawing from a deeper historical dataset than almost everyone else
14
50
830
It’s interesting. In books like Idea Factory as they talk about Bell Labs and mid-1900s engineering innovation, Midwesterners are everywhere
The authors of all these books note it constantly. It was a talent powerhouse. But they don’t really talk about this at all in the Midwest
35
57
758
Ladies and gentleman
*drum rolls*
I present to you my girlfriend's shockingly accurate gingerbread rendition of Edison's Menlo Park Lab
..And a short 🧵 of all the craftsmanship details I couldn't believe she got right 1/7
15
36
588
Gentle reminder that Edison was an ABSOLUTE DOG
A world-changing technical entrepreneur, the likes of which we might never see again
17
55
533
To learn more about early MIT, check out the Progress Studies History of Early MIT series on FreakTakes. Link in bio!
In those early years, the Institute helped us win a war or two, start up many industrial powerhouses still alive today, and much more
4
13
515
Bonus graphic with some of the industrial powerhouses MIT affiliates had a hand in starting (as of 1997)
16
26
502
Everyone mistakenly pictures a gray-haired Edison when they think of his lighting and sound work. But he had already done all that and become world-famous by ~33
He actually looked more like this at the height of his powers
Reminder that our current gerontocracy is neither necessary nor permanent.
The age distribution of people who worked on the Manhattan Project:
39
112
963
6
50
503
There are two books that obviously influenced my obsession with R&D history
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- Rise and Fall of American Growth
IMO the 2nd should be as widely read as the first. So, just because, here's a short 🧵 of 9 thought-provoking graphs from the book 1/10
7
57
398
@ShitpostRock
@devarbol
Claude Shannon: “Yeah I rig gambling machines in my basement and juggle on unicycles. I’m a real nut. What do you get up to Seymour?”
Cray, absolutely covered in dirt: “Just code…and stuff…”
1
11
347
@patrickc
Good question that I haven’t seen a satisfactory answer to.
I’ve always figured that part of it was that, at the time, it wasn’t unthinkable to step away fully for 3 months and, at the end, step back into your old life. So maybe your mind allowed itself to go there?
6
2
281
Gerald Holton's 1962 essay had a FANTASTIC graph showing not just exponential growth in accelerator speeds from 1930-1960, but, also, how ten different technologies individually contributed to this total growth
Anybody know of examples of graphs like this for other technologies?
14
41
251
I love Bell Labs' approach to applied science. They wanted their researchers to work on interesting problems, but Labs' management applied extreme influence in shepherding them to certain ones
Jim Fisk said the following on Bell's philosophy of problem selection 🧵 (1/4)
4
24
245
@GLNoronha
@McKinsey
Not great, obviously. But one is heartened by the old Seinfeld <-> HBR interview where they asked him about using McKinsey
7
6
222
If anyone is curious I write about this at length on my substack:
This concept of many individual technology sub-branches with diminishing returns combining to contribute to overall exponential growth has changed my way of looking at scientific progress
9
25
156
@moksh_grg
I’m not sure they needed the massive donation for the new campus just to keep existing
The amount they needed to stay alive was more modest. There’s a good chance local industry/MA politicians could have scraped the money together
Many at the time felt MIT deserved more
1
3
157
@mollyfleck
So as a cyclist and driver in Chicago, I will say that:
1) A non-negligible % of cars on the road seem to hate that I'm there, just in general. Not good
2) A significant % of bikers I see choose to comply with pedestrian laws sometimes and car laws others. That's dangerous
5
1
155
It's astonishing to me how many people on tech Twitter just make things up. Chicago:
- Median household income ~$85k
- Unemployment ~5%
- Avg 3 bed rental around $2800
- Super walkable by American standards
- 4 bed houses in top school districts starting around $500k-$800k
It's impossible to find a single family home in the US for under $1m that:
- Is walkable
- Is in a top rated school district
- Has access to good jobs
- Is in a safe community
929
146
3K
12
9
147
Mervin Kelly's 1950 speech to the Royal Society is must read for those who study progress -- particularly the intro
He details the effects of progress in America during his lifetime and how industrial R&D labs learned to harness the scientific method to create steady progress
2
25
141
@dieworkwear
Are there a few supreme materials for sweaty boys who want to wear not tight button up shirts on a budget?
11
0
137
@JakeAnbinder
Fwiw Harvard people (probably Penn people too) do apply there nowadays. Just from a metrics perspective it is one of the faster-growing, non-VC funded companies founded in the last 20 years
People into business and sports analytics consider this a great job
3
1
135
It's finally out!
I spent 6 weeks diving into how molecular bio survived its tentative early years to become a wildly impactful field
In short: one funder's specialization and commitment to weird-looking, young science
The long answer is this fun piece!
3
27
129
Which is why I’m surprised when I talk to deep tech VCs at how well they know the coastal schools and how little they know about Big 10 schools/their people
Of course, there are talented engineers everywhere. But this might look different if Iowa State had a prettier ranking imo
6
2
126
@dieworkwear
I promise you there's no advice you could give to lower the Chicago birth rate. You're on too high a level
People here 1) love getting married and 2) dress like this in North side bars
4
1
125
@nabeelqu
We revere the profession -- old-school engineering in particular. As a Midwesterner in hs decent at math, engineering was the one and only career recommended to me
We don't really fully support finance/lawyering as professions. Business is ok, but lesser
It’s interesting. In books like Idea Factory as they talk about Bell Labs and mid-1900s engineering innovation, Midwesterners are everywhere
The authors of all these books note it constantly. It was a talent powerhouse. But they don’t really talk about this at all in the Midwest
35
57
758
1
4
123
The European mind simply could not comprehend Edison
Exhibit A: The French
15
11
115
As someone who grew up there and still lives there, I don’t think it’s because we don’t think doing sick engineering is cool. I think we just don’t ‘do’ history as much
Few ppl I grew up with pushed back against the idea of “you should be an engineer, dr. lawyer, or do business”
1
1
103
@annaarthoe
I think for breakthroughs in basic scientific research, this could definitely be a defensible opinion
But it’s much much harder to defend for more applied forms of “technological progress”
My piece on Bell Labs tangentially explores this
3
3
98
@Noahpinion
I write about the effects of bureaucracy and the changing of Skunk Works operations in this post if you're interested
Kelly Johnson was pretty obsessed with minimizing bureaucracy and not modularizing things too much by letting the team get big
1
12
96
@isaachasson
So I feel like Boston is peak IF you were:
1) already going to dedicate your life to academic stuff and say no to party invites anyway
2) always going to have enough to live comfortably but never be rich in any career you might like
But if those aren’t you, maybe not Boston
3
2
94
Those all seemed like reasonable and great jobs to us.
It’s a pretty practical crew and you’re more likely to find them spending free time doing something relaxing than reading about semiconductor history.
But it’s probably still the deepest physical engineering talent pool
2
1
96
Richard Feynman on the Manhattan Project, age ~25
@CaptFligh
@AlecStapp
No. The age of the scientific "big wigs" on the project was like 40
In 1945:
Oppenheimer: 41
Bethe: 37
People as young as a 25 yo Feynman were in charge of massively important projects like making sure the Oak Ridge nuclear material operation was constructed safely
1
5
69
1
3
92
@hollowearthterf
Thank you! We need more Twitter stans
Been here 5 years and counting. Every time I visit SF and NYC I have a lovely time but can’t wait to get home.
1
0
91
@dieworkwear
Have any athletes/celebrities reached out to you for help since you've blown up?
I'd pay for your help if I had money like that
0
0
90
It would be great to have one 🧵 where people listed exceptionally important roles held by young people in the past
Comment any great cases you know! I'll add cases in the comments as well 🧵
Everyone mistakenly pictures a gray-haired Edison when they think of his lighting and sound work. But he had already done all that and become world-famous by ~33
He actually looked more like this at the height of his powers
6
50
503
11
15
86
I’ve talked to a few people who run very mech e related startups who have said this to me recently about their Midwestern engineers
Not the kind of people who find practical boring or feel above hyper monotonous details and want to get promoted away from them as fast as possible
1
3
84
@t_blom
I get that often the current location is not the right call
But what’s wrong with the idea of wanting to build the early stages of a business in the place you know the best/have the best connections?
It’s weird to assume SAAS businesses should start in SF by default
4
0
82
Kelly Johnson was possibly the most powerful aircraft engineer since the Wright Brothers. Because of this, Lockheed trusted him to found his now-famous Skunk Works
As Skunk Works' boss, he became obsessed with bureaucracy. Today's piece explains why
0
23
77
@StevenGlinert
Throwback to the old Seinfeld <-> HBR interview where they asked Jerry if he should have used McKinsey
5
5
78
People complain that Edison wasn't the first to invent pretty much anything that his name is synonymous with
And HE DIDN'T! But that's ok
He didn't view himself was one who invented. We have a word for people like him now: technical entrepreneur
And he was the best ever (1/3)
Thomas Edison, fraud? Far from it. His genius may not have been for pure invention, says
@eric_is_weird
, but for something equally important – building the environment needed for innovation and bringing good ideas to market.
2
7
44
6
13
77
@JuliaBauman2
@science_seeds
@mfgrp
I wrote something on how industrial R&D labs used to do this. It’s not the exact same as modern academia, but it’s also a lot closer to how academics used to find questions than they do today since funding was more practical
Check it out if you’d like!
2
15
78
@Andercot
A lot of life sciences PhDs from prior generations really don’t seem to excel with math/coding/stats
It’s clear from the stats/methods sections in some papers that they just pull stats methods off the shelf and use them without much tuning/understanding
6
1
72
@CaptFligh
@AlecStapp
No. The age of the scientific "big wigs" on the project was like 40
In 1945:
Oppenheimer: 41
Bethe: 37
People as young as a 25 yo Feynman were in charge of massively important projects like making sure the Oak Ridge nuclear material operation was constructed safely
1
5
69
I've been reflecting on this today. IF he's right that the limits of GPT are being reached, it's still hard to bet against OpenAI making the next breakthrough
A short thread on recent innovation in jiu jitsu and how it helps contextualize all of this 🧵(1/12)
OpenAI’s dirty little secret is that GPTs are reaching their limits and it doesn’t know what to do next.
209
182
2K
4
13
70
@ankurnagpal
Do you think you can hire a rental property management firm for yourself?
But at a reduced rate given you only require a subset of the services
This is theoretically their job
4
0
69
One underrated aspect of having a good research blog:
You can become someone that the researchers, practitioners, and funders in the space you're obsessed with want to talk to
You don't need a PhD, 20k subs, or anything like that to qualify. Just do what they see as good work
4
1
68
People found it strange that I was taking over a month just to research the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932-1953
"That feels niche"
But, frankly, I was shocked Warren Weaver's big bet at Rockefeller wasn't studied more closely by funders of early-stage science
A short 🧵
2
11
69
From LinkedIn world: Stanford GSB denied the application for a Defense Tech club
4
6
67
As an oral history of Frank Heart -- one of the lead engineers for BBN on the ARPAnet contract -- was wrapping up, the historian asked if Heart had anything he'd like to add for the record
Heart, who worked with DARPA before and after the Competition in Contracting Act, added:
3
14
68
First bit of the ARPA Playbook is out!
The project's first step is producing FreakTakes-style posts on dozens of DARPA projects from history -- good and bad
The coming week's pieces cover DARPA's ~1980s work on parallel computing, vision, & chip research
3
17
67
I’m no hardcore Oppenheimer fan or anything like that. And he’s always been morally complicated
But excerpts like this are a remarkably…uh…let’s say ‘contrarian’ or ‘minority’ opinion
Even his worst enemies said he was maybe the best lab manager of all time
Oppenheimer was a privileged 'Cry Baby Scientist', who built the Bomb based on a mistake (the Nazis didn't race) then lost every political fight to limit the arms race he started.
He wasn't American Prometheus, he was a schmuck.
My latest
@voxdotcom
35
7
90
5
10
65
@mikedecr
Beautiful place!!
I feel like so much of the NYC/SF/LA-based Chicago hate comes from people who insist on living there regardless (for one reason or another) and want to think that life can’t be pleasant here at this price
2
0
65
The American university research ecosystem changed a remarkable amount as a result of WWII. Before:
- We didn't fund much of it
- It was often considered a sideshow to applied work
- We weren't that good at it
WWII changed that. Poaching a ton of the world's best helped a lot
2
13
63
Had an education structured not as much by conceptual "units" in a textbook, but, rather, by repeatedly having described to them what the frontier in a given topic in a given era generally looked like...and how a small group of researchers pushed it outwards
(5/8)
2
7
62
@_brianpotter
Exactly! Your heuristic also really clarifies what one should be working on
The number of things that are both important enough (in your eyes) and interesting enough (in your eyes) to read everything about is vanishingly small in a given moment
1
0
60
@Andercot
If anyone is curious about how Kelly Johnson operated the Skunk Works, you can check out this piece on FreakTakes
1
2
61
@agneswickfields
This is about the time the best scientific grant funder of all time (Warren Weaver) was born
He opens his memoir talking about how amazing it was to be live through this period
Check it out!
@krishnanrohit
@friedmandave
@tylercowen
@JimPethokoukis
Alright here is the first bit of Weaver’s autobiography. He’s the best.
Very Midwestern in a wholesome way
2
2
23
0
4
59
A while ago I watched an interview with one of the Martians of Budapest (the term used to describe early-20th C. Budapest's uncanny ability to produce top minds like von Neumann, Wigner, Teller, etc.)
The martian described his math education in a fascinating way... (1/8)
2
7
60
An under-discussed pattern from DARPA history is that moonshot successes often relied on contractors inordinately aligned with DARPA's goals
A classic case is the CMU Robotics Institute's work on autonomous vehicles. One CMU researcher described his atypical incentives, saying:
3
12
57
@paulg
This is an exceptionally exciting point
All-time great R&D managers like Kelly Johnson at Skunk Works or some of the early BBN folks fiercely believed in keeping teams small and dealing with the tradeoffs
The following is Kelly Johnson on small teams:
2
10
58
@keccers
IMO the winters aren’t worse than NYC. You have to like…walk everywhere in NYC winter. Here it’s easy to keep a car. And Ubers are cheap. And tech people all seem to leave their city of residence from dec 15-Jan 15 anyway
I can’t recommend it enough. Been here 5 years
11
2
58
@Rainmaker1973
I do a ton of scientific history and always try to order the pre-1970 versions of textbooks when I can
Publishers were happy to let one person take a swing at writing it like how a person talks. They weren't the boring monuments to compromise many textbook wordings of today are
0
3
58
I'll stop there. I loved this gift! Hopefully none of the other progress writers are jealous that I got a little scale model of Menlo
I'm not sure my gf cares about progress studies, but she clearly retains more from my pieces than I thought
Merry Christmas from Chicago! 7/7
1
4
57
Check out my three part Progress Studies History of MIT series to learn more!
And subscribe to FreakTakes while you’re there!
2
5
55
@diana_h
@Harvard
Awesome! Boston/Cambridge is Eden for people who like reading too much. If I had to leave Chicago, I hope it would be for Boston
(Although, nowadays, MIT is probably closer to modern Harvard than it is to 1920 MIT. They're still the best at what they do, but a dif brand now)
1
2
55
Research can be messy and requires adaptability. When it comes to instrumentation, off-the-shelf capabilities are great, but modifiability is often underrated
In the following excerpt, a young Feynman is shocked and excited by how *bad* the Princeton cyclotron appears, saying:
2
8
54
@PaulSkallas
Scientific/engineering problems of the form “can x even be done?” tend to be much harder than those of the form “how do you do x…which has been done?”
I hear similar things of success rates with different chess puzzle prompts. “find the win” vs “mate in 4”
1
1
49
@dieworkwear
If you figure out how to infuse academics with the same kind of mission-driven pettiness -- not the kind they currently have -- you might solve the replication crisis/academic fraud
0
3
50
@albrgr
@gatesfoundation
I’ve never dealt directly with Gates. But in my tangential interactions it did always feel like they operated in a very MBA-ified way that him and Charlie tried to push against in their own work
I hope this turns out to be a net positive for the philanthropic space
1
0
49
@serbantanasa
If we did have a von Neumann around today, there’s a decent chance they’d be wasted in the current academic ecosystem
His era of academia was better set up to take advantage of somebody who could quickly get up to speed on assorted problems like he was
2
2
47
I've been working on a new project writing up administrative histories for a bunch of specific DARPA projects from history in a similar style to my industrial R&D lab pieces
I'll be posting them on FreakTakes in batches. First batch of 8 or so projects coming later this month!
7
2
48
This is one of the cooler things I’ve ever gotten out of being on Twitter
4
1
48
@mnolangray
Architecture boat tour. Try not to spend the majority of your time in the loop/river north/Gold Coast etc.
Commonly done by tourists but the charm is in the outer neighborhoods
If you can hang out in places like Lincoln Park, wicker park, Logan square, Pilsen, Ravenswood etc
2
0
48
I’ll be in London from the 10th to 18th. I’m about to begin working on several projects involving the UK R&D ecosystem
Looking to meet as many engineers, researchers, and R&D policy folks as I can! Please reach out — DMs open
1
5
49
@GrantSlatton
I know this is a joke…but if anyone is interested in understanding what the CS PhDs were up to in the 1960s-1980s, check out FreakTakes
This era of CS research was exceptional, including in ML
Tomorrows piece dives into 1980s driverless car work @ CMU
1
2
44
I visited the Bay last week. It seems like there's a ton of overlap in the Bay Area crew's reading habits (in a probably bad way) 🧵(1/9)
7
4
42
The Rust Belt state Senators aren’t built like they used to be
Applaud the shiny, metal, potentially productivity-enhancing machine Mr. Senator
btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat
3K
125
1K
1
2
39
@annaarthoe
A lot of really hard development work depends on high-level work from a ton of people
Of course, lots of big engineering organizations are just bloated. So it’s hard to disentangle from the outside
But in the Bell case at least, they had an internal sense of who was essential
0
0
40
@patrickc
@_TamaraWinter
I'm thinking of driving around to talk with a bunch of people involved in the Big Ten engineering programs in the next few months
It seems like they still do pretty applied forms of work with industry that were common to a place like early MIT but are far less common now
3
0
40
@rSanti97
I used to think it would be cool to be friends with/date comedians
But I soon realized how normal it is for them to take an interaction you had as the "premise" for a joke, change 30% of what happened to make it crazier, and tell the story in a way you can still be identified
3
4
37
In its early years, MIT was special. It trained students to be the scientifically informed, hands-on workmen that American industry needed to innovate
Today's piece dives into what made MIT special in that era and why we need a modern-day equivalent. a 🧵
2
10
37
@gurgavin
In the America I live in I appreciate that city Alderman have to scrape together the funds to pay Middle Eastern PE firms for lost parking revenue so you can shut down a street for a block party
An elegant system if you ask me
1
2
39
When I worked for Steve Levitt, he used to say, "Nobody wants to work on ideas that aren't theirs." And that often is the case!
It makes me very thankful that that the DC progress folks --
@tkalil2050
,
@KumarAGarg
,
@stuartbuck1
,
@calebwatney
,
@Parthion
, etc -- are the opposite
4
2
38
@nona_uppal
Normal People demands to be finished once you’ve started, for some reason
You will quickly come to hate both main characters’ decision-making patterns as if they are your oldest friends who ask you for advice repeatedly/at length and then don’t take it
It’s awesome
3
1
37
Interesting progress trend in American wrestling: all of a sudden there are a handful of high school wrestlers dominating fully-grown former NCAA champs and truly competing at World Team Trials
This used to happen every so often. But it seems like it might be the new norm
2
4
37
I’ll never get over how much doctors used to just lie to people because they decided on their own that it was the moral thing to do.
Richard Feynman on his wife Arlene’s diagnosis
4
4
34
@PaulSkallas
Eh. Once the first one went off and the world knew it was possible, probably 3-ish other countries with the right combo of science, engineering, and resources existed that could’ve (alone) developed it within 10 years if they cared at least a medium to high amount about doing so
2
0
34
@IglesiasYosha
@gambitman14
@IglesiasYosha
. I'm a lowly 1200-ish rated player but I do teach data science and have done work in catching cheaters in other areas before
I made some visualizations with
@gambitman14
's data that maybe you'll find interesting
6
2
34
@Ben_Reinhardt
SF people: "We want another Bell Labs! That was the golden era. If one existed we'd all love to work there!"
Also SF people (my followers):
Hypothetical: Let’s say I got a modest amount of money to set up an electronics-focused R&D lab loosely modeled on something like the original GE Research Lab
If I set it up in a some Midwestern town would you/any of your great, technical friends excitedly take the job?
2
0
16
5
2
36