Creating a New Ecosystem of Research and Innovation

I'd like to help.

Speaking as a social scientist…real scientists are the coolest

I love progress studies and metascience. I’ve loved it since before I knew it had a name. I initially stumbled into the field while doing background research on the Manhattan Project for a project I was working on at my job. When I initially leaped into this rabbit hole, I was just calling it “the social scientific system of scientists.” I have been reading deeply in the field for several years. The different buckets of material to draw on are fascinating: biographies and histories of the great inventors and labs, computational social science research often built on citations in research papers and patents, and niche psych/anthro literature on how serial innovators think and interact in teams. I have been reading everything I can get my hands in the field since 2019.

And I’m so excited by the explosion of interest in the space. The community of builders and visionary funders striving to design new research organizations that foster innovation that will truly improve the lives of regular people is inspiring. I am currently trying to build a product in this space. But I wanted to do more. More so than my one small product, I just want the space to succeed.

The Engineering Innovation Newsletter

Every piece in this newsletter will have the same goal: to propose concrete ways forward for those looking to help shape the future of technological innovation.

I will not be in the business of just asserting my beliefs sans facts and background information. Instead, I’ll be attempting to build understanding and weave narratives through a thorough, but still light-hearted, presentation of a combination of academic literature, the tales of great inventors, and any other evidence that fits the piece. If you come to an entirely different conclusion than I do based on the evidence provided, then that’s great!

As long as I can help the readers of this newsletter think new and different thoughts about the space, then I consider that a huge win! I hope to be an easy one-stop-shop for those looking to think deeply on these hard progress studies/metascience problems but are inevitably time-constrained.

Please feel free to Twitter dm me @eric_is_weird with new article ideas, questions, or comments. If enough readers let me know that there’s a specific piece they’d love to see produced, I’m excited to dive into the question and quickly produce a piece on it.

First post dropping Monday!

Please subscribe if you’re intrigued. If enough people subscribe, I think I’ll quit my day job so I can write more of these and continue to develop my product!