Book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11797471
Structure of this document
me (Alex) commenting
On the research environment within Bell Labs:
- Arnold would later say of his group, “inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.” The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.
what does providing a free environment for the operation of genius looks like at flashbots?
- The Labs’ research department was conceived upon the notion of constantly looking far ahead, toward the goal of big and risky breakthroughs. To think long-term toward the revolutionary, and to simultaneously think near-term toward manufacturing, comprises the most vital of combinations.
this reminds me of what we're trying to build
- Bell Labs had a clear mission : “Our job, essentially, is to devise and develop facilities which will enable two human beings anywhere in the world to talk to each other as clearly as if they were face to face and to do this economically as well as efficiently.”
- And as Morry Tanenbaum, the inventor of the silicon transistor, points out, Bell Labs’ sense of mission—to plan the future of communications—also had an incalculable value that endured for sixty years. The mission was broad but also directed. Bell Labs’ researchers, Tanenbaum notes, had a “circumscribed freedom” that proved to be liberating and practical at the same time.
what's our manifesto?
On the exchange of ideas within Bell Labs: