Unusual social processes that could be (or are being) trialled today by adventurous funders or research organizations
Fund-by-variance: Instead of funding grants that get the highest average score from reviewers, a funder should use the variance (or kurtosis or some similar measurement of disagreement5) in reviewer scores as a primary signal: only fund things that are highly polarizing (some people love it, some people hate it). One thesis to support such a program is that you may prefer to fund projects with a modest chance of outlier success over projects with a high chance of modest success. An alternate thesis is that you should aspire to fund things only you would fund, and so should look for signal to that end: projects everyone agrees are good will certainly get funded elsewhere. And if you merely fund what everyone else is funding, then you have little marginal impact6,7.
Century Grant Program8: Solicit grant applications for projects to be funded for 100 years. Done through an endowment model, the cost would be a small multiple of conventional 5- or 10-year funding. The point is to elicit an important type of intellectual dark matter9: problems of immense scientific value that can’t be investigated on short timelines. Inspired by seminal projects such as the CO2 monitoring at the Mauna Loa observatory, the Framingham Heart Study, and the Cape Grim Air Archive.
Tenure insurance: Tenure-track scientists often play it safe in the projects they take on. Encourage people to swing for the fences by offering a large payout if they fail to receive tenure. Supposing 80% of tenure-track faculty receive tenure10, the cost for a large payout would only be a modest addition to an existing benefits package. A premium of $8k per year for 6 years, with a 5x multiplier and reasonable assumptions about interest rates, would result in a payout of over $300k. That’s several years of pre-tenure salary in many fields and at many institutions. This suggestion is an instance of two more general patterns: (1) moving risk to parties who can more easily bear it, making the system as a whole less risk averse; and (2) a plausible way to increase people’s ambition is to de-risk by improving their fallback options in the event of failure11.
Failure audit: Many funders advocate high-risk, high-reward research, but this is often mere research theater, not seriously meant. For instance, in 2018 the European Research Council issued a self-congratulatory report claiming that: (a) they fund mostly “high risk” work; and (b) almost all the work they fund succeeds, with 79% of projects achieving either a “scientific breakthrough” or a “major scientific advance”. If almost every project succeeds, then this is not a definition of “high risk” we recognize12. To prove the seriousness of their intent about risk, funders could run credible independent audits on their grant programs, and if the failure rate for grants persists below some threshold (say, 50%), the program manager is fired13. Or, at a different level of abstraction, the entire funder could be audited, and if the number of grant programs which fails is below 50%, the funder’s director is fired.
Acquisition pipeline for research institutes: People often lament the loss of (or large changes in) great private research institutes past – PARC in the 1970s is perhaps the best modern example14. If PARC-in-the-1970s was so great, why didn’t the NSF acquire it? An acquisition would have been within their mission, and almost certainly a far-better-than-median use of NSF’s funds15. There might well have been political or bureaucratic barriers, but if so the problem lies in politics and bureaucracy, not in the merit of the idea. If public (or philanthropic) acquisition of private research institutes was common, it may incentivize the creation of more outstanding private research institutes.
Pull immigration programs: Moving between countries is an intimidating and arduous exercise, often involving a considerable amount of know-how. There is no a priori reason some enterprising country – let’s say Estonia, which has run several innovative experiments in the way they approach immigration – couldn’t simply identify outstanding people they’d like as immigrants, and directly recruit them. Imagine a valet shows up on the doorstep of every science olympiad student in the world, with a first-class plane ticket to Estonia, a pre-approved visa, an offer of several years of first-rate private mentoring in whatever field or fields they desire, a stipend, and housing as part of a community of similarly extraordinary students. It’d be interesting to see what the long-run outcomes from such a community would be16.
Open Source Institute: Like a research university, but instead of producing understanding in the form of research papers, it would produce understanding in the form of open source software and open protocols (with a penumbra of concomitant goods, such as prototypes, demos, open data and, yes, papers). Based on the thesis that sometimes important new understanding isn’t best expressed in words, but rather in code or protocols. A number of superficially similar programs already operate, but none (as far we know) genuinely change the underlying political economy – the means by which people build their reputation and career – which is the primary point.
Institute for Traveling Scientists: A yacht that sails around the world, boarding and de-boarding scientists in each port. It would be a mobile version of places like the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences – somewhere stimulating and relaxing for scientists to go on sabbatical, learn a new field, or perhaps write that book they’ve been meaning to write. Inspired in part by Craig Venter’s round-the-world trip for the Ocean Sequencing Project.
Long-shot prizes: Purchase insurance premiums against extremely unlikely possibilities that would transform the world. A proof that P ≠ NP. A proof that P = NP. A constructive algorithm solving NP-complete problems quickly. Cold fusion. True faster-than-light travel. A perpetual motion machine. And so on. The more unlikely the outcome, the larger the prize can be, even for a small premium17. Cheap, unlikely to succeed, and extraordinarily impactful if it led to solutions to such problems18.
Public hall of shame / anti-portfolio: The venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners maintains a public anti-portfolio of companies where they had an opportunity to invest, but failed. It includes enormously successful companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, and many others. Each failure is accompanied by a short story naming the Bessemer partner who had the opportunity to invest but didn’t, and describing (often fancifully and amusingly) why they failed to invest. Every science funder, every university, and every scientific journal in the world should maintain a similar anti-portfolio. Alternately, a collective anti-portfolio could be constructed by a third party willing to tolerate some opprobrium. It wouldn’t be popular19. But done well it would be invaluable.
Interdisciplinary Institute: Most proposals for interdisciplinarity are tepid. Take interdisciplinarity seriously, by setting up an institute which identifies (say) 30 different disciplines, and then hires three people to work at the intersection of every possible pairing of disciplines. That’s just 1305 people – a large program, but tiny on the scale of modern science. This would be a deliberately variance-inducing strategy. Most pairings of disciplines would produce little, but there are likely a few where great discoveries would unexpectedly be made through the combination. Those few would pay for all the rest. A less expensive approach would be to sample from randomly chosen pairs of disciplines, with the disciplines potentially coming from a much longer list.
At-the-Bench Fellowship: In their heyday, senior scientists at places such as Bell Labs and Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology often carried out research work themselves, or in direct, hands-on collaboration with 1-3 others20. Yet modern universities often strongly encourage scientists to take on a managerial role, applying for grants but being hands off in research work. This Fellowship would fund senior scientists to spend essentially all their time actually doing science. The thesis here is that for some types of work, important discoveries are most likely if done by someone highly skilled, with a deeply developed affinity for some part of nature. Put another way, the thesis is that for some scientists there are increasing returns to focused expertise, not the diminishing returns assumed in the conventional scientist-becomes-manager-of-a-large-group model.
Printing press for funders: An entity endowed with $10 billion could spin out new funders each year; it could spin out, for instance, a single funder with a roughly $500 million endowment, perhaps running a competition to find the operators of the new funder. Or it could spin out a larger number of smaller funders. If each new funder had a radically different thesis, this could significantly increase the structural diversity of science; and perhaps increase the diversity of ambient working environments available to scientists. It would also be possible to set up a similar kind of printing press for research organizations, mutatis mutandis. And, perhaps, to set up sunset clauses for the organizations, so they don’t permanently occupy organizational space in the discovery ecosystem; organizational longevity would then necessarily be through people and ideas being passed to future organizations, not organizational inertia.
Excitement quotient for funders: Scientists often apply for grants on the basis of what they believe is fundable, rather than with their best ideas21. We’ve spoken with scientists who tell us “I know I can get funding for many fashionable-but-unimportant projects, but I can’t get funding for the work I think is most important”. Why should a funder or anonymous peer reviewer know better than the scientist how they should use their skills? It has the flavor of the busybody stranger who tells a parent they’re parenting wrong. Many funders effectively give veto power to such strangers. One approach to partially address this is for an independent agency to sample people applying to different funders, asking: “how excited were you about this grant application?” They can then publicly rate different funders by comparing excitement scores. This would place pressure on funders to fund work applicants were excited about, and raise questions if it was mostly pro forma.
Programs motivated by a view of the funder as a detector searching out intellectual dark matter
Endowed professorships by 25: Many of history’s great scientists made key discoveries while very young. This was true, for example, of giants such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. It’s also been true more recently: think of Joshua Lederberg, discovering bacterial conjugation at the age of 21, or Brian Josephson, discovering the tunneling current between superconductors at the age of 22. Concerningly, in recent times the age at which scientists can establish independent research programs has substantially increased29. Often, people who begin research in their early 20s can’t establish independent programs until their late 30s or 40s(!) Instead, they work on someone else’s research program, or leave science. The thesis of this endowment program is that it will unlock latent potential for discovery if we give some young people full independence to follow their ideas. To this end, establish endowed professorships (and associated project support) at a few outstanding institutions, say Harvard and Cambridge, for promising scientists no more than 25 years old. If even a few recapitulate the success of a Lederberg or a Josephson such a program would be well worth it30.
Focused Research Organizations (FROs): First trialled in 2021, these are organizations of scientists and engineers which “require levels of coordinated engineering or system-building inaccessible to academia”, often tens of millions of dollars31. They aim to produce a well-defined tool, technology, or scientific dataset. Examples include: E11 bio, developing tools to make it relatively easy and inexpensive to map mice brains, down to the level of single synapses; and the Cultivarium – most work in synthetic biology has been focused on a few model organisms, but the Cultivarium is developing tools to make synthetic biology routine in a much wider range of organisms. At first glance, FROs seem similar to endeavors such as LIGO, the LHC, and the human genome project, each of which also involved large-scale science and engineering in pursuit of well-defined ends. But in the past such endeavors were conceived and funded on a bespoke basis. The innovation of FROs is that they are a scalable way of eliciting and creating such entities; the underlying thesis is that such a scalable means would reveal many valuable FROs that are currently latent. It is (again) a mechanism to search out and activate a kind of intellectual dark matter32.
Para-academic Fellowship: A Fellowship for people to do independent research work outside academia. The underlying thesis is that there are many such people who have extremely unusual combinations of skills, skills unlikely to be found in academia, but which may enable important discoveries. Think of people such as Jane Jacobs, Judith Rich Harris, and Robert Ballard. Indeed, if we go back further in time, think of the young Albert Einstein, during his time in the Swiss Patent Office. Again: this is building a detector for a class of undervalued intellectual dark matter, and then funding whatever seems most promising33.
Discipline-switching Fellowship: To make it easy for outstanding scientists to change fields. We have met many scientists who have no trouble getting funding in the field they are currently working in, but who tell us they would prefer to be working in some other field. This is strange: they have funding to work on projects they’re not so keen on, but not for things they consider more promising. Sometimes they have some special insight or edge that they feel gives them an advantage in their desired new area. Others feel they have run the course of what they have to contribute in their current field. Whatever the reason, funders currently largely ignore this information: it is, yet again, intellectual dark matter. Surfacing and acting on it will help people better use their talents. Done at sufficient scale, it would help established but moribund fields die. And it would also surface useful aggregate information: if people are unexpectedly going into unglamorous fields or leaving high status fields, that’s a striking signal that something is afoot. Many small-scale programs along these lines are already done; it would be interesting to make, say, 50,000 such grants each year, providing a huge injection of disciplinary liquidity into science34.
Programs motivated by a view of the funder as predictor
Elicit-the-secret-thesis: Sometimes a scientist undertakes a project because they have some special secret, something they know that no-one else fully appreciates, giving them a unique competitive edge. Feynman talked about the necessity of having “to think that I have some kind of inside track… that I have some special mathematical trick that I’m going to use that [my competitors] don’t have, or some kind of a talent”37. But if you’re a scientist with such an edge, you’re in a bind when it comes to funding. You don’t want to disclose this special edge in a peer-reviewed grant: you may be telling competitors your best ideas! Thus: the standard peer review proceduresometimes suppresses the information that would be most usefulfor making decisions. It’s an inverse market for lemons38, a form of asymmetric knowledge where perverse incentives inhibit the applicant from revealing how good their idea is. Of course, some projects have competitive edges of a less easy-to-copy nature (e.g., special equipment or personnel). But not all. A grant application could have a short separate section, where scientists are asked to describe any secret competitive edge they have. The funder would promise this secret thesis is seen only by the (professional, not peer) program manager. The secret thesis could then be used as an input in the decision-making; sometimes, it would be the decisive input.
A quota for young program managers: Suppose 50 percent of program managers were required to be appointed before age 28, and only allowed to serve for five years. Perhaps offer program manager jobs to all the Hertz or NSF Graduate Fellows at age 27? How would that change the nature of decisions made? Conventional wisdom says it requires age and experience to make good decisions. Perhaps that wisdom is correct. But the thesis here is that younger program managers would make systematically different decisions to today’s incumbents, an effective change in inference method, and perhaps with some advantages relative to the current situation. It would also be interesting to try similar ideas at other levels of a funder, perhaps at the level of the overall CEO or Director. What would a 25 year-old Director do differently, compared to the 50-, 60- and even 70-somethings common now at most funders?
A “Nobel prize” for funders: The early stages of important discoveries often look strange and illegible: people grappling with fundamental ideas in ways at the margin of, or outside, conventional wisdom. Since such projects often look like anything but sure bets, there is a strong incentive for funders to delay support – just when it is most needed – in order to avoid looking foolish. This is especially true of individual program managers, who naturally shy away from funding things that may later seem silly or frivolous. It’s striking to contrast this situation with venture capital, where there is a strong incentive to fund in the earliest stages, when stock is cheap because of the uncertainty; the net result is more chance of looking silly when things fail, but also a much larger windfall if things work out39. It’s interesting to think about ways of rewarding the science funders – especially individuals – who are first to put their own reputations on the line to support such projects. This can be done in many ways: one natural way is to create one or more prizes to publicly recognize such brave funders.
Various illustrative examples of metascience ideas from Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu’s 2022 essay A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science, for my own reference:
Unusual social processes that could be (or are being) trialled today by adventurous funders or research organizations
Fund-by-variance: Instead of funding grants that get the highest average score from reviewers, a funder should use the variance (or kurtosis or some similar measurement of disagreement5) in reviewer scores as a primary signal: only fund things that are highly polarizing (some people love it, some people hate it). One thesis to support such a program is that you may prefer to fund projects with a modest chance of outlier success over projects with a high chance of modest success. An alternate thesis is that you should aspire to fund things only you would fund, and so should look for signal to that end: projects everyone agrees are good will certainly get funded elsewhere. And if you merely fund what everyone else is funding, then you have little marginal impact6,7.
Century Grant Program8: Solicit grant applications for projects to be funded for 100 years. Done through an endowment model, the cost would be a small multiple of conventional 5- or 10-year funding. The point is to elicit an important type of intellectual dark matter9: problems of immense scientific value that can’t be investigated on short timelines. Inspired by seminal projects such as the CO2 monitoring at the Mauna Loa observatory, the Framingham Heart Study, and the Cape Grim Air Archive.
Tenure insurance: Tenure-track scientists often play it safe in the projects they take on. Encourage people to swing for the fences by offering a large payout if they fail to receive tenure. Supposing 80% of tenure-track faculty receive tenure10, the cost for a large payout would only be a modest addition to an existing benefits package. A premium of $8k per year for 6 years, with a 5x multiplier and reasonable assumptions about interest rates, would result in a payout of over $300k. That’s several years of pre-tenure salary in many fields and at many institutions. This suggestion is an instance of two more general patterns: (1) moving risk to parties who can more easily bear it, making the system as a whole less risk averse; and (2) a plausible way to increase people’s ambition is to de-risk by improving their fallback options in the event of failure11.
Failure audit: Many funders advocate high-risk, high-reward research, but this is often mere research theater, not seriously meant. For instance, in 2018 the European Research Council issued a self-congratulatory report claiming that: (a) they fund mostly “high risk” work; and (b) almost all the work they fund succeeds, with 79% of projects achieving either a “scientific breakthrough” or a “major scientific advance”. If almost every project succeeds, then this is not a definition of “high risk” we recognize12. To prove the seriousness of their intent about risk, funders could run credible independent audits on their grant programs, and if the failure rate for grants persists below some threshold (say, 50%), the program manager is fired13. Or, at a different level of abstraction, the entire funder could be audited, and if the number of grant programs which fails is below 50%, the funder’s director is fired.
Acquisition pipeline for research institutes: People often lament the loss of (or large changes in) great private research institutes past – PARC in the 1970s is perhaps the best modern example14. If PARC-in-the-1970s was so great, why didn’t the NSF acquire it? An acquisition would have been within their mission, and almost certainly a far-better-than-median use of NSF’s funds15. There might well have been political or bureaucratic barriers, but if so the problem lies in politics and bureaucracy, not in the merit of the idea. If public (or philanthropic) acquisition of private research institutes was common, it may incentivize the creation of more outstanding private research institutes.
Pull immigration programs: Moving between countries is an intimidating and arduous exercise, often involving a considerable amount of know-how. There is no a priori reason some enterprising country – let’s say Estonia, which has run several innovative experiments in the way they approach immigration – couldn’t simply identify outstanding people they’d like as immigrants, and directly recruit them. Imagine a valet shows up on the doorstep of every science olympiad student in the world, with a first-class plane ticket to Estonia, a pre-approved visa, an offer of several years of first-rate private mentoring in whatever field or fields they desire, a stipend, and housing as part of a community of similarly extraordinary students. It’d be interesting to see what the long-run outcomes from such a community would be16.
Open Source Institute: Like a research university, but instead of producing understanding in the form of research papers, it would produce understanding in the form of open source software and open protocols (with a penumbra of concomitant goods, such as prototypes, demos, open data and, yes, papers). Based on the thesis that sometimes important new understanding isn’t best expressed in words, but rather in code or protocols. A number of superficially similar programs already operate, but none (as far we know) genuinely change the underlying political economy – the means by which people build their reputation and career – which is the primary point.
Institute for Traveling Scientists: A yacht that sails around the world, boarding and de-boarding scientists in each port. It would be a mobile version of places like the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences – somewhere stimulating and relaxing for scientists to go on sabbatical, learn a new field, or perhaps write that book they’ve been meaning to write. Inspired in part by Craig Venter’s round-the-world trip for the Ocean Sequencing Project.
Long-shot prizes: Purchase insurance premiums against extremely unlikely possibilities that would transform the world. A proof that P ≠ NP. A proof that P = NP. A constructive algorithm solving NP-complete problems quickly. Cold fusion. True faster-than-light travel. A perpetual motion machine. And so on. The more unlikely the outcome, the larger the prize can be, even for a small premium17. Cheap, unlikely to succeed, and extraordinarily impactful if it led to solutions to such problems18.
Public hall of shame / anti-portfolio: The venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners maintains a public anti-portfolio of companies where they had an opportunity to invest, but failed. It includes enormously successful companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, and many others. Each failure is accompanied by a short story naming the Bessemer partner who had the opportunity to invest but didn’t, and describing (often fancifully and amusingly) why they failed to invest. Every science funder, every university, and every scientific journal in the world should maintain a similar anti-portfolio. Alternately, a collective anti-portfolio could be constructed by a third party willing to tolerate some opprobrium. It wouldn’t be popular19. But done well it would be invaluable.
Interdisciplinary Institute: Most proposals for interdisciplinarity are tepid. Take interdisciplinarity seriously, by setting up an institute which identifies (say) 30 different disciplines, and then hires three people to work at the intersection of every possible pairing of disciplines. That’s just 1305 people – a large program, but tiny on the scale of modern science. This would be a deliberately variance-inducing strategy. Most pairings of disciplines would produce little, but there are likely a few where great discoveries would unexpectedly be made through the combination. Those few would pay for all the rest. A less expensive approach would be to sample from randomly chosen pairs of disciplines, with the disciplines potentially coming from a much longer list.
At-the-Bench Fellowship: In their heyday, senior scientists at places such as Bell Labs and Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology often carried out research work themselves, or in direct, hands-on collaboration with 1-3 others20. Yet modern universities often strongly encourage scientists to take on a managerial role, applying for grants but being hands off in research work. This Fellowship would fund senior scientists to spend essentially all their time actually doing science. The thesis here is that for some types of work, important discoveries are most likely if done by someone highly skilled, with a deeply developed affinity for some part of nature. Put another way, the thesis is that for some scientists there are increasing returns to focused expertise, not the diminishing returns assumed in the conventional scientist-becomes-manager-of-a-large-group model.
Printing press for funders: An entity endowed with $10 billion could spin out new funders each year; it could spin out, for instance, a single funder with a roughly $500 million endowment, perhaps running a competition to find the operators of the new funder. Or it could spin out a larger number of smaller funders. If each new funder had a radically different thesis, this could significantly increase the structural diversity of science; and perhaps increase the diversity of ambient working environments available to scientists. It would also be possible to set up a similar kind of printing press for research organizations, mutatis mutandis. And, perhaps, to set up sunset clauses for the organizations, so they don’t permanently occupy organizational space in the discovery ecosystem; organizational longevity would then necessarily be through people and ideas being passed to future organizations, not organizational inertia.
Excitement quotient for funders: Scientists often apply for grants on the basis of what they believe is fundable, rather than with their best ideas21. We’ve spoken with scientists who tell us “I know I can get funding for many fashionable-but-unimportant projects, but I can’t get funding for the work I think is most important”. Why should a funder or anonymous peer reviewer know better than the scientist how they should use their skills? It has the flavor of the busybody stranger who tells a parent they’re parenting wrong. Many funders effectively give veto power to such strangers. One approach to partially address this is for an independent agency to sample people applying to different funders, asking: “how excited were you about this grant application?” They can then publicly rate different funders by comparing excitement scores. This would place pressure on funders to fund work applicants were excited about, and raise questions if it was mostly pro forma.
Programs motivated by a view of the funder as a detector searching out intellectual dark matter
Endowed professorships by 25: Many of history’s great scientists made key discoveries while very young. This was true, for example, of giants such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. It’s also been true more recently: think of Joshua Lederberg, discovering bacterial conjugation at the age of 21, or Brian Josephson, discovering the tunneling current between superconductors at the age of 22. Concerningly, in recent times the age at which scientists can establish independent research programs has substantially increased29. Often, people who begin research in their early 20s can’t establish independent programs until their late 30s or 40s(!) Instead, they work on someone else’s research program, or leave science. The thesis of this endowment program is that it will unlock latent potential for discovery if we give some young people full independence to follow their ideas. To this end, establish endowed professorships (and associated project support) at a few outstanding institutions, say Harvard and Cambridge, for promising scientists no more than 25 years old. If even a few recapitulate the success of a Lederberg or a Josephson such a program would be well worth it30.
Focused Research Organizations (FROs): First trialled in 2021, these are organizations of scientists and engineers which “require levels of coordinated engineering or system-building inaccessible to academia”, often tens of millions of dollars31. They aim to produce a well-defined tool, technology, or scientific dataset. Examples include: E11 bio, developing tools to make it relatively easy and inexpensive to map mice brains, down to the level of single synapses; and the Cultivarium – most work in synthetic biology has been focused on a few model organisms, but the Cultivarium is developing tools to make synthetic biology routine in a much wider range of organisms. At first glance, FROs seem similar to endeavors such as LIGO, the LHC, and the human genome project, each of which also involved large-scale science and engineering in pursuit of well-defined ends. But in the past such endeavors were conceived and funded on a bespoke basis. The innovation of FROs is that they are a scalable way of eliciting and creating such entities; the underlying thesis is that such a scalable means would reveal many valuable FROs that are currently latent. It is (again) a mechanism to search out and activate a kind of intellectual dark matter32.
Para-academic Fellowship: A Fellowship for people to do independent research work outside academia. The underlying thesis is that there are many such people who have extremely unusual combinations of skills, skills unlikely to be found in academia, but which may enable important discoveries. Think of people such as Jane Jacobs, Judith Rich Harris, and Robert Ballard. Indeed, if we go back further in time, think of the young Albert Einstein, during his time in the Swiss Patent Office. Again: this is building a detector for a class of undervalued intellectual dark matter, and then funding whatever seems most promising33.
Discipline-switching Fellowship: To make it easy for outstanding scientists to change fields. We have met many scientists who have no trouble getting funding in the field they are currently working in, but who tell us they would prefer to be working in some other field. This is strange: they have funding to work on projects they’re not so keen on, but not for things they consider more promising. Sometimes they have some special insight or edge that they feel gives them an advantage in their desired new area. Others feel they have run the course of what they have to contribute in their current field. Whatever the reason, funders currently largely ignore this information: it is, yet again, intellectual dark matter. Surfacing and acting on it will help people better use their talents. Done at sufficient scale, it would help established but moribund fields die. And it would also surface useful aggregate information: if people are unexpectedly going into unglamorous fields or leaving high status fields, that’s a striking signal that something is afoot. Many small-scale programs along these lines are already done; it would be interesting to make, say, 50,000 such grants each year, providing a huge injection of disciplinary liquidity into science34.
Programs motivated by a view of the funder as predictor
Elicit-the-secret-thesis: Sometimes a scientist undertakes a project because they have some special secret, something they know that no-one else fully appreciates, giving them a unique competitive edge. Feynman talked about the necessity of having “to think that I have some kind of inside track… that I have some special mathematical trick that I’m going to use that [my competitors] don’t have, or some kind of a talent”37. But if you’re a scientist with such an edge, you’re in a bind when it comes to funding. You don’t want to disclose this special edge in a peer-reviewed grant: you may be telling competitors your best ideas! Thus: the standard peer review procedure sometimes suppresses the information that would be most useful for making decisions. It’s an inverse market for lemons38, a form of asymmetric knowledge where perverse incentives inhibit the applicant from revealing how good their idea is. Of course, some projects have competitive edges of a less easy-to-copy nature (e.g., special equipment or personnel). But not all. A grant application could have a short separate section, where scientists are asked to describe any secret competitive edge they have. The funder would promise this secret thesis is seen only by the (professional, not peer) program manager. The secret thesis could then be used as an input in the decision-making; sometimes, it would be the decisive input.
A quota for young program managers: Suppose 50 percent of program managers were required to be appointed before age 28, and only allowed to serve for five years. Perhaps offer program manager jobs to all the Hertz or NSF Graduate Fellows at age 27? How would that change the nature of decisions made? Conventional wisdom says it requires age and experience to make good decisions. Perhaps that wisdom is correct. But the thesis here is that younger program managers would make systematically different decisions to today’s incumbents, an effective change in inference method, and perhaps with some advantages relative to the current situation. It would also be interesting to try similar ideas at other levels of a funder, perhaps at the level of the overall CEO or Director. What would a 25 year-old Director do differently, compared to the 50-, 60- and even 70-somethings common now at most funders?
A “Nobel prize” for funders: The early stages of important discoveries often look strange and illegible: people grappling with fundamental ideas in ways at the margin of, or outside, conventional wisdom. Since such projects often look like anything but sure bets, there is a strong incentive for funders to delay support – just when it is most needed – in order to avoid looking foolish. This is especially true of individual program managers, who naturally shy away from funding things that may later seem silly or frivolous. It’s striking to contrast this situation with venture capital, where there is a strong incentive to fund in the earliest stages, when stock is cheap because of the uncertainty; the net result is more chance of looking silly when things fail, but also a much larger windfall if things work out39. It’s interesting to think about ways of rewarding the science funders – especially individuals – who are first to put their own reputations on the line to support such projects. This can be done in many ways: one natural way is to create one or more prizes to publicly recognize such brave funders.