55 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2022
  2. Feb 2022
  3. Jan 2022
    1. In a recent paper, Pierre Azoulay and co-authors concluded that Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s long-term grants to high-potential scientists made those scientists 96 percent more likely to produce breakthrough work. If this finding is borne out, it suggests that present funding mechanisms are likely to be far from optimal, in part because they do not focus enough on research autonomy and risk taking.

      Risk taking and the potential return are key pieces of progress.

      Most of our research funding apparatus isn't set up with a capitalistic structure. Would that be good or bad for accelerating progress?

    2. Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.

      These are usually incredibly political questions that aren't always done logically.

      See for example Malcolm Gladwell's podcast episode My Little Hundred Million.

  4. Dec 2021
    1. In a world where labs become sustainable by spinning out products, researchers need some way to de-risk their initial work, when they won’t have any new products or technologies to sell. I think this is an effective place for open-ended research grant programs.

      This is a lovely idea, but it feels like it's just kicking the can down the road. Who's funding these grants? Where do those monies come from? That's the real problem.

  5. Nov 2021
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  13. Oct 2020
    1. Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies.

      examples of government (public) funding for research and it's effects

  14. Sep 2020
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  17. May 2020
    1. Holmes, E. A., O’Connor, R. C., Perry, V. H., Tracey, I., Wessely, S., Arseneault, L., Ballard, C., Christensen, H., Silver, R. C., Everall, I., Ford, T., John, A., Kabir, T., King, K., Madan, I., Michie, S., Przybylski, A. K., Shafran, R., Sweeney, A., … Bullmore, E. (2020). Multidisciplinary research priorities for the COVID-19 pandemic: A call for action for mental health science. The Lancet Psychiatry, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30168-1

  18. Apr 2020
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  20. May 2019
    1. Funding organizations like universities and foundations can get in touch with authors to back their future work, or spot trends of where breakthroughs are being made so they can funnel resources correctly

      Essentially GoFundMe or Patreon for the science set! This is nearly laughable and unlikely to really happen.

      Maybe VC culture can invade science research and screw that up too!

  21. Sep 2017
    1. We spend a lot of public and private money chasing silver bullets in education. I propose we would be better served by investing that money in providing educators with the training, support, and incentives to participate in the work of advancing the sciences of learning.

      for teachers as "citizen scientists"

  22. Apr 2016
    1. A system that assumes a "quite good" institution is unable to get better, and thus denies them the funds that would enable them to get better, is probably not an optimal system for promoting merit. A system that rewards in proportion to merit would at least be able to recognise and reflect the dynamism of university research; research groups wax and wane as people come, go, get disheartened, get re-invigorated.

      On the importance of funding middle-ground

    2. it could be argued that we don’t just need an elite: we need a reasonable number of institutions in which there is a strong research environment, where more senior researchers feel valued and their graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to aim high. Our best strategy for retaining international competitiveness might be by fostering those who are doing well but have potential to do even better

      capacity requires top and middle.