For research funding, the sweet spot is the flashiest idea that seems extremely likely to work. It’s hard to get grants to try something really out there, espe

For research funding, the sweet spot is the flashiest idea that seems extremely likely to work. It’s hard to get grants to try something really out there, especially from the NIH or NSF; DARPA is a bit more adventurous. Pilot data helps with this, but those experiments cost money too, so one approach is to make the project sound almost, but not quite, obvious in light of existing work. At the same time, it’s also really hard to get funding to confirm something that everybody “knows”, even when the underlying data is actually not very convincing. These experiments need some hype.