22 ms·

What we learned doing Fast Grants

202 points by sundaypancakes 5y ago

mrkurt 5y ago
The US has created so much bureaucracy, it's hard to imagine clawing ourselves out from under it.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  If the gov't was a tech company, the laws that have been created are a massive amount of technical debt that has been built up over a century and rarely has anyone ever gone back to prune bad laws. There was a commission created to discover how many LAWS there were in the U.S. Just basic LAWS that people and institutions have to follow(because ignorance of the law is no excuse) And after years the final conclusion from this commission was that it was impossible to know how many laws there are. You can google that. A ton of what governments deal with are problems THEY CREATE THEMSELVES.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  It's not entirely a ratchet. Look at what happened to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
haskellandchill 5y ago
We need to fix our economy to encourage the flow of money to productive ideas and individuals.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Too bad the most productive ideas and individuals are mostly not in the path of this money flow, instead pushed aside by the very clamor of the uniform hordes who seek nothing else. >alternative models of science funding can work. >The macro conclusion is that we don’t yet know what works or which combination of structures would make most sense. One thing we all know is the type of things that don't work, when it comes to making the most of those researchers having the greatest talent for out-of-the-box experimentation & discovery. Over a lifetime of effort tackling this exact problem, proven elements can be isolated and combined in ways that are not possible using any other approach. So it's good that there are actually those who long ago foresaw today's sad situation, and who know lots of things that do work, even if those individuals are not in the mainstream.
  - haskellandchill 5y ago
    It is too bad... also I'm a little confused why I was downvoted, I see this as part of the more general problem of asset allocation our current economy is struggling with, of which crypto and meme stocks are the clearest symptom. A possible solution is UBI, once people are safe and secure they can research without worrying about survival and eventually reap the gains of good work. However there still would be the problem of large asset allocation, like who gets machines to conduct research, I have no ideas of any fair solution for that.
rattray 5y ago
This is worth reading all the way through for anyone with an interest in science and innovative projects.
- TheCanuckster 5y ago
  Thank you for your thoughtful comment. At the risk of drawing a conclusion too strong from the article, I would add that that Fast Grants' referee panel of 'earyl-career individuals from top universities' with [responses] given out within '48 hours' warrants thoughtful contemplation on its own. Hiring great people, then giving them both autonomy and authority to make effective decisions seems to be a missing ingredient in high-uncertainty activities (and no wonder, how is someone supposed to take risks when failure is harshly penalized). It is also a telling demonstration that questions and challenges requiring domain expertise need not be subject to endless advisory reviews or require sophisticated statistical modelling/complicated decision processes. Regarding the statistical modelling/decision processes, I by no means am suggesting such modelling is always unnecessary, just that it seems it can often be used to justify inaction, or simply to cover one's arse. I am reminded of the Challenger incident [1] where engineers at Morton Thiokol were deeply suspect of launching, but were unable to decisively prove that a launch was inadvisable for want of adequate evidence. The rich irony of the situation was that several engineers were suspect of the launch AND had domain expertise shared a "gut instinct" about something each had superior tacit knowledge about. Granted, going with one's "gut" generalizes poorly outside of a domain of expertise. However, twenty scientists saying 'yay' or 'nay' to an activity is compelling evidence if all are dispassionate, third parties with no vested interest. I suspect such skilled, domain-aware groups with the necessary capacity to make important decisions would generalize well to high-uncertainty, risky activities. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380822
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Seems like funding awarded by a panel of 'early-career individuals from top universities' would be a success-prone screening process. But compared against the rigid and bureaucratic obstacles to conventional funding, it is actually closer to being a random application of criteria than what was otherwise available to the grantees. The sad part about the mainstream academic institutions is that a more random award process is more sensible than what most researchers are normally facing these days. No doubt 'late-career individuals who did top things even though they went to schools that were not well-known' would be a good qualification for a different success-prone panel, but you would expect the outcome to be vastly different. Either way it gives some researchers a chance who would not otherwise have any near-term or appropriate opportunities. Just different researchers.
efitz 5y ago
Well worth the read, although I would have liked to have seen more depth on “what could have gone better”.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> Most importantly, Fast Grants didn’t change the vaccine timeline, and vaccines were clearly the most important component of the response. They are being really intellectually honest here. One thing you couldn't apply for for Fast Grants was a media effort to convince people to take the vaccine. And speaking of the power of individuals, Robert De Niro (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-robert-de-niro-anti-vaccine-autism-movie-tribeca-20160325-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et...) and other A-Listers actively campaign against vaccines. Fauci said he wishes DiCaprio would endorse the vaccine - as Fast Grants said, pretty obvious - and of course DiCaprio hasn't, he thinks vaccines cause autism. Were there any institutions who were adversaries to vaccine adoption?
- eloff 5y ago
  What's disturbing is people taking health advice from celebrities instead of medical experts.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    What about taking health advice from the NEWS MEDIA.
    - eloff 5y ago
      Not recommended to take any kind of advice from the news media. It's not even recommended to consume much news media. The less you're exposed to that garbage, the better.
    - gpm 5y ago
      Screaming isn't necessary... Taking advice directly from the reporter is as ridiculous as taking advice from celebrities. Taking advice from the health officials/professionals the reporter is quoting... well as long as you trust the reporter to be quoting them accurately that's about as reasonable as taking advice directly from the health officials/professionals. Advice can roughly speaking be evaluated as [probability it was quoted correctly] * [probability you should be taking advice from that health official/professional]... (that's only rough, because you also have to account for reporters doing things like selectively quoting bad advice... but it's a reasonably first estimate)
jvanderbot 5y ago
The US went all in on vaccines. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the US didn't fund more academic R&D; that's the MO I expected during that administration.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  There's plenty of funding for academic R&D (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm), TFA focuses on how slow it took to get that funding or repurpose existing funding. I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.
  - eganp 5y ago
    I worked with a group trying to get a drug repurposing study running in June of last year. U01 submissions were often Sept-Aug with no cash until April 2021. To a degree, these NOTs and RFAs are deeply unserious and woefully underfunded. There are 10s of absurdly narrow sub-focuses (e.g. "Medical Consequences of Smoking and Vaping Drugs of Abuse in Individuals with HIV and COVID-19" really??) that are great add-ons to some existing research problem, but totally miss the point. It's not wrong to study these the ideas, but why prioritize over larger more impactful studies of drugs to treat ARDS or ALI? Much like The Fed provided public and private debt support, these applications are more pork for existing investigators with deep knowledge of the NIH bureaucracy, but sadly likely of little relevance to the larger issue.
- eganp 5y ago
  I'm glad we did. Vaccines were a home-run solution. In a crisis, what does academic R+D get you on the margin? Better testing for sure, but that wouldn't solve the crisis like vaccines would. I will say the drug repurposing landscape was an absolute fiasco last year. Every funding opportunity wanted reams of data supporting use in COVID19 which takes time to generate. Yet, somehow on-patent anti-IL-6 drugs were tried again and again and again even in the absence of elevated IL-6. UK and the NHS really got this right by centralizing repurposing efforts. In the US, there aren't more than ~50 experts in drug repurposing. Why didn't HHS/CDC round them up, lock them in a room, and have to rank-order molecules for proposed basket repurposing trials? We could have saved ~10-100k lives in the US with better drugs for early- and mid-stage disease, but nobody wants to fund a drug that can't generate an ROI. Truly a market, and institutional, failure here.
unchocked 5y ago
> Making human clinical trials cheaper and quicker is probably one of the biggest opportunities for improving U.S. healthcare both during and beyond pandemics. The failure to accelerate vaccine development through challenge testing is a black mark on our ethical and regulatory system. the Moderna vaccine mRNA was developed two days after COVID-19 was identified, yet it took over a year to get through human testing. All the while, willing volunteers stood by at https://www.1daysooner.org https://www.1daysooner.org
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  How about we quit treating people like children and make all drugs legal? The FDA stamp will just be a stamp of quality to help guide people to a known quality product. No enforcement of drug laws at the barrel of an authorities gun. But if people want to do some experimental off brand use that their doctor recommends then they can. If people do their own research and want to self prescribe they can. Getting the monopoly out of health care would reduce health care costs as well.
  - buu700 5y ago
    I've thought the same thing and generally agree with it. Why shouldn't I be able to walk to CVS and pick up a bottle of heroin and various prescription drugs? I'm an adult; I shouldn't even owe anyone an explanation. At the same time, I think we would need to concurrently ban drug advertisements as other countries have. To me, that seems like a better balance between treating individuals as adults with autonomy and minimizing harm on the macro scale.
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      The reason you can't go to CVS and pick up heroin or crack is: Inevitably, lots of people would become addicted and there would be many deaths. Very critical news stories would run. People neglecting their children to use drugs. Testimonies of loved ones and shattered families. Politicians would be inundated with calls to regulate these dangerous substances. Politicians who refused to do anything would be mired in conspiracy theories, accusations of conflict of interest and profiting from suffering. They would be voted out and replaced. Regulation ensues.
draklor40 5y ago
Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions. To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the institution.
- ike0790 5y ago
  well said
- mathattack 5y ago
  It’s growing the pie versus fighting over it. Most large firms have economies of scale that allow the managers to fight over the surplus. Hard to restrain this without moral authority of founders.
- cbsmith 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it a damning indictment. You set up institutions to protect the status quo. Individuals can go ahead with risks and experiments, but you don't want to risk an entire society with someone's wild idea. For every wild idea that works out, there's many more that didn't. Of course we should mitigate risks before potentially destroying society.
  - andreilys 5y ago
    Institutions operating in "peace-time" mode during war-time are failing the people they are supposed to represent. Continuing to protect the status quo during a national emergency is irresponsible and leads to countless lives lost.
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      Part of the trick is determining what the baseline risk levels are and what safeguards should be dispensed with. It's not binary "peace-time" vs. "war-time". It's about the baseline risk factors. Aside from societal risk, there's individual risk too. When a society's mortality rate drops, it is appropriate to have more safeguards, and when it increases, it is appropriate to have fewer safeguards. ...and then there's also the systemic effects of a broader, more relaxed approach to funding. While distributing $50 million means you're getting high quality leads, if you're in charge of a $5 billion funding program (which the NIH did manage: https://covid19.nih.gov/funding https://covid19.nih.gov/funding), the net effect of opening up the flood gates is going to be very different. Even if you do a good job of distributing that money (and that is, in itself a HUGE challenge), you're going to be dealing with law suits and political challenges that you'd not deal with for a $50 million fund. It may suck, but it's the reality of large systems.
Kydlaw 5y ago
Fast Grants, but to fight climate change?
- Retric 5y ago
  New emergencies generally offer more low hanging fruit. I am doubtful that ~50M split into 260 grants would have any measurable impact on climate change. Just as this didn’t have any large wins. Arguably rather than research leveraging that into solar panels or other infrastructure would be a better use of funds. In the end it’s a real gamble. One or more of those 4,000 applications was likely a great use of funds, but finding and funding it is hard especially if you’re trying to keep overhead low. Up the amount to say 1B/year and the tradeoffs become even harder between research and action.
  - boxed 5y ago
    Your argument is short time and defeatist. Good science can totally chance the game. You're talking about playing the existing game.
    - Retric 5y ago
      We don’t need new science at this point. 0 CO2 from cars + 0 CO2 from electricity + 0 CO2 from heating is a monumental improvement and we don’t need to tech to get there just building infrastructure is enough. Few people will want an ICE when 80+% of gas stations close down, that’s a huge tipping point. Any discovery that take 20 years to go from a lab to production isn’t fast enough to make real change. Avoiding CO2 pollution today on the other hand gives us time to find better solutions.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  I don't think climate change is a research problem. The key solutions to it are known but just require political will to do what needs to be done and bear the short-term disadvantages; but that doesn't seem plausible (and, arguably, if politicians just went ahead with major sacrifices to fight climate change, their voters would throw them out and replace with other politicians who keep the current policies), and research isn't going to change that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
The_rationalist 5y ago
The FDA bureaucracy is arguably the number 1 cause of mortality worldwide.
ALittleLight 5y ago
"This is an instance of a broader theme: we were surprised that many entities continued with something close to “business as usual” rather than switching to emergency pandemic mode" I think we need to codify what "emergency mode" is and when we switch to it. Bureaucracies, and those working in them, need to understand when the situation is not "business as usual" and get out of the way! Implicit in that is, when we are in emergency mode, more risk is taken, there is less red tape, we expect side effects and damage, but we also expect faster progress. We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  >> We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it. This is precisely the problem. Who is "we," and how are they going to define these new protocols? The "systems" are not (exclusively) designed. They're evolved. They're impenetrable, or at least difficult to penetrate. They're autonomous. Only insiders have the requisite knowledge to figure out what emergency mode is. The whole point is not to wait for "orders" to drop down.
ipunchghosts 5y ago
Whatever happened to that pineapple guy who donated all if his bitcoin for research?
wolverine876 5y ago
Andreessen Horowitz created Future to bypass journalists, as I understand it, and have actively tried to discredit journalists who are critics. This essay is the first I've seen in Future, and it fits what one might expect: It's highly critical of others, the authors portray themselves as heroes and avoid almost all criticism of themselves. There are almost no sources and it doesn't show or attempt to show other points of view, and makes no attempt to address bias and self-interest. In a sense, it works perfectly. Let's be aware of what it is: self-promotion from people trying to avoid scrutiny.
- DataGata 5y ago
  You are ignoring the article and attacking the publisher. Indeed, the article itself invites scrutiny.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > You are ignoring the article and attacking the publisher I wrote specific criticisms of the article, and why shouldn't I criticize the publisher? It's necessary to know your source. People criticize publishers all the time; many criticize all journalists and their publishers with one broad brush!

mrkurt 5y ago

The US has created so much bureaucracy, it's hard to imagine clawing ourselves out from under it.

nickthemagicman 5y ago
If the gov't was a tech company, the laws that have been created are a massive amount of technical debt that has been built up over a century and rarely has anyone ever gone back to prune bad laws. There was a commission created to discover how many LAWS there were in the U.S. Just basic LAWS that people and institutions have to follow(because ignorance of the law is no excuse) And after years the final conclusion from this commission was that it was impossible to know how many laws there are. You can google that. A ton of what governments deal with are problems THEY CREATE THEMSELVES.
Symmetry 5y ago
It's not entirely a ratchet. Look at what happened to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

haskellandchill 5y ago

We need to fix our economy to encourage the flow of money to productive ideas and individuals.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
Too bad the most productive ideas and individuals are mostly not in the path of this money flow, instead pushed aside by the very clamor of the uniform hordes who seek nothing else. >alternative models of science funding can work. >The macro conclusion is that we don’t yet know what works or which combination of structures would make most sense. One thing we all know is the type of things that don't work, when it comes to making the most of those researchers having the greatest talent for out-of-the-box experimentation & discovery. Over a lifetime of effort tackling this exact problem, proven elements can be isolated and combined in ways that are not possible using any other approach. So it's good that there are actually those who long ago foresaw today's sad situation, and who know lots of things that do work, even if those individuals are not in the mainstream.
- haskellandchill 5y ago
  It is too bad... also I'm a little confused why I was downvoted, I see this as part of the more general problem of asset allocation our current economy is struggling with, of which crypto and meme stocks are the clearest symptom. A possible solution is UBI, once people are safe and secure they can research without worrying about survival and eventually reap the gains of good work. However there still would be the problem of large asset allocation, like who gets machines to conduct research, I have no ideas of any fair solution for that.

rattray 5y ago

This is worth reading all the way through for anyone with an interest in science and innovative projects.

TheCanuckster 5y ago
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. At the risk of drawing a conclusion too strong from the article, I would add that that Fast Grants' referee panel of 'earyl-career individuals from top universities' with [responses] given out within '48 hours' warrants thoughtful contemplation on its own. Hiring great people, then giving them both autonomy and authority to make effective decisions seems to be a missing ingredient in high-uncertainty activities (and no wonder, how is someone supposed to take risks when failure is harshly penalized). It is also a telling demonstration that questions and challenges requiring domain expertise need not be subject to endless advisory reviews or require sophisticated statistical modelling/complicated decision processes. Regarding the statistical modelling/decision processes, I by no means am suggesting such modelling is always unnecessary, just that it seems it can often be used to justify inaction, or simply to cover one's arse. I am reminded of the Challenger incident [1] where engineers at Morton Thiokol were deeply suspect of launching, but were unable to decisively prove that a launch was inadvisable for want of adequate evidence. The rich irony of the situation was that several engineers were suspect of the launch AND had domain expertise shared a "gut instinct" about something each had superior tacit knowledge about. Granted, going with one's "gut" generalizes poorly outside of a domain of expertise. However, twenty scientists saying 'yay' or 'nay' to an activity is compelling evidence if all are dispassionate, third parties with no vested interest. I suspect such skilled, domain-aware groups with the necessary capacity to make important decisions would generalize well to high-uncertainty, risky activities. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380822
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Seems like funding awarded by a panel of 'early-career individuals from top universities' would be a success-prone screening process. But compared against the rigid and bureaucratic obstacles to conventional funding, it is actually closer to being a random application of criteria than what was otherwise available to the grantees. The sad part about the mainstream academic institutions is that a more random award process is more sensible than what most researchers are normally facing these days. No doubt 'late-career individuals who did top things even though they went to schools that were not well-known' would be a good qualification for a different success-prone panel, but you would expect the outcome to be vastly different. Either way it gives some researchers a chance who would not otherwise have any near-term or appropriate opportunities. Just different researchers.

efitz 5y ago

Well worth the read, although I would have liked to have seen more depth on “what could have gone better”.

an_opabinia 5y ago

> Most importantly, Fast Grants didn’t change the vaccine timeline, and vaccines were clearly the most important component of the response. They are being really intellectually honest here. One thing you couldn't apply for for Fast Grants was a media effort to convince people to take the vaccine. And speaking of the power of individuals, Robert De Niro (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-robert-de-niro-anti-vaccine-autism-movie-tribeca-20160325-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et...) and other A-Listers actively campaign against vaccines. Fauci said he wishes DiCaprio would endorse the vaccine - as Fast Grants said, pretty obvious - and of course DiCaprio hasn't, he thinks vaccines cause autism. Were there any institutions who were adversaries to vaccine adoption?

eloff 5y ago
What's disturbing is people taking health advice from celebrities instead of medical experts.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  What about taking health advice from the NEWS MEDIA.
  - eloff 5y ago
    Not recommended to take any kind of advice from the news media. It's not even recommended to consume much news media. The less you're exposed to that garbage, the better.
  - gpm 5y ago
    Screaming isn't necessary... Taking advice directly from the reporter is as ridiculous as taking advice from celebrities. Taking advice from the health officials/professionals the reporter is quoting... well as long as you trust the reporter to be quoting them accurately that's about as reasonable as taking advice directly from the health officials/professionals. Advice can roughly speaking be evaluated as [probability it was quoted correctly] * [probability you should be taking advice from that health official/professional]... (that's only rough, because you also have to account for reporters doing things like selectively quoting bad advice... but it's a reasonably first estimate)

jvanderbot 5y ago

The US went all in on vaccines. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the US didn't fund more academic R&D; that's the MO I expected during that administration.

ipsum2 5y ago
There's plenty of funding for academic R&D (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm), TFA focuses on how slow it took to get that funding or repurpose existing funding. I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.
- eganp 5y ago
  I worked with a group trying to get a drug repurposing study running in June of last year. U01 submissions were often Sept-Aug with no cash until April 2021. To a degree, these NOTs and RFAs are deeply unserious and woefully underfunded. There are 10s of absurdly narrow sub-focuses (e.g. "Medical Consequences of Smoking and Vaping Drugs of Abuse in Individuals with HIV and COVID-19" really??) that are great add-ons to some existing research problem, but totally miss the point. It's not wrong to study these the ideas, but why prioritize over larger more impactful studies of drugs to treat ARDS or ALI? Much like The Fed provided public and private debt support, these applications are more pork for existing investigators with deep knowledge of the NIH bureaucracy, but sadly likely of little relevance to the larger issue.
eganp 5y ago
I'm glad we did. Vaccines were a home-run solution. In a crisis, what does academic R+D get you on the margin? Better testing for sure, but that wouldn't solve the crisis like vaccines would. I will say the drug repurposing landscape was an absolute fiasco last year. Every funding opportunity wanted reams of data supporting use in COVID19 which takes time to generate. Yet, somehow on-patent anti-IL-6 drugs were tried again and again and again even in the absence of elevated IL-6. UK and the NHS really got this right by centralizing repurposing efforts. In the US, there aren't more than ~50 experts in drug repurposing. Why didn't HHS/CDC round them up, lock them in a room, and have to rank-order molecules for proposed basket repurposing trials? We could have saved ~10-100k lives in the US with better drugs for early- and mid-stage disease, but nobody wants to fund a drug that can't generate an ROI. Truly a market, and institutional, failure here.

unchocked 5y ago

> Making human clinical trials cheaper and quicker is probably one of the biggest opportunities for improving U.S. healthcare both during and beyond pandemics. The failure to accelerate vaccine development through challenge testing is a black mark on our ethical and regulatory system. the Moderna vaccine mRNA was developed two days after COVID-19 was identified, yet it took over a year to get through human testing. All the while, willing volunteers stood by at https://www.1daysooner.org https://www.1daysooner.org

nickthemagicman 5y ago
How about we quit treating people like children and make all drugs legal? The FDA stamp will just be a stamp of quality to help guide people to a known quality product. No enforcement of drug laws at the barrel of an authorities gun. But if people want to do some experimental off brand use that their doctor recommends then they can. If people do their own research and want to self prescribe they can. Getting the monopoly out of health care would reduce health care costs as well.
- buu700 5y ago
  I've thought the same thing and generally agree with it. Why shouldn't I be able to walk to CVS and pick up a bottle of heroin and various prescription drugs? I'm an adult; I shouldn't even owe anyone an explanation. At the same time, I think we would need to concurrently ban drug advertisements as other countries have. To me, that seems like a better balance between treating individuals as adults with autonomy and minimizing harm on the macro scale.
  - xyzzy123 5y ago
    The reason you can't go to CVS and pick up heroin or crack is: Inevitably, lots of people would become addicted and there would be many deaths. Very critical news stories would run. People neglecting their children to use drugs. Testimonies of loved ones and shattered families. Politicians would be inundated with calls to regulate these dangerous substances. Politicians who refused to do anything would be mired in conspiracy theories, accusations of conflict of interest and profiting from suffering. They would be voted out and replaced. Regulation ensues.

draklor40 5y ago

Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions. To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the institution.

ike0790 5y ago
well said
mathattack 5y ago
It’s growing the pie versus fighting over it. Most large firms have economies of scale that allow the managers to fight over the surplus. Hard to restrain this without moral authority of founders.
cbsmith 5y ago
I wouldn't call it a damning indictment. You set up institutions to protect the status quo. Individuals can go ahead with risks and experiments, but you don't want to risk an entire society with someone's wild idea. For every wild idea that works out, there's many more that didn't. Of course we should mitigate risks before potentially destroying society.
- andreilys 5y ago
  Institutions operating in "peace-time" mode during war-time are failing the people they are supposed to represent. Continuing to protect the status quo during a national emergency is irresponsible and leads to countless lives lost.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    Part of the trick is determining what the baseline risk levels are and what safeguards should be dispensed with. It's not binary "peace-time" vs. "war-time". It's about the baseline risk factors. Aside from societal risk, there's individual risk too. When a society's mortality rate drops, it is appropriate to have more safeguards, and when it increases, it is appropriate to have fewer safeguards. ...and then there's also the systemic effects of a broader, more relaxed approach to funding. While distributing $50 million means you're getting high quality leads, if you're in charge of a $5 billion funding program (which the NIH did manage: https://covid19.nih.gov/funding https://covid19.nih.gov/funding), the net effect of opening up the flood gates is going to be very different. Even if you do a good job of distributing that money (and that is, in itself a HUGE challenge), you're going to be dealing with law suits and political challenges that you'd not deal with for a $50 million fund. It may suck, but it's the reality of large systems.

Kydlaw 5y ago

Fast Grants, but to fight climate change?

Retric 5y ago
New emergencies generally offer more low hanging fruit. I am doubtful that ~50M split into 260 grants would have any measurable impact on climate change. Just as this didn’t have any large wins. Arguably rather than research leveraging that into solar panels or other infrastructure would be a better use of funds. In the end it’s a real gamble. One or more of those 4,000 applications was likely a great use of funds, but finding and funding it is hard especially if you’re trying to keep overhead low. Up the amount to say 1B/year and the tradeoffs become even harder between research and action.
- boxed 5y ago
  Your argument is short time and defeatist. Good science can totally chance the game. You're talking about playing the existing game.
  - Retric 5y ago
    We don’t need new science at this point. 0 CO2 from cars + 0 CO2 from electricity + 0 CO2 from heating is a monumental improvement and we don’t need to tech to get there just building infrastructure is enough. Few people will want an ICE when 80+% of gas stations close down, that’s a huge tipping point. Any discovery that take 20 years to go from a lab to production isn’t fast enough to make real change. Avoiding CO2 pollution today on the other hand gives us time to find better solutions.
PeterisP 5y ago
I don't think climate change is a research problem. The key solutions to it are known but just require political will to do what needs to be done and bear the short-term disadvantages; but that doesn't seem plausible (and, arguably, if politicians just went ahead with major sacrifices to fight climate change, their voters would throw them out and replace with other politicians who keep the current policies), and research isn't going to change that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

The_rationalist 5y ago

The FDA bureaucracy is arguably the number 1 cause of mortality worldwide.

ALittleLight 5y ago

"This is an instance of a broader theme: we were surprised that many entities continued with something close to “business as usual” rather than switching to emergency pandemic mode" I think we need to codify what "emergency mode" is and when we switch to it. Bureaucracies, and those working in them, need to understand when the situation is not "business as usual" and get out of the way! Implicit in that is, when we are in emergency mode, more risk is taken, there is less red tape, we expect side effects and damage, but we also expect faster progress. We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it.

dalbasal 5y ago
>> We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it. This is precisely the problem. Who is "we," and how are they going to define these new protocols? The "systems" are not (exclusively) designed. They're evolved. They're impenetrable, or at least difficult to penetrate. They're autonomous. Only insiders have the requisite knowledge to figure out what emergency mode is. The whole point is not to wait for "orders" to drop down.

ipunchghosts 5y ago

Whatever happened to that pineapple guy who donated all if his bitcoin for research?

wolverine876 5y ago

Andreessen Horowitz created Future to bypass journalists, as I understand it, and have actively tried to discredit journalists who are critics. This essay is the first I've seen in Future, and it fits what one might expect: It's highly critical of others, the authors portray themselves as heroes and avoid almost all criticism of themselves. There are almost no sources and it doesn't show or attempt to show other points of view, and makes no attempt to address bias and self-interest. In a sense, it works perfectly. Let's be aware of what it is: self-promotion from people trying to avoid scrutiny.

DataGata 5y ago
You are ignoring the article and attacking the publisher. Indeed, the article itself invites scrutiny.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > You are ignoring the article and attacking the publisher I wrote specific criticisms of the article, and why shouldn't I criticize the publisher? It's necessary to know your source. People criticize publishers all the time; many criticize all journalists and their publishers with one broad brush!