Final paragraph: "Sometimes your research should be based not on how glorious success might be, but on how little you will have lost if you screw up." Fair en

Final paragraph: "Sometimes your research should be based not on how glorious success might be, but on how little you will have lost if you screw up." Fair enough. But -- there should be outliers. Apollo. Hubble. Manhattan Project. Genome Project. There's a ton of small, incremental science being funded in the US. There should also be some big, ambitious science. Both approaches are valid and useful. And this probably applies to startups as well.