I think that a lottery has potential if we use peer review as the bar for quality. My prior is that peer review is better than random chance. This seems sensib

I think that a lottery has potential if we use peer review as the bar for quality. My prior is that peer review is better than random chance. This seems sensible; after all, a human being should be better at determining scientific validity versus random chance. Under that assumption, it makes sense to have peer review to narrow the pool down to a smaller number of grant proposals. It doesn't seem unreasonable that peer review could get the "best" proposal into a pool of 10-15 applicants around 90% of the time. I think that would reduce the pressure on proposals by a decent amount.