[oli5679]

The USA's DARPA program funded important research into

- The internet

- GPS

- Graphical user interface and mouse

- Onion routing

- Voice assistant

Hopefully this program executes well. There is clearly a big social payoff to betting big on credible people doing risky research with high potential impact.

https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...

[dalbasal]

DARPA gets used as an example a lot, so let's take it as a our type specimen.

What makes an (D)ARPA? What (besides funding) made it work?

Is secrecy and/or low accountability important? Defense/weapons focus? Was the cold war a necessary condition? Do they have an investment philosophy that could be copied? Managerial philosophy?

Is high level stuff even relevant or is it details like 5 year PM appointments and selection criteria? I always thought tenure-like jobs would be useful if you have high creativity/risk goals.

Thoughts? Any agencies (outside the US, also) that should also be considered shining example? Any failed attempts at creating a DARPA?

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Likely more than you ever wanted to know on the topic: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw

A couple things I'd pull out:

Program managers sit limited terms to prevent empire building

Program managers have a great deal of autonomy once funding is initially allocated

DARPA has a high appetite for risk. They're ok with 90% of projects failing to hit their goal.

[disgruntledphd2]

From your link:

> I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take action than by a broad audience who will find it merely interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for indulging me!

You maybe shouldn't have shared that here, but thanks!

[SllX]

A focus.

DARPA research is performed in response to real challenges that service members and officers are faced with, and also in response to new capabilities that our adversaries develop.

[godelski]

Having done DARPA contracts, the difference I saw is that they feel more like moonshots. They are more fun to work on because you're encouraged to let your imagination run wild. Since failure is almost guaranteed it is kinda liberating since you don't feel the pressure to avoid failure. Failure IS the process here. Working on a DARPA contract is really the space where "there's no dumb ideas." Of course there actually are, but there's much more freedom to suggest these because at worse you rule some things out. And often the dumb ideas lead to good ideas that haven't been seen because the path starts at something that is clearly absurd. But then again, the premise of the problem is absurd so you have to try absurd things.

[madaxe_again]

That’s nice, but this isn’t what this will be about. This will be a means of funnelling cash to party donors without oversight, nothing more. Hence the FOI exception.

I mean, just look at how they’ve fared in the last 18 months alone - how many unaccountable tens of billions did they pay out to their donors?

I had Tory ministers’ children approaching me about putting together business plans to help them get covid grants - same crowd who I used to help with R&D grants, which were also used to get high net worth individuals with money of dubious origin into the country. I anticipate I’ll be hearing from them again.

This kind of funding will not develop anything but the wealth divide.

[grey-area]

For those doubting the above, here is an example from the recent past of corruption from the Prime Minister, paying his lover with public funds:

https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/31/10000-grant-given-boris-johns...

[dalbasal]

The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner.

IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is "They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering."

I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the UK is at the point where everything is just corruption and nothing more. There is room to talk about things other than corruption too. Besides, this particular flavour of corruption is almost always present. Whether it's the VC's boyfriend, bank manager's mistress or political boys clubs. Insiders get insider access. I don't like it either, but where/when is this not the case? It's not a coincidence that so many of your (or american) parliamentarians went to school together?

I am sure knowing people at DARPA, being married to a general or whatever is a big help too.

Americans are worse than you guys on these fronts, and they're not the worst either.

[kergonath]

> IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic.

Only because he's so enthusiastic and shameless about it. Open corruption is corrosive in a democracy, they deserve to be hit on the head with it until they stop.

And there's no point lamenting these poor (!) tories. If you were around when a bunch of ministers and high-ranking politicians were sacked, some of them thrown in jail, for using public funds for their benefits, you know they did not get away with it. Both media and public opinion were relentless, and that was under New Labour. And the sums were much, much smaller than these phony contracts to old mates.

[dalbasal]

Who's lamenting. Do whatever you want with them.

[gmac]

I think I disagree. When someone breaks a key moral principle — let’s say they are a murderer – we don’t spend time discussing how they are also good to animals or make a mean chilli. That doesn’t offset their transgression, so it becomes essentially irrelevant.

A key moral principle for a democratic government is to maintain public trust in democracy and its institutions. By pilfering public funds to enrich themselves and their friends, this government (and Johnson himself) has broken that principle, and until that has been remedied with resignation or impeachment, and ideally jail, it’s reasonable to talk of nothing else.

Except of course in this case we might also want to discuss this government’s appalling record elsewhere: allowing more of its citizens to die than almost anywhere else, per capita, by prioritising “the economy” and ignoring its own scientists; or destroying tens to hundreds of billions of pounds in wealth and tens to hundreds of thousands of livelihoods through their extraordinary scorched-earth Brexit.

[dalbasal]

I think this sort of thing has to be contextual. Is there any government or governing party anywhere that meets these standards?

Applied as it is hear, unless I'm missing something, your take means that there's no point or legitimacy to any conversation (EG a HN post) about any new UK agency (or sewage plant, school, energy plan, etc.) besides "they're corrupt, look at their other dealings."

I'm sympathetic to the moral principles. In particular, some have made the case that salacious shamelessness itself is the problem. It's corrosive.

But... Are you really at a point where you're calling quits on politics as a whole until this corruption stuff is sorted? Isn't this corrosive too?

I'm not saying that you can't put anticorruption first. It's definitely relevant here. This is a way of distributing money and contracts, after all. It is designed to not be accountable in conventional ways. Anticorruption is relevant and it's good to have people making that their top priority. But anticorruption is not the only thing at stake in anything and everything government related. There's also whatever the hell the thing is supposed to do.

Being uncorrupt, but failing to produce useful technology is also be bad. Maybe not murder bad, but I didn't think this is a useful way of thinking about it.

[DanBC]

This is not "corrupt but useful", it's "corrupt and useless".

> I think this sort of thing has to be contextual.

The context is that UK government gave £22 BILLION to private companies for Test and Trace, and they wasted most of it contributing to the very high death rate to covid in the UK.

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...

> At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.

> National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.

That's one example. There are dozens of other examples.

> Companies awarded pandemic-related contracts include Randox, which received £479m for Covid testing. The firm pays Conservative MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year as a consultant.

> Meanwhile, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law Sir Humphry Wakefield is an associate of the director of Admiral Public Relations, which received £670,000.

> Health minister Edward Argar is a former senior executive at Serco, which is in charge of much of the contact-tracing system. The company’s chief executive is Rupert Soames, brother of ex-Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.

> Public First, whose directors previously worked for Mr Cummings and Michael Gove, was also paid £840,000 for “focus group research”.

etc etc.

[lordnacho]

It's a good point, Labour did a bunch of PPI deals that didn't seem to benefit the public as much as the private collaborators. So it's not exclusive to one party, but the Conversatives have been in power for a fairly long time now.

Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge.

[dalbasal]

Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right.

Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption.

Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The "Boris' girlfriend gets a £100k grant" storyline is salacious, but I don't think it's unusual. Insiderism exists. It existed yesterday, last year. I'm sure Winston Churchill's girlfriend also did well out of the deal. c'est la vie

I'm definitely interested in ideas about insiderism, any solutions to it... but are you really at a point where you're against everything that the government does on the assumption that it's all going to Boris' girlfriends?

[JeanQuille]

> Insiderism exists. It existed yesterday, last year.

I'm guessing you're not living in Britain? The last few years have been on a different scale entirely. We've had to get used to a government that delivers contracts free of tender to shell companies owned by friends and donors that fail to deliver and don't even pretend to be legit (have you heard the one about the "ferry company" that thinks it's a takeaway restaurant?), while on the other hand openly jeering and mocking such causes as health worker pay.

In such light, tell me how you would expect "New project, £X hundred million initial fund, will use novel legislation to remove public oversight" to be received. It's not rocket science to work out that if you want people to be grateful instead of angry and you're a cabinet with a documented history of lying and corruption, just remove the last clause.

I appreciate the faith in progress, but in honesty, our legs are being peed on from a high height while you're in here nobly suggesting it could be raining.

[Jochim]

> It existed yesterday, last year. I'm sure Winston Churchill's girlfriend also did well out of the deal. c'est la vie.

It's exactly this type of dismissal that allows this level of corruption to fester. It was unacceptable yesterday and it still is today. The point is to try and do something about it rather than sit back while they make it harder to punish because "it's already a problem".

A research fund where the public will be forbidden from scrutinising the spending of people who are known to be corrupt is not comparable to a public park.

[jonp888]

> they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way)

We aren't.

> Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me.

It's not. In the background schools/hospital/roads are being build/rebuilt just fine.

This is only about the projects personally spearheaded by those at the very top, i.e. Boris Johnson and those close to him. These seem to be almost exclusively ways to funnel money to friends and relatives. Afterwards it usually comes out that the contract was awarded without tender on the personal reccomendation of the minister, or that the advice of the officials on who to give the contract too was overriden. Boris Johnson's former Chief Advisor is currently defending himself in court on this point: https://goodlawproject.org/case/money-for-dominic-cummings-m...

[lordnacho]

Ideas that I haven't tested:

- Once you leave office, you get a big salary for life, but can't have another job. No working for a bank, or happening into consultancy. No speaking fees, though you are of course free to give speeches to whomever you like. Yeah it's draconian, but there's plenty of people who want the role.

- Make all the government's accounts visible to everyone. All the money, wherever it goes, is tied to some contract. Website where you can find out who they paid to do the plumbing in number 10, with a full paper trail.

- You have to certify that you're not mates with anyone who is offering the contract for the new bridge. Someone finds out you went to school with him. You go to jail together (more likely a fine), lose the contract, he loses his job. Yes, it's a bummer if you're competent and you happen to know the PM, who needs you for something. But again, there's a lot of competent people.

[mcguire]

"> Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge."

Corruption is bad, but not necessarily that bad, of course. But this case is about an agency almost literally immune to outside investigation.

[mcguire]

The problem with this line of argument is that it ignores the specifics of the case and overgeneralizes to a version of the slippery-slope fallacy.

If someone were proposing building a sewage plant immune to FOI requests, I'd be feckin' terrified, much less worried about corruption. And I'm pretty blase about corruption in various activities (such as the ever-popular road construction and maintenance) in the US.

[dalbasal]

what slippery slope? What general case? Everything I said was specifically about this agency, this HN thread.

[mcguire]

"The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner. ... Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is..."

I don't read that as being about this agency.

[CodeGlitch]

Corruption in the UK is classed as "very low" according to: [1]. Pretty sure it will happen with any political party unfortunately, but it's not something I worry too much about. If this ARIA can produce world-changing tech then I'm happy for a little insider deals.

[1] https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/

[grey-area]

I think the problem people have is the FOI exception. There is no good reason for this, save corruption and wasting public funds. Other agencies are subject to FOI requests and public oversight, why should this one be different?

So the objection is to that specific clause and based on very real facts about recent and ongoing corruption. Priti Patel is another example and there is a very long list if you want one of abuse of public office from the current cabinet, this is not an abstract concern or one without foundation.

Nobody on this thread has said that everything the Conservatives do is bad, just that they are proven to be corrupt and therefore a FOI exception is a bad idea in this case.

[hogFeast]

The reason why the FOI exception exists is because that is how the scheme ran in the US, and having political pressure on this program will kill it.

Also, remember that FOI isn't some magic tool for stopping corruption. Blair brought it in, and has said several times that it needs to be changed. FOI isn't public oversight.

The Conservatives are not proven to be corrupt. This self-evidently not true because no-one has proved it.

[pbhjpbhj]

The thing about democracy is you're not supposed to be able to force the public to do things they don't want.

If Tories believe an agency without oversight is in the public interest they're supposed to come to the public, get a mandate for that, win support. I strongly suspect this is vehicle for backhanders, but even if it weren't then in a democracy they're care to win approval first.

If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing the cost of. I'm happy to explore having a low-financial return science/engineering group funded by pubic money ... but only if it's completely transparent (financially and politically).

[jariel]

"There is no good reason for this, "

No, there are a ton of things the US et. al. do in secret, it's normal.

There needs to be oversight, public is better, but an independent council can work.

But yes, there's going to be a problem with graft.

[kergonath]

You can have both industrial secrets and FOI. Documents got through FOI requests are routinely redacted, and requests denied, when there is a real justification. A blanket policy is counter-productive and a strong indication that there's something very dodgy.

I mean, if you FOI the MoD, they say no, but they don't have a blank cheque to avoid any scrutiny either.

[grey-area]

We have government agencies for secret stuff - spies and the military, they already have lots of R&D funds.

[hogFeast]

Just to be totally clear too, a certain section of the British public is neuralgic about the Tories (inner city Remainers usually).

They believe there is massive levels of corruption because, unfortunately, the media is largely composed of neuralgics too and they are quite happy to feed the beast. The past twelve months or so has gone from: Brexit is stupid to there are huge levels of corruption, all these people are evil, and should be in jail. It is alarming, although not surprising, that untruths have been swallowed so eagerly (to be clear, this is 100% about Brexit, not corruption).

So: under Labour the same stuff happened, when anyone asked for polling or consulting (the latest issue de jure) it inevitably came from people connected to Labour (McKinsey's London office in the 2000s was largely composed of people with political connections, they worked closely with Blair), this is normal because (shock) if you are in politics, you have certain ideas and aren't going to hire people who will try to actively sabotage you.

In terms of public contracts, what isn't made clear to the public is that the UK has several bodies who examined all of these contracts. The public believes that because they were fast-tracked, there was no scrutiny. No, the NAO looked at all the contracts, and found no evidence of corruption (there is a substantiali report on this topic). There is a certain publicity hungry lobbying group which has repeatedly claimed there was no corruption...the actual evidence of this has, still, not been found (and they have moved on from their earlier claims to yet more "shocking" new claims of corruption that they will still likely be unable to prove...unsurprisingly, they are raising significant funds to reverse Brexit...which is presumably their angle with all this).

So I would say: this isn't "corruption" in any global sense of the word. Most of the things that people attribute to "corruption" are bad govt. For example, PFI means some companies do very well but the issue was that civil servants and govts signed these deals, and paid no attention to the terms. There is massive scrutiny of govt purchasing in the UK. If you are corrupt, the risks are infinite and the return is zero. What does happen is: people choose to buy things from people they know and who agree with them (the latter being very important in politics), it is someone knowing someone else, this happens in business. Talking about "corruption" in British politics is, however, ludicrous.

[pbhjpbhj]

'I paid my friend to deliver £80M of PPI, but he delivered £20k worth instead, and none of that was useable. Oh well. Weird how we spent that money on a business made 2 weeks ago rather than one of our many established PPI suppliers. Well it was an emergency so we didn't bother with the procurement paperwork .. ho hum, I'll tousle my hair and mention some Greek mythology, and we'll just move on and pretend it never happened.'

This sort of thing doesn't seem even a tiny bit questionable to you?

I'm surprised NAO have investigated them all, could you link that report/or a compendium? They didn't have problems with consider who has never delivered PPI getting multi-million pound contracts; nor the prevalence of associations to Tory hierarchy?

[pbowyer]

I believe this is the NAO report & press release referred to. It doesn't say what the grandparent thinks it does.

https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-...

https://www.nao.org.uk/press-release/investigation-into-gove...

[afandian]

Anyone who doubts the veracity of the claims of Tory corruption, here and throughout the thread, please check out the Good Law project and the litigation currently in UK courts.

https://goodlawproject.org/news/

[kanjus]

Thanks for talking about this. I'm sure you've considered this already, but it'd be valuable to contact an anti-corruption charity like Transparency International about your experience. It'd probably be a drop in the ocean, but every witness report counts, even about widely known issues.

[pkaye]

Also self driving cars, VLSI, FinFETs.