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.
An indictment, or just an admission that we're not generally willing to make?
What would happen, for example, if we handed the entire education budget to teachers directly. No controls, reporting requirements... just a stack of cash? Teacher decides how to spend it. My guess is that we would see some amazingly positive things. We would also see some awful things. Fraud, failure, scandal... Perhaps, probably even, the average result would be good. Could we stomach the price though? Would year 10 be better or worse than year 1?
We tend to be scandalised by bad things, and take good things for granted. Hence controls.
"Let’s do it” was then the basic attitude and we were much more worried about missing out on supporting important work than looking silly"
Fine attitude, given the circumstances. Outside of seed funding and research though... is it viable? Is it viable after 10 years of repetition? Can it survive scandalous articles highlighting blatant abuses, face up to scrutinies year after year?
There are differences between early and late stage "games." Run this as a long term program, and scams might flood in. More insidious perhaps, proposals that are not quite scams. Observers are also less forgiving of repetitive "failures." Would the director of such a fund be willing to say "we will do nothing" to questions about fraud, scandal or whatnot? Would they want to?
Google once had 20% time, for similar reasons. Let smart people do what they do on their own. It devolved. They tried to fix it with controls. It sucked and then they killed it. The attempt was earnest, but the destination was precisely what G we're trying to avoid.
I'm not disagreeing with this author or the general sentiment on this thread. Getting past or around institutional mindsets is high potential. This project sounds great. We need these to exist.
I am saying that it's unwise to underestimate something this prevalent.
I'm reminded of a Dan Ariely quote about why daughters want bad boys on proverbial motorcycles, but parents hate them. Mothers don't get to ride the motorcycle, but they do get to deal with the consequences.
A lot of this relates to high risk, high reward stuff. Research, startups, etc. Employees, even CEOs are never compensated (including non money incentives) in a way that reflects true risk/reward.
I would differentiate between non CEO founders and founders CEOs. Non-founder CEOs are subject to the whims and fancies of the board (institutions).
I am disappointed that Yale with 30 BILLION USD ! in endowments did not have the same impact a hastily put together fund filled mostly with volunteers did.
To weed out the poor capital allocators, you need skin in the game.
Not saying it is perfect, but it probably would be way better than what we saw during the pandemic (and still see).
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.
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.
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), 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.
> Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions.
> To me this was the most damning indictment of all.
Why?
One company in Texas geared up and started emergency mask production back when the original SARS/MERS hit. And it almost killed his company. He refused to wind up production for masks during Covid without cash and a contract. That's just smart business.
In the US, the Trump administration and a Republican Senate had absolutely demonstrated that it would absolutely leave people in the lurch who didn't kowtow appropriately.
That is NOT an atmosphere where you are going to bet the company on the fact that the government will do the sane thing.
On the flip side, there are basically no institutions that campaigned against vaccine adoption, whereas there are many prominent celebrities and politicians who did.
"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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
> 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
Keep in mind that vaccines solve a systemic problem, and a bad vaccine can exacerbate a pandemic. Yes, vaccines can be made in a day or two, but it takes a long time to know if they are effective.
It actually doesn't take long to have high confidence vaccines work. Roughly 30 days. Day 1- inject vaccine. Day 15 - infect virus. Day 30 - know it works.
Human challenge studies were a ethical no brainer.
Even other studies if we gradually increased the number of people allowed to take them would mitigate almost any real risk. So you let up to 1k people take it month 1, 10k month 2, 100k month 3, and so on. Basically no meaningful extra risk but faster results.
Vaccines have a very good safety record and efficacy record, this isn't like cancer which is much more speculative.
Banning vaccines is not the answer. Most US deaths were completely preventable.
I strongly agree with reducing red tape for biomedical testing, but this is a drastic oversimplification of the current scenario, and of vaccine efficacy.
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.
IMO, it's a mistake to approach these kinds of questions from first principles perspective, at least exclusively. We have a history, and a lot of where we are is a response to past problems. That doesn't mean where we are is optimal, just that it's not simple.
Snake oil is a major problem, always has been. Drugs of abuse are a problem, like the oxi crisis. Antibiotic resistance. Etc. There are lots of reasons to have controls in place that don't have a first principles logic to them... just an empirical one.
Makes sense. There's definitely room for disagreement without either side being malicious. On one hand there are the problems we see in front of us today of a lot of people having their lives unfairly destroyed by the state and billions of dollars being arguably wasted; on the other hand, we have to consider the problems that led to our current situation, and ensure that any solution we implement today doesn't excessively regress in those areas.
I'm still pro-full-legalization for the moment, but wouldn't just sign a bill if presented to me today without first ensuring that my administration had a firm understanding of all the historical issues, and felt comfortable that the bill reasonably addressed them (or, if not, that the cure at least wasn't worse than the disease). I know there's a pop culture narrative that drug prohibition was primarily motivated by malicious suppression of anyone Nixon considered undesirables, but from what I understand the real history is much more complicated.
Perhaps simple decriminalization would be a better first step, if not ultimately a better long-term solution as well. And, oh hey, it looks like that may soon be on the table: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27522843
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.
> lots of people would become addicted and there would be many deaths
This is the reason. It doesn't require cynically blaming politicians. It's not wrong for politicians to act to prevent death, and to be responsive to their constituents. Those are good things.
I didn't get the sense that GP was necessarily agreeing with those positions, more illustrating the high-level political hurdles (right or wrong) that legalization fundamentally faces.
It's similar in my mind to self-driving cars. The first post-large-scale-rollout deaths will likely cause a political backlash, even if statisticians and scientists are able to show that the proposed regulatory response would cause more harm than good.
I don't agree that the successful implementation of such a regulatory response is a foregone conclusion in either case, but we will need to be prepared to deal with the reality of some people dying due to self-driving software issues and/or consumption of non-FDA-approved substances.
The only reason I like this idea is that we know a certain political segment of society would of been killed off by dumb decisions in this area via hydroxychloroquine.
Please explain how you think the link you provided backs your opinion. Give me your analysis of the data presented. Let me know you actually understand it.
This is one paper on one hospital and only looking at data after the fact.
Across the USA if you were hospitalized more than 10 days you had a much higher chance of survival. It did not depend on any medication given. That is a stat that runs across the board. This study only includes patients that were given a treatment AFTER 10 days of hospitalization. Most of those that were going to die did so before this study would show they would of been treated.
"HCQ was found to be consistently effective against COVID-19 when provided early in the outpatient setting. It was also found to be overall effective in inpatient studies. No unbiased study found worse outcomes with HCQ use. No mortality or serious safety adverse events were found."
Also the articles that claimed it DIDN'T work were retracted because the authors of the articles couldn't prove their data.
Furthermore HCQ advocates would reject this study because they want it tested with zinc as a prophylaxis before things get bad enough to send you to hospital
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.
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.
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.
I'm not Patrick Collison, but if I were then I might say that there are already a bunch of impressively plausible-looking carbon capture and sequestration technologies, they look like our best bet on the margin, and what they mostly need is a large enough early customer base to let them scale up and reduce cost.
As it happens, there's a program called Stripe Climate which aims to do exactly this! Money comes from Stripe and from businesses that would like to be able to truthfully say that they donate a percentage of purchases to fight climate change. It looks well thought-out and credible, at least to my eye. They elaborate more on the rationale here:
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...) 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?
DeNiro continued: “In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be screened or gotten involved in the programming. However, this is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a discussion, which is why we will be screening “Vaxxed.” I am not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the issue.”
“Tribeca, as most film festivals, are about dialogue and discussion. Over the years we have presented many films from opposing sides of an issue. We are a forum, not a judge,” a spokeswoman said in a statement on behalf of the festival earlier this week.
GOOD. If you're correct your viewpoint will stand up to dialogue.
That seems like an odd thing for them to say, since they are judges. They "curate" the entries that come in, and then celebrity judges award prizes.
They're not really a discussion forum. They're mostly about just showing things. They have some panels, but mostly any discussions kicked off by films are arranged by the attendees for themselves.
There are truly unjuried festivals, but they're much less high profile because the quality will be very uneven. That's not what Tribeca is about at all. So I don't know why she would say that.
I'm certain they do. So I'd be curious to know what's on their mind when they said that.
The cynical view would be that they were looking to stir up controversy, and pretending they weren't. A less cynical view is to take them at their word, even though it's not entirely truthful since they do, in fact, regularly exercise their judgment. There are thousands of filmmakers who would have loved to have been in the theater that day instead.
I don't think that "It's an alternate viewpoint therefore it should be heard" is a very good argument, just because there are a lot of viewpoints that are Just Plain Bad. You pick and choose. I'd be curious to know why they chose this one -- because they did make a choice, and if they're saying otherwise, that's curious.
There's a difference between people who don't think vaccines are good as a whole...and people who question a rushed vaccine developed with no FDA oversight or testing by companies who have absolutely no liability if things go wrong for a disease that has 99.99% survival rate for most people.
And then there are questions about it even WORKING fully and one still has to wear a mask and you can still be contagious and it may not protect against other strains!
If that doesn't ring critical thinking bells in your brain then you're operating based on unquestioning BELIEF in the GOOD of the experts, gov't, and people in general which doesn't seem to always have worked out the best throughout history.
> There's a difference between people who don't think vaccines are good as a whole...and people who question a rushed vaccine developed with no FDA oversight or testing by companies who have absolutely no liability if things go wrong for a disease that has 99.99% survival rate for most people.
>
> And then there are questions about it even WORKING fully and one still has to wear a mask and you can still be contagious and it may not protect against other strains!
Yes, there's a difference between people who question vaccines as a whole and... a fabricated reality/false narrative.
The survival rate is not 99.99%, and the outcomes for "survivors" are all too often debilitating. The demand on our healthcare infrastructure is potentially crippling, as we've seen.
There has been FDA oversight... indeed the vast majority of the time from development to release of the vaccines in the US has been getting clearance from the FDA (you may recall the J&J vaccine was even paused by the FDA).
...and the liability shield is due to the never-ending unjustified legal claims that companies are invariably subjected to when they operate in this space.
There's a difference between critical thinking bells and having your bell rung. ;-)
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.
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.
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.