[bm3719]

As someone with ARPA-related experience, I can say there are some trade-offs (possibly even flaws) in the execution of "the recipe" as practiced in the modern day. However, it's probably also the part of government that most closely resembles the start-up world. In fact, when I was there, we often intentionally modeled certain things after ideas borrowed from that side of the private sector. If you believe in maxims like "being okay with failure", "failing fast", and "going for moonshots", then you might think it's worth the cost (and all the untrimmed fat).

That said, I'd probably like to see high-level visibility on some accounting of cost versus success in, say, the past 15 years. From what I've seen, there haven't really been the kind of big-impact wins you usually see touted from further back in history. Instead it's mostly been PR, shrug-worthy output, and outright graft (e.g., a golden parachute for a certain Solyndra exec).

[walleeee]

Agreed. Worked on an ARPA-E funded project and it was reported as a success even though the primary deliverable was never completed and was probably not viable anyway. Everyone involved meant well, but I sensed the PIs viewed it more as a vehicle for their ICs' careers than as a mission-driven enterprise.

This is a wicked incentive problem and I don't know how to solve it.

[elefanten]

Curious to what degree the "low-hanging fruit" dynamic comes into play when comparing the current era to the past.

It keeps coming up in many other fields.

[malfist]

For those not familiar with the jargon, can you expand what PI and IC means? Private Investors and Individual Contributors?

[walleeee]

sorry, Principal Investigator and Individual Contributor

[elzbardico]

But, did the project significantly advance the knowledge in the field, even if the deliverable couldn't be completed?

In that case, I would call it a success anyway.

[walleeee]

It produced some modest results which slightly advanced the field. Not groundbreaking. The applied work did demonstrate the viability of a few robotics applications and the infeasibility/insufficient ROI of a few others. I would say that was the most valuable output.

It did not begin to approach the goals in the project description, which I've since come to believe are detached from reality. A moonshot may have seemed collossally ambitious in 1961 but we already had most of the basic capabilities necessary to succeed. In this case, however, I don't think we're anywhere close, and even if we were, it would be a suboptimal solution to the problem it's meant to solve. (It would however be politically and economically convenient).

[two_almonds]

For those less informed about its history, is there any transparent accounting of ARPA's cost-vs-success during its initial decades that you recommend reading? I am only marginally familiar with some of the 'big-impact wins' that are frequently mentioned, so I would love to read a comprehensive analysis of its accomplishments.