[pierrefermat1]

The concept trying new science orgs is noble, but this is the typical Schmidt BS of saying every previous academic consortia is totally incompetent and I'm the only one that can inject the magic sauce of focus and coordination.

[gorkish]

Unfortunately being noble or self righteous or whatever emotion you choose has nothing to do with it. If there is a pool of grant money available only to “Focused Research Organizations,” and you want some of it for your work, then you open one and do your work under that umbrella. Academic institutions themselves do this all the time. It looks politically and morally sketchy, and maybe it often is, but it’s the way it works.

[mlyle]

To me, it seems like coming up with something more coordinated than a consortium and more flexible than a single lab or a research corporation funded by multiple universities makes sense.

It's probably a narrow set of problems with the right set of constraints and scale for this to be a win.

[matthewdgreen]

Having an organization maintain a software tool seems pretty unsurprising. There’s a well-defined problem with easily visible deliverables, relatively little research risk, and small organizations routinely maintain software tools all the time. Whereas broader research is full of risk and requires funders be enormously patient and willing to fund crazy ideas that don’t make sense.

[mlyle]

Hmm. I don't know very much about Lean, and it definitely feels smaller in scope and coordination risk than the kinds of things that would generally benefit from this.

(OTOH, within the community they're effectively trying to build a massive, modern Principia Mathematica, so maybe they would...)

> Whereas broader research is full of risk and requires funders be enormously patient and willing to fund crazy ideas that don’t make sense.

Yah. I'm not a researcher, but I keep ending up tangentially involved in research communities. I've seen university labs, loose research networks, loose consortia funding research centers, FFRDC, etc.

What I’ve noticed is that a lot of these consortia or networks struggle to deliver anything cohesive. There's too many stakeholders, limited bandwidth, and nobody quite empowered to say “we’re building this.”

In the cases where there’s a clearly scoped, tractable problem that’s bigger than what a single lab can handle, and a group of stakeholders agrees it’s worth a visionary push, something like an FRO might make a lot of sense.

[alphazard]

This is an incredibly bad take on a hard social problem which is hard for reasons that are well understood.

Scientific research is often not immediately applicable, but can still be valuable. The number of people that can tell you if it's valuable are small, and as our scientific knowledge improves, the number of people who know what's going on shrinks and shrinks.

Separately, it's possible to spend many years researching something, and have very little to show for it. The scientists in that situation also want some kind of assurance that they will be able to pay their bills.

Between the high rate of failure, and conflicts of interest, and inscrutability of the research topics. It's very hard to efficiently fund science, and all the current ways of doing it are far from optimal. There is waste, there is grift, there is politics. Any improvement here is welcome, and decreasing the dollar cost per scientific discovery is more important than the research itself in any single field.