Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

zika

The Riemann Hypothesis! Hear me out, because I think it could serve as a great model for modern math research and collaboration.

One thing that really bothered me during my PhD is that even at the Stanford math department it felt like academia is not set up to encourage work on big questions, nor is it optimal for any objective function I can think of. Is it any wonder that many of the recent breakthroughs (Perelman with Poincare, Zhang with prime gaps) came not from establishment mathematicians, but ones who couldn't or wouldn't play the academia game and ended up almost destitute on the fringes, working away at these problems that they knew inside could be resolved.

Now, why specifically is the Riemann Hypothesis a great place to start? Math problems are like a maze. There are many paths to take, and while you can take satisfaction in exploring one part, you won't know your progress until you see the exit in front of you. In the case of RH the branch factor is absolutely massive, but once you pick a direction, it doesn't take long (relatively) to get to the forefront of what's known. But as it stands it is very hard to get perspective on the problem, or know which ways are good or bad. A mathematician who is not an expert in the field may experiment with various ways of bounding Zeta away from zero, but a domain expert would right away point out positive vertical density results for all a-sets, and bounds on moments of 1/zeta(s). Worse: if you have an idea for a new approach, there's no good way to share it because it will likely be too small for the quantum of academia: the academic paper. Building a collaborative atlas for the Riemann Hypothesis would help solve both of these problems, and could provide a more structured way of working on hard problem than even the polymath projects. It'll be a challenging use-case but at least with 150 years' of work there will be no cold start problem. And I've seen many analytic number theorists who are incredibly smart, hard-working, insightful, great with programming, happy to get their hands dirty, eager to teach others, but neglected by the system and lacking an outlet for their skills. PS: There's still no clear reason to believe RH to be true rather than false.

Figure out a way to break translational research out of the academic science model at scale! There is currently a huge decoupling of supply and demand in academia, especially in life sciences which is my home domain. Incredibly talented individuals are forced to invest 6-14 years building the credentials necessary to apply for grant funding / self-sufficiency, all the while (at best) earning what a new grad would make if they became a tech in pharma straight out of college. Most people cycle out before hitting their prime, at the expense of our economy.

This decoupling between supply and demand has also motivated other negative trends, such as changes in employment incentives for labs (large push for postdocs / foreign students at the expense of grad students); increasing importance of publishing in high impact, for profit journals (more paywalling of knowledge); sabotage of the peer review process; and a deliberate siloing of what should be public knowledge to prevent "competition" (among other things).

Ultimately I see most basic science being performed in an institute model existing in parallel to academia. In such a model, investigators should own their own ip, would have their salaries uncapped, and would be able to employ qualified people at a fair market wage. In my eyes, the biggest barrier to enacting such a model is startup capital. Most universities give new faculty members a "startup package"; essentially an angel investment to allow them to buy equipment / reagents and pay salaries before they need to support themselves off of grant funding. A new institute would not have the capital required to support this (unless it received extensive funding from foundations / industry / NIH etc).

I envision crowd funded startup packages with caveats. One potential model could mimic angel investment / old school patronage: an investigator receives $X in exchange for a percentage ownership of whatever IP they create within Y years, distributed among the investors. Another model could mimic kickstarter: people crowd fund an investigator with small investments and are rewarded by being part of the process. They are given regular updates, walked through experiments / data, invited to the lab if they are local to see work being done etc. I'm sure other funding mechanisms exist that I have not considered. I would love to chat further about this issue if you are interested; please feel free to contact me.

Get us out of advertising hell.

More and more surfaces are covered with ads, they are nigh on inescapable. In my life I've seen the world go from relatively clean to visually incredibly polluted. I'd love to find a way for companies to be able to reach consumers without having to take over every surface in sight.

If we cure aging and live for centuries we will still be subject to accidents while we are trying to work out how to live without a body at all. I would be interested to know how likely it is to get maimed or killed during this extended period and how it would affect the psychology of a person. I assume it would be a pretty frightened bunch not leaving home much.