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UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#171

Post by Nullabillity »

g_p wrote: post #148
LinuxBender wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S. everything is technically exempt from FOIA to a degree. Having gone through that process while I was in the military, I found many of the loopholes. The obvious ones are that the answer can be "Classified" or "Decline to answer" or in my case, the answer can be boxes and boxes of paperwork that is worded so vague that it may as well not have existed. No idea if this is the same in the U.K. Is there anyone…

There are many ways to prevent material being subject to FOI. Commercial confidence is one, classification/generic national security grounds is another. There are also some good reasons for this - in many cases, there are genuine commercial concerns. This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the p…

So, what can be done.. mandate pricing and contract transparency for everyone?

Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#172

Post by minikites »

motohagiography wrote: post #41
jdavis703 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet came out of a US government funded “advanced research projects agency.” It took decades before VCs monetized that research.

The Roman empire created roads, but we don't attribute railroads and cars to them. I think "government spending invented the internet," is the "you like roads, dontcha?" of our time. ARPA wasn't open ended research either, it was to respond to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Conflating public largess with national defence spending is a category error. Not to belabour it, but I do think this trope need…

The whole point of government-funded research is to either remove perverse incentives or fund things with no direct/clear incentives at all.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#173

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hogFeast wrote: post #140
grey-area wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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…

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).

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#174

Post by g_p »

Nullabillity wrote: post #171
g_p wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways to prevent material being subject to FOI. Commercial confidence is one, classification/generic national security grounds is another. There are also some good reasons for this - in many cases, there are genuine commercial concerns. This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the p…

So, what can be done.. mandate pricing and contract transparency for everyone? Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).

Pricing transparency might be a sensible approach, but I imagine you'd need international agreement to do so in lock-step, to avoid unintended arbitrage between countries. Such a setup could also perhaps favour non-value-adding middlemen, who would be able to provide unit-price transparency for a product they don't manufacture, and therefore which has a meaningless SKU (reseller-001), that avoids impact on the ultimate seller.

Don't disagree about this being a wider issue, but it's hard to see how you ever force price parity, short of published price lists. But we still have "list price", and people will still negotiate discounts below that "list price". I imagine in the long run, even across industry, we'd just end up back where we're at right now, with opaque price reductions and rebates, and potentially that process ends up more corrupt, as it's less visible?

I don't know what the fix is, but I'm not sure it would be as easy as just requiring everyone to publish transparent pricing and go for pricing parity.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#175

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hogFeast wrote: post #138
dalbasal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

'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?

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#176

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tinktank wrote: post #68
motohagiography wrote: post #12

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…

> I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. Isn't the difference that VCs are looking for short-to-medium term opportunities as they want a return on capital? Presumably gvt funding means riskie…

And projects without financial returns too? Projects that challenge VCs other income?

If you can keep things on the level, humans can achieve a lot, there are other goals than just making financial profit.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#177

Post by Nullabillity »

g_p wrote: post #174
Nullabillity wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what can be done.. mandate pricing and contract transparency for everyone? Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).

Pricing transparency might be a sensible approach, but I imagine you'd need international agreement to do so in lock-step, to avoid unintended arbitrage between countries. Such a setup could also perhaps favour non-value-adding middlemen, who would be able to provide unit-price transparency for a product they don't manufacture, and therefore which has a meaningless SKU (reseller-001), that avoids impact on the ultima…

Hence why I mentioned contract transparency. Don't just publish ideal lists, publish the contracts that actually end up being signed. That would also fix the obfuscating-middle-man problem (reseller-001 still needs to be defined somewhere).

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#178

Post by pbowyer »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #175
hogFeast wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

'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 h…

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...

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#179

Post by JeanQuille »

cameronh90 wrote: post #168
JeanQuille wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have commented, I think the animosity against this announcement isn't necessarily that it wouldn't be successful, just that it's a clear attempt to widen and hush up the current government's already large grift pipeline. FWIW, from my experience in UK public projects, I think the question of how to improve their varied success is complex and would take a long time to fairly cover. Though, off the top of my…

The restrictions on FOI may be an attempt to allow the government to directly pay market rates and otherwise do the things they normally have to hide via an outsourcing partner. Look at what happens when the Daily Mail and/or opposition MPs find out that an IT boffin is being paid more than a nurse. They stoke unjustified outrage until the hospital is forced to outsource to Crapita to hide its costs.

In terms of raw salary, I think the current mess is more a result of the government's own "pay cap" crusade over the last decade—I haven't known anyone really be against the idea that public sector salaries should at least have kept pace with inflation, and I feel like there wasn't really any call for the dirty tactics the government has brought to negotiation over the past few years.

But you're probably right that public visibility has spoiled other perks that are otherwise part of a functioning job—travel to conferences, overnight stays, on-site food outlets; it feels like they've all been cut from fear that they could end up as a bile-filled column in the Mail.

As an aside, I've gladly said to many people that as an IT boffin, nurses should be paid more than me!

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#180

Post by mikeyouse »

omginternets wrote: post #126
jarmitage wrote: post #63

The FOI part means this is dead on arrival and will be abused all ends up. For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).

Genuine question: why did DARPA work?

If people are genuinely curious, this is the best explanation I've seen of why DARPA worked:

https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw

> The Advanced Research Projects Agency model is of an organization set up to maximize the agency and effectiveness of world-class program managers (PMs) who coordinate external research to midwife technology that wouldn’t otherwise happen (Programs.)

> The model has changed over time, but has still produced outlier results over time so it is worth paying attention to modern DARPA with more focus on informal process than formal process. PMs need specific characteristics to succeed: thinking for themselves, curiosity, low ego, vision, and ability to act under uncertainty. PMs also need to be trustworthy because the model depends on their ability to deploy funds quickly and redeploy them as needed. These PMs have temporary tenures, which enables idea turnover, aligns incentives, and enables DARPA to hire people it wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It’s worth deeply thinking about PM motivations because they are so core to the model.

> Organizationally, DARPA is tiny, flat, and opaque. It is set up to combine bottom-up and top down approaches through different-scale feedback loops. It is more ideas limited than money limited. DARPA’s project design and execution framework boils down to first showing that a precise technological vision is not impossible, then showing that it is possible, and finally making it possible. On top of many tacit tools, PMs execute on these steps by building focused networks and using seedling projects to derisk assumptions during a

> DARPA provides a critical ‘in-between’ role in the world. It facilitates cross-polination and derisks wacky ideas for both private, academic, and government organizations.

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