I like this a lot. Kickstarter for scientists.
It would be very welcome if scientists didn't have to come up with military applications of their research in order to get funding.
Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#32What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old e…
I'm currently working through preparing for a candidacy exam, and I've found a number of errors on a Physical Review article...yes, a Physical Review. They aren't the crux of the paper, but they are fundamental equations that they apparently implemented in their code (of course, I don't have access to that code), and these updates are the crux of the paper. If the equations they wrote are wrong, how can I trust their results?
Recently a senior researcher admitted to me that from a journal he referees for, he was referee-ing for a paper and found 10 issues with it. However, the editor came back to him and told him accept it.
You're damn right it's stacked, and sometimes "long track records" just means cosy with the publisher. It's not like there isn't corruption elsewhere in the world, but young scientists do not have start-ups. They do not have opportunities or the means to go against the grain and get into those risky projects unless it's after the decade or two of getting cosy with others in the academe and building those mini-empires. You're very right they need a venue, an accelerator for grad students, I suppose.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#33Silly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money. (I am an investor in Experiment.com)
Saying that a 3 min speech inspired 1.2m in investments is almost always silly, even if it was at demo day. It undermines all the work behind that speech, which is sometimes years of work.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#34The SF Bay Area community bio labs (BioCurious and Counter Culture Labs [0]) are considering using this platform to try and fund their iGEM team, researching inducing UV resistance in E. Coli and then optimizing it with directed evolution. Community labs have effectively no funding to operate with, so these types of platforms (Experiment, Kickstarter, etc) are incredibly important for them. If you'd like to support t…
andrew, come by our office next week!
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#35What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old e…
> What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk research. If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a lottery. Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A lottery would increase coverage.
I've always wanted to run an experiment where NIH or NSF split the proposals randomly 50/50. Group A gets peer reviewed and awarded the way the current system works. Group B gets peer reviewed and the top half of proposals gets put into a lottery and awarded at random. I am willing to bet the outcomes and impact of Group B will always be better than Group A.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk research. If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a lottery. Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A lottery would increase coverage.
Having a lottery is a good idea and one I support for grants in general. The grant review process should be simply "is this idea viable and worthy of funding - yes or no”. If yes put it into the lottery and fund as many good grants as you have resources. Peer review works well for this type of sorting, but it is terrible for trying to pick a top 10% idea from a top 15% idea. It just isn’t possible for even the best s…
In my opinion we are missing out on great discoveries because we allow a small number of humans determine if a scientific research question is worthy of funding. If a single scientist thinks an idea is worth doing and can find the resources to support it, she should do it.
We will move to a system where we only ask 'can this question be answered by the scientific method?' If we use the scientific method to answer these questions we will uncover secrets of the universe that would never survive in the current system humans have designed.
The best scientists do not design their experiments with a goal of publishing in top tier journals. And as a community, we should not be encouraging this behavior.
The best scientists investigate questions out of pure curiosity and as a side effect publish the most impactful research.
Young talented people are already tackling really hard and high risk problems. If this is truly what young scientists want to do, they will find a way. 10 years of guaranteed salary is not the solution, but giving everyone the opportunity to be a scientist may be.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#37Silly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money. (I am an investor in Experiment.com)
👋🏻, joshua! There is no such thing as a talk that raises money.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#38I didn't realize Cindy was the driving force behind this. I just need to re-do my video and my project should be ready to launch...
👌🏻
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#39What a great idea. Maybe this is what will keep corporate interests out of scientific research, as there's more transparency and diversity in funding sources. I'm willing to bet the reproducibility rate for these studies will be much higher than the ~30% average.
In my opinion reproducibility is a technical problem. Once research is published and peer reviewed in real time, all studies should be reproducible. If they are not reproducible, we should have insight into exactly why they are not and propose a solution.
Re: Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
#40Scanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.
Sadly the stats aren't that good. From the article "Two years on and with a smart name change, “Experiment” has launched 5,058 projects and funded 336 of them" so still a long way to go - Kickstarter's success rate I think is around 40%. That's still 336 research projects that wouldn't have been funded otherwise! Go Cindy!
Success rates in the last 3 months are north of 60%. You can expect this to continue.