What we learned doing Fast Grants

There's plenty of funding for academic R&D (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm), TFA focuses on how slow it took to get that funding or repurpose existing funding.

I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.

I'm not Patrick Collison, but if I were then I might say that there are already a bunch of impressively plausible-looking carbon capture and sequestration technologies, they look like our best bet on the margin, and what they mostly need is a large enough early customer base to let them scale up and reduce cost.

As it happens, there's a program called Stripe Climate which aims to do exactly this! Money comes from Stripe and from businesses that would like to be able to truthfully say that they donate a percentage of purchases to fight climate change. It looks well thought-out and credible, at least to my eye. They elaborate more on the rationale here:

https://stripe.com/climate

An indictment, or just an admission that we're not generally willing to make?

What would happen, for example, if we handed the entire education budget to teachers directly. No controls, reporting requirements... just a stack of cash? Teacher decides how to spend it. My guess is that we would see some amazingly positive things. We would also see some awful things. Fraud, failure, scandal... Perhaps, probably even, the average result would be good. Could we stomach the price though? Would year 10 be better or worse than year 1?

We tend to be scandalised by bad things, and take good things for granted. Hence controls.

"Let’s do it” was then the basic attitude and we were much more worried about missing out on supporting important work than looking silly"

Fine attitude, given the circumstances. Outside of seed funding and research though... is it viable? Is it viable after 10 years of repetition? Can it survive scandalous articles highlighting blatant abuses, face up to scrutinies year after year?

There are differences between early and late stage "games." Run this as a long term program, and scams might flood in. More insidious perhaps, proposals that are not quite scams. Observers are also less forgiving of repetitive "failures." Would the director of such a fund be willing to say "we will do nothing" to questions about fraud, scandal or whatnot? Would they want to?

Google once had 20% time, for similar reasons. Let smart people do what they do on their own. It devolved. They tried to fix it with controls. It sucked and then they killed it. The attempt was earnest, but the destination was precisely what G we're trying to avoid.

I'm not disagreeing with this author or the general sentiment on this thread. Getting past or around institutional mindsets is high potential. This project sounds great. We need these to exist.

I am saying that it's unwise to underestimate something this prevalent.

I'm reminded of a Dan Ariely quote about why daughters want bad boys on proverbial motorcycles, but parents hate them. Mothers don't get to ride the motorcycle, but they do get to deal with the consequences.

A lot of this relates to high risk, high reward stuff. Research, startups, etc. Employees, even CEOs are never compensated (including non money incentives) in a way that reflects true risk/reward.

"This is an instance of a broader theme: we were surprised that many entities continued with something close to “business as usual” rather than switching to emergency pandemic mode"

I think we need to codify what "emergency mode" is and when we switch to it. Bureaucracies, and those working in them, need to understand when the situation is not "business as usual" and get out of the way! Implicit in that is, when we are in emergency mode, more risk is taken, there is less red tape, we expect side effects and damage, but we also expect faster progress. We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it.

The only reason I like this idea is that we know a certain political segment of society would of been killed off by dumb decisions in this area via hydroxychloroquine.