# Grants only go so far I’ll be blunt: I’m worried that because of how easy and humble grants are, enabling research[^4] through grants will crowd out enabling research through more definite ways. The optimism embodied in grants and the fact that they *are* effective puts me in the position of doing a tightrope walk over a pit of moral hazard where on the margin I simply justify more inaction or pessimism. Instead I want to convince you that: 1. Grants are good, but they have limits *and many good things fall outside of them*. 2. The mindset that “research funding” is all that research enabling organizations do is wrong. 3. There are other *pragmatic* ways to enable research.[^1] The implicit way that many people think of enabling research (especially outside of your own organization) is as a matter of how you get money to people and filter potential projects. Call this the “filtering” or “granting” approach. Funding and filtering are powerful aspects of research management, but they’re just two tools in a much larger toolkit. Overfocusing on grants limits you to enabling a particular set of [[Activity Space]]. In other words, *grants only go so far.* ### Grants are great The idea of grants (especially small grants) as the way to enable more awesome in the world feels like it has exploded in the “tech-adjacent/crypto” world — [[Emergent Ventures]], [[Fast Grants]], [[Impetus Grants]],[[Gitcoin]], [[SSX grants]], [[Moth Minds]], and more. Grants are also a default mode of both government and traditional philanthropic funding as well. Let’s be clear: these programs and institutions are a massive boon for the world. Both new grant programs and older granting institutions have[^3] enabled impactful work that would otherwise not have happened, directed money towards human flourishing, and generally channeled optimism and the desire to enable awesome towards productive ends. The granting approach has many positive attributes to recommend it. In their purest form grants have extremely low transactions costs. Someone says “I want to do this” and the grantor says “Ok. Here’s the money to do that.” Put a bookmark here: this core interaction is also where the limits of the granting approach sneak in. Grants don’t require a huge time commitment or deep expertise on the part of the grantor (it’s pretty straightforward to get an experts take on any particular grant). Granting doesn’t require the person giving out the money to come up with good ideas. In that way it’s very humble. Grants let you build a portfolio of support that, if you believe you don’t have the best ideas, maximizes the chance that you’ll support successful projects. It’s a very [[Indefinite optimism]]ic way of approaching research management. In their platonic form, grants don’t require any ongoing work — you give someone money and let them rip. In part, we’re seeing so many granting programs because of how they can be done well without a massive time commitment. Most of the most lauded new examples are run as side-projects by extremely busy people. Grants are a tool for some of the most effective people in the world enable research despite many other commitments. In the absence of grants, they might not help at all! Grants are humble, fast, low time commitment, and maximize the chance that you’ll support something successful — their appeal and popularity makes a lot of sense. But they have limits. ### Limits to grants Grants filter for people who know what the right thing to work on. However, not everybody who could potentially do good work knows the right thing to work on. Especially in a world of increasing specialization people often see problems only through a specific lens or only see one node in a system-level problem. [[Specialization in research and careers in general has cut off a lot of possible innovations]]. More generally, people don’t know what they don’t know. [[Small grants are different animals from big grants]] [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]. Most significantly, grants fail to address one of the biggest impediments to weird new things in the world: the [[Shadows of the Future]].[^6] You get a grant that pays the rent for a few months, perhaps hire a contractor, buy some equipment, or do work that wouldn’t normally be funded in your university. Then what? You need to either land in an institution or get another grant. Either way, you need to tune work that you did on the grant to set you up for your next steps. You haven’t actually escaped institutional incentives at all. Grants could arguably get around shadows of the future by enabling side projects but that scale is a significant limitation in itself — for many projects part-time work is different in kind from full-time work, especially with multiple people involved. Additionally, I suspect that many of the people who grants are going to are not being paid by the hour. The idea that a chunk of money can free someone up to work on a project part-time is often a fallacy. ### Research management matters [[Research management matters]]. At some point, unless a single person can do the work for a project, someone needs to play a coordinating function. Coordination involves incentivizing people to do things *they wouldn’t otherwise do*. The actions can be at levels of abstraction and the incentives can involve various levels of coercion, but at the end of the day, effective coordination involves more than just shining a spotlight on problems and potential solutions. [[Vision is not enough]]. [[andreessenItTimeBuild2020]] and [[collisonWeNeedNew2019]] were both inspiring pieces and wasted opportunities. Yes, they galvanized people but a lot of the energy was diffused without being channeled into change. To a large extent people framed what they were already doing in a new language. Vannevar Bush got people excited about the idea of a Memex in 1945 with As We May Think, but it took Licklider, Sutherland, and Taylor deploying capital, nudging+enabling people to start labs, and to work on different pieces of the connected personal computing vision decades later for it to become reality. Good research management has many dimensions and can manifest in many different ways depending on the context: from Elon Musk’s involvement in minute engineering details to J.C.R. Licklider’s funding labs and keeping communication channels open between them based on a fairly precise vision. ([[Heilmeier — Licklider — Braben — Elon quadrants of Research Management]]) The importance of research management is probably a “duh” point when spelled out, but if you agree that research management matters, it means that the common perception that “research enablement = research funding” is wrong. To focus only on funding is to implicitly say that filtering-based research enablement is the *only* option. Pure filtering-based research enablement always pushes the coordination function one level lower. Grants defer on having an opinion about what should happen beyond a binary yes/no, saying “well, the person or org receiving the grant will do any necessary coordination.” The trick is that usually the recipients of a grant will have less money, social capital, and reach than a grantor, all of which makes coordination harder. Pushing coordination one level lower also subjects the coordination to the incentives of whatever institutional structure the grant is going to — be it a startup, an academic lab, or an individual out to make a name for themselves. [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]. In the extreme, if grants are the lauded way to enable things, everybody will end up giving everybody else grants hoping for some coordination to emerge on some distant Discord server. Grants all the way down! Too much focus on grants leads to everybody wandering through the world playing mother-may-I. ### Alternatives to grants [[What are the alternatives to grants?]] ### Conclusion 1. Grants are good, but they have limits — they filter for specific kinds of people and projects, force ambitious projects onto a specific trajectory, encourage portfolio theory and success bias, and continually push responsibility down a level while maintaining control. 2. The mindset that “research funding” is all that research enabling organizations do is wrong. Research management matters. 3. There are many potential alternatives and tweaks that can enable work that falls outside the limits of traditional grants. Nothing is a silver bullet, but on the margin, different approaches to giving money to support research can enable entirely different sets of activities and the human flourishing (and awesome sci-fi shit) that so often comes from trying weird new things. ### Related * [[Szilard point]] [^1]: While I’m focusing on research here, this applies more broadly to “enabling new things in the world” [^3]: Or hopefully will! [^6]: This phenomenon constantly looms over the shoulders of those of us who want to see new institutions and games in the world and deserves a much longer treatment. [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Grants+only+go+so+far) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Grants+only+go+so+far)