Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering

People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible

Manufacturing is important and often ignored

The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia

All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going

Academic culture prizes individual recognition

Younger professors have to spend more time getting money

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup

Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.

The idea that academia is for crazy exploration and companies are for low risk exploration is bullshit

Three myths about scientific peer review

A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

What was the real incentive for people to work on the DARPA Grand Challenge?

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

NS Notes on Officers Techniques

Necrobotics illustrates how academia forces engineering

The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

There are very few senior individual contributors in academia

Is it more impactful to find and train undiscovered diamonds or to unlock well-positioned but constrained researchers?

Wolfgang Merkt conversation 12 Oct 2021

An institution riffing on the ARPA Model could enable paradigm shifts that are not happening

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Funding structures lead to several layers of indirection on what even gets proposed

Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?

Running list of relevant science news?

# §Academia Constraints
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

- [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]
- [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]]
- [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]
-  [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]
- [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]]
- [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
- [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]
- [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]]
- [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]
- [[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]]
- [[Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]
- [[A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility]]
- [[Physical experiments are expensive]]
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]
- [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]]
- [[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]]
- [[Going outside of the approved process can be a black mark against people in academia]]
- [[People proposing work that they have already done is a sign that feedback loops are broken]]
- [[Necrobotics illustrates how academia forces engineering]]
- [[Labs implicitly judge research through the sense of dollars per paper]]

### Related
- [[§Startup Constraints]]
- [[§Corporate R&D Constraints]]
- [[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]]
- [[Market Failures in Science]]

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Progress Conversation 2020-04-04

# Example of grant system failure for COVID19 tweet thread
Everybody piling onto covid 19 grants regardless of what they were working on 
Diverting work to work on it screws over long term work
People actually working on covid19 stuff don’t have bandwidth to apply for grants

See also:
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]

[Dr Emma Hodcroft on Twitter: “I want to come back to this:*Our current funding methods stand a good chance of failing #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 research.*Initiatives across the globe are setting up emergency #hCoV19 funding calls. They vary but generally promise extra 💰 into a cash-starved system (research)1/n”](https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1245251019354836992?s=20)



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Fair games can be gamed

Making a game more fair reduces its variance

Government money needs to be fair

§Institutions and Games

Complicated rules are a way of creating a nominally fair game that is not fair by any common use of the word

# Fair games are self-limiting
[[Fair games have legible rules]] and if a game has legible rules, it’s easier to predict whether you have a shot of winning. Marathons have extremely legible rules and I will bet a lot of money that I will never be world class marathoner. As a result I’m not even going to try. In other words, games with predictable success are self-limiting. 

In the name of fairness, people have been pushing for more legibility in the form of transparency, metrics, and explicit criteria. However, for disciplines that haven’t been systematised, like science or starting companies, [[The Map is not the Territory]] and these attempts to create legibility do not (cannot?) capture all the important things. However, the fairness measures will still create the self-limiting effect and people who could potentially crush it at the illegible unfair game don’t even play. For example [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]].  

In a way, making a game fair actually *raises* the barriers to entry: only those who can afford to optimize the game can get over the high, but uniform, wall. [[Fair games can be gamed]]. 

Of course, the fairness measures are in place to try to get rid of other things that freeze people out of a game - the classic illegible example is “it’s all about who you know.” This is tricky.  While it is not fair, ‘who you know’ is actually a reasonable rule *in a healthy institution.* In that situation, the people in the institution should want to maximize the game’s output, so they should be open to knowing people who might be great at it, even if they aren’t in their social circle. You see this throughout history - the young outsider pounding down the door of the master who recognizes their talent and helps them win. It is *completely unfair* and yet creates some amazing outputs - Alexander Hamilton, Warren Buffet, etc. However, [[Most institutions have become cancerous]] - so the drive towards fairness is not unreasonable but won’t fix the underlying problem.  

Another way to look at the effect of fairness measures is that they homogenize the people playing the game around ‘people who are good at whatever is being measured.’ For marathons, this is fine because you’ll homogenize around people who are really good at running 32.5 miles as fast as they can. That’s literally all a marathon is so in this case, the map *is* the territory. In science, on the other hand, you’re homogenizing around people who are really good at publishing highly cited papers in prestigious journals, pulling in grant money, and getting attention ([[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]].)  Is that all science is? 

### Related
- [[When ‘talent’ isn’t code for ‘specialized training’ it means the role or industry has not been systematized]]



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§Academia Constraints

Fair games are self-limiting

The incentives inherent to corporate R&D mean that researchers motivated by money leave and those who are motivated by glory are not the best in the world

Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it

Example of grant system failure for COVID19 tweet thread

Notes on the Endless Frontier Act

The Endless Frontier Act

# Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia
[[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]]

But then researchers in [[Federally funded research and development centers - FFRDC]] like [[Lawrence Livermore National Lab]] need to write grant proposals anyway. 

### Related
- [[Venkatesh Narayanamurti Podcast 20 May 2020]]



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# Notes on the Endless Frontier Act

This is going to be a painfully cliched but imagine that the American science and technology system is an engine. It’s just not performing as well as it used to. It’s making a lot of noise and when we push the accelerator it’s sluggish. This bill assumes the solution is STEP ON THE ACCELERATOR HARDER. That is, it wants to slam more money through a system shot through with friction and bad incentives. Slamming on the accelerator when your engine has problems doesn’t often fix the problem. I’ve tried it, and it ended up with my car ‘[throwing a rod](https://www.cartalk.com/content/what-does-it-mean-throw-rod#:~:text=The%20motion%20of%20that%20piston,one%20of%20two%20things%20occurs.).’ 

Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) introduced “The Endless Frontier Act” a bipartisan bill to spend $100B to super-charge the National Science Foundation at the end of May. You can read an official announcement [here](https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-schumer-unveil-endless-frontier-act-to-bolster-us-tech-leadership-and-combat-china) and Noah Smith’s summary on Bloomberg [here](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-01/the-u-s-gets-serious-about-catching-up-to-china-in-r-d).

Some thoughts after reading through the actual text of the bill. (My eyes will bleed so yours don’t need to.) 

This bill is proposing to give money with risk-averse restrictions to a risk-averse organization (the NSF) to be dispersed among other risk-averse organizations (Universities) into a system with increasingly risk-averse incentives.  Note that I’m not saying “it’s all fubar’d lets burn it to the ground!” but I am suggesting that instead of slamming on the accelerator, we should be asking “what would a tune-up and an oil change look like instead? “

### The Bill
The bill comes back to its  `Key Technology Focus Areas` throughout the document:

(i) artificial intelligence and machine learning;
(ii) high performance computing, semiconductors, and advanced computer hardware
(iii) quantum computing and information systems
(iv) robotics, automation, and advanced manufacturing
(v) natural or anthropogenic disaster prevention
(vi) advanced communications technology
(vii) biotechnology, genomics, and synthetic biology
(viii) cybersecurity, data storage, and data management technologies; 
(ix) advanced energy
(x) materials science, engineering, and exploration relevant to the other key technology focus areas described in this subparagraph. 

That list is pretty uncontroversial.[^1] And that should raise a flag. In other words, this is a list of “what are the top 10 hot technologies right now?” What if there is suddenly a huge opportunity in airship technology? Or underground construction? Or wormholes? It wouldn’t be too much of a problem but this list can only be changed *every four years*.  You could make the argument that these definitions are so broad that anything could fit in them - ok, then what’s the point of having the list in the first place?  

The bill is heavy on bureaucratic requirements and light on science or organizational structure (“we’ll figure that out later.”)  Which reports need to be given to whom and when, how money can and can’t be spent, etc. I agree that this is the job of lawmakers, but it doesn’t feel like opening up an endless frontier, it feels like “here are the walls of your sandbox.” 

We are very clear that the grant awards are going to happen on a competitive basis. The bill is shot through with the term `award grants, on a competitive basis` . This is code for “to get this money, amazing scientist, are going to need to spend a good chunk of your life writing grants” and interacting with websites that look like [this.](https://www.research.gov/research-web/) or [this](https://www.grants.gov/).  Competition is good *when the output is valuable no matter who wins.* Failed grants are basically worthless except as the basis for other grant applications. Economist [Mike Munger does a great job explaining how grants can often end up burning more value than they create](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XwBP_pqkGJA).  [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]].

The bill specifies exactly what the money can be used for `may be used for the purchase of equipment, the support of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and the salaries of staff. ` Like the key areas, this sounds eminently reasonable. However, it means that grant money, unlike normal money, is not fully fungible. You need to track all of it and where it goes in case you are audited. It also means that if the project runs into an expense that doesn’t fall into one of these buckets - say you need a specialized service from a company to do an experiment - you’re stuck. Chilling effects are hard to measure, but my research experience has been shot through with being forced to pay more for an inferior product through a web portal that made your eyes bleed because we had to prioritize “approved vendors” for accounting reasons tied to restrictions like these.

I don’t think it matters for this discussion but `$20B/year` is misleading - the actual bill specifies that the $100B will be backloaded: $2B in 2021, $8B in 2022, $20B in 2023, and $35B in 2024 and 2025.

### NS(T?)F 
`“I share your feeling about this point,” I said with the fervor of conviction, “but then why not do something about the retardation of scientific progress?”`
`“That I would very much like to do,” Mark Gable said, “but how do I go about it?”`
`“Well,” I said, “I think that shouldn’t be very difficult. As a matter of fact, I think it would be quite easy. You could set up a foundation, with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make out a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. And the very best men in the field should be appointed as chairmen at salaries of fifty thousand dollars each. Also have about twenty prizes of one hundred thousand dollars each for the best scientific papers of the year. This is just about all you would have to do. Your lawyers could easily prepare a charter for the foundation. As a matter of fact, any of the National Science Foundation bills which were introduced in the Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Congresses could perfectly well serve as a model.”`
`“I think you had better explain to Mr. Gable why this foundation would in fact retard the progress of science,” said a bespectacled young man sitting at the far end of the table, whose name I didn’t get at the time of introduction. It should be obvious,” I said. “First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output; but by going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.”`
From [The Marla Gable Foundation](https://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/619829573132107776/a-short-story-by-martian-physicist-le%C3%B3-szil%C3%A1rd) by Nobel Prize winning Physicist Leo Szilard, published in 1948. 

The core idea of the bill is to increase the National Science Foundation’s funding and expand its mandate to include technology development as well as science. 

Roughly, the [[National Science Foundation - NSF]] (and [[National Institute of Health - NIH]])  decide what to work on by getting some of the ‘top people’ in a field together in a room and asking them “what programs should we pursue?” This process depends first on being able to identify the top people in a field and convincing them to stay in a shitty hotel in Washington. So the agenda is being set by ‘the top people in a field who are willing to come to Washington and stay in a shitty hotel.’ Additionally, who entails the ‘top people’ is up to the program officers and since [[Professors have long term relationships with their NSF program officers]] chances are that the professors who have put the work into those relationships are going to be the most salient. 

All the incentives are set up so people probably push for their lines of research. Even if they are being completely intellectually honest, researchers probably think that their area of research is the most important thing to fund. If they are slightly less intellectually honest, they realize that they’re more likely to be funded if their priorities line up with the NSF’s. 

The process is inherently conservative [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]] because if you’re consulting the top people in a field on what to fund, the chances they’ll suggest the weird new thing are low.  

#### But will be like DARPA!

DARPA has a great track record of enabling paradigm shifting technology - it had its fingers in the creation of personal computing, the internet, modern robotics, gps, and autonomous cars, to name a few. Riffing on DARPA’s model to emulate its success is a worthy goal. However, there is only one section in the entire bill that gives a head nod to the DARPA model:

`The Director shall have the authority to carry out a program of personnel management authority for the Directorate in the same manner, and subject to the same requirements, as the program of personnel management authority authorized for the Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under section 1599h of title 10, United States Code, for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.`
`(B) PROGRAM MANAGERS.—The employees of the Directorate may include program managers for the key technology focus areas, who shall perform a role similar to programs managers employed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the oversight and selection of programs supported by the Directorate. `

DARPA’s program managers work because they are embedded in an organizational structure and culture that is tuned to empower them to explore high-risk opportunities. DARPA has ~125 staff and three layers of hierarchy while the NSF has 1400 staff. DARPA PMs are able to spend and shift money without much overhead. There’s nothing in this bill suggesting that NSF PMs would be delegated the power needed to run effective high-risk high-reward programs. I’m pretty sure that you can’t just bolt people called ‘program managers’ onto an existing organization and hope to get results like DARPA. 

### Universities and the system as a whole

The bill is designed to funnel money through the system of universities, peer review, and ‘academia’ in general. The ways in which this system piles on friction and conservative incentives are legion, but to name a few: Universities can take more than half of grant money as administrative overhead[^2]; universities are incentivized to prioritize research that brings in big grants that are given for research that requires lots of grad students and equipment, so high quality theoretical and low-equipment work is marginalized; academics are incentivized to work on publishable work[^3] over groundbreaking work; there’s a big gap between labs and useful technology; the winners tend to win more, even though amazing discoveries consistently come from upstarts; tech transfer offices; the most successful professors are not necessarily the best professors; grad student labor shenanigans; and more. 

For more, see Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen’s [Science is getting less bang for its buck](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/) Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood’s [Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?](https://www.brown.edu/academics/political-theory-project/sites/brown.edu.academics.political-theory-project/files/uploads/Innovation%20%26%20scientific%20progress.pdf),  Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb’s [Are ideas getting harder to find?](https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf) Bhattacharya and Packalen’s [Stagnation and Scientific Incentives](https://www.nber.org/papers/w26752)

![](BearImages/407B3672-83A2-44D6-98D4-24895AC81B8A-1821-000419E278DA3C67/bhattacharya-packalen-diagram.png)
From [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]]

To reiterate: this isn’t necessarily to say “we shouldn’t put any more money into the system until we fix it” or “burn it all down!” But ignoring the systemic issues entirely and slamming on the accelerator seems like the waste of a good opportunity. 

Young and Schumer could the energy to fund a slew of small experiments into new institutional structures and ways to fix incentives and remove friction in the system we have today. 

What could these experiments look like?  
- **Long term funding for people, not projects.** The Howard Hughes Medical Institute selects fellows to receive ~$1m/year over seven years to be spent on whatever they see fit as opposed to constantly writing grant applications and focusing on project deliverables. This allows researchers to focus on long-term projects and to quickly discard dead-ends. HHMI’s entire budget is ~1/20th of the proposed NSF expansion but has yielded 17 Nobel prizes and created massive respect among the scientific community.  
- **Funding medium science.** There is a gap in science funding for ‘medium science’ - projects that cost dozens, but not hundreds of millions of dollars to complete. There are many grants for projects that cost <$10m. Big Science’ projects that cost >$100m like the LHC and ITER do tend to happen albeit slowly. Scientist [[Adam Marblestone]] has pointed out that there are many projects in this gap that could potentially have huge payoffs, but do not get funded because there aren’t many systems in place to fund projects of that size besides maybe DARPA programs.
- **Give riffing on DARPA  a real shot.**.The proposed ‘DARPA-like program managers’ won’t work unless they are embedded in an organization set up to empower them to work on high risk, non consensus programs. The NSF is not set up this way, but it could create a ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ from scratch to riff on DARPA. DARPA’s entire budget is $3B: 3/20th of the proposed expansion. 
- **Try faster grants.** The grant application process can take months and approaches a full-time job.  Formed in the face of the COVID crisis, the philanthropic [Fast Grants](https://fastgrants.org/) showed that this doesn’t need to be the case. The Infinite Frontier Bill could run an experiment with an initially small pool of money for grants that require short applications and make decisions in days. You can literally science the science by rigorously measure the science quality that comes out of them compared to a control group. 
- **Don’t shackle research to universities.** The university is at the core of the system Bush set up after WWII. The Infinite Frontier Bill continues that tradition by planning to channel the money through Universities and University-led consortia. However, America has a long tradition of research done outside of universities, whether it is at corporate labs or in people’s 
- **Play around with prizes.** Several economists have suggested that prizes could provide an alternative to grants with much less overhead on both sides of the table. Prizes have a storied history in spurring innovation - from transatlantic airplane travel to navigational instruments. 
- **Poke at IP.** Vannevar Bush realized that scientists would be incentivized to commercialize their inventions if they could make money off of them. This (correct) sense was codified in the Bayh-Dole act in 1980, which gave universities default ownership of any IP created by federal research. Good-intentioned results can lead to bad results. Anybody who wants to commercialize research has to negotiate with dreaded tech transfer offices. [The litany of problems is long](https://researchenterprise.org/), but  consider the example of a complex product that depends on inventions at two different universities. Each will want a large enough chunk that it would be totally unprofitable. There are possible alternatives to the current system that preserve the profit motive while addressing the poor incentives that have become baked into the system. These include consulting-based IP transfer in which professors make *more* money when multiple companies use their invention and government patent purchases. 

[^1]:Although it is missing anything around transportation, space, nanotechnology.
[^2]:While some of the administrative overhead does help with research by maintaining buildings, much of it does not.
[^3]:Published papers (especially ones that are highly cited soon after they are published) are by definition papers that other people think are interesting. Therefore if you want to maximize publications, maverick work is a poor decision. Other documented problems with peer review are legion.



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Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia

Marissa Convo 1/5/2020

The money from SBIR is barely worth the money

# Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it
Grants usually take the same amount of work, regardless of how big they are. A grant can take weeks to write.

Really there should be a cost to the scientific community associated with any grant. 

### Related
- [[Szilard point]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Giving Away Money Costs More Than You Think]]



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# The Endless Frontier Act

### Grants and Bureaucracy
The majority of the document is about the bureaucratic overhead. We are very clear that the grant awards are going to happen on a competitive basis. Do you 
`award grants, on a competitive basis,`
This will just further entrench 
- [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Evaluating transformative research programmes: A case study of the NSF Small Grants for Exploratory Research programme]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]

Note that while it ‘averages’ to $20B a year, it’s actually 2, 8, 20, 35, 35. 

It specifies exactly what the money can be used for `may be used for the purchase of equipment, the support of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and the salaries of staff. `

CONSIDERATIONS FOR DESIGNATION AND 2 GRANT AWARDS.—In selecting an eligible consortium that submitted an application under paragraph 4 (4)(A) for designation and support under paragraph 5 (1)(A), the Secretary shall consider, at a minimum, 6 the following:
(A) The potential of the eligible consortium to advance the development of new technologies in a key technology focus area. 
(B) The likelihood of positive regional economic effect, including increasing the number of high wage jobs, and creating new economic opportunities for economically disadvantaged populations. 
(C) How the eligible consortium plans to integrate with and leverage the resources of one or more university technology centers established under section 8A(c)(6) of the Act of May 19 10, 1950 (64 Stat. 149, chapter 171; 42 U.S.C. 20 1861 et seq.) in a related key technology focus area. 
(D) How the eligible consortium will engage with the private sector, including small and medium-sized enterprises to commercialize new technologies and develop new supply chains in the United States in a key technology focus area.
(E) How the eligible consortium will carry out workforce development and skills acquisition programming, including through the use of apprenticeships, mentorships, and other related activities authorized by the Secretary, to support the development of a key technology focus area. 
(F) How the eligible consortium will improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education programs in the identified region in elementary and secondary school and higher education institutions located in the identified region to support the development of a key technology focus area. 
(G) How the eligible consortium plans to 18 develop partnerships with venture development organizations and sources of private investment in support of private sector activity, including launching new or expanding existing companies, in a key technology focus area. 
(H) How the eligible consortium plans to organize the activities of regional partners in the public, private, and philanthropic sectors in  support of the proposed regional technology hub, including the development of necessary infrastructure improvements and site preparation. 
(I) How the eligible consortium plans to 5 address economic inclusion, including ensuring 6 that skill development, entrepreneurial assist7 ance, and other activities focus on economically 8 disadvantaged populations. `

- `U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) `
- Lots of noise around china
- $100B over five years
	- AI/Machine Learning 

`The newly-established Technology Directorate would receive $100 billion over five years to lead investment and research in artificial intelligence and machine learning; high performance computing; robotics, automation, and advanced manufacturing; and more. An additional $10 billion would be authorized to designate at least 10 regional technology hubs, awarding funds for comprehensive investment initiatives that position regions across the country to be global centers for the research, development, and manufacturing of key technologies.`

- [Young, Schumer Unveil Endless Frontier Act to Bolster U.S. Tech Leadership and Combat China | U.S. Senator Todd Young of Indiana](https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-schumer-unveil-endless-frontier-act-to-bolster-us-tech-leadership-and-combat-china)

` This is a great move because leveraging existing universities will yield much more bang for the buck than trying to build new research parks.`

` The technology directorate of the proposed NSTF would have the ability to organize DARPA-like projects in addition to traditional research efforts.`

- Bloomberg 

Key areas 
‘(A) INITIAL LIST.—The initial key tech15 nology focus areas are— 16 ‘‘
(i) artificial intelligence and machine 17 learning; 18 ‘‘
(ii) high performance computing, 19 semiconductors, and advanced computer 20 hardware; 21 ‘‘
(iii) quantum computing and infor22 mation systems; 23 ‘
‘(iv) robotics, automation, and ad24 vanced manufacturing; 13 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 ‘‘
(v) natural or anthropogenic disaster 2 prevention; 3 ‘‘
(vi) advanced communications tech4 nology; 5 ‘‘
(vii) biotechnology, genomics, and 6 synthetic biology; 7 ‘‘
(viii) cybersecurity, data storage, and 8 data management technologies; 9 ‘‘(ix) advanced energy; and 10 ‘‘
(x) materials science, engineering, 11 and exploration relevant to the other key 12 technology focus areas described in this 13 subparagraph. 

These can only be changed every four years

Prioritize univerisities for funding 

They’re talking more about reports than how the whole thing will work

`Each year, the Director shall 3 prepare and submit a report to Congress, and shall 4 simultaneously submit the report to the Director of 5 the Office of Science and Technology Policy, describ6 ing the interagency cooperation that occurred during 7 the preceding year pursuant to this paragraph, in8 cluding a list of— `

`‘‘(AA) innovations de21 rived from research carried 22 out under item (aa), through 23 such activities as proof-of24 concept development and 25 prototyping, in order to re- 22 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 duce the cost, time, and risk 2 of commercializing new tech3 nologies; and 4 ‘‘(BB) through the use 5 of public-private partner6 ships; and `

`‘‘(A) PROGRAM AUTHORIZED.—The Direc10 tor shall establish a program in the Directorate 11 to award grants, on a competitive basis, to in12 stitutions of higher education or consortia de13 scribed in paragraph (3)(A)(i)(III)— 14 ‘‘(i) to build capacity at an institution 15 of higher education and in its surrounding 16 region to increase the likelihood that new 17 technologies in the key technology focus 18 areas will succeed in the commercial mar19 ket; and 20 ‘‘(ii) with the goal of promoting ex21 periments with a range of models that in22 stitutions of higher education could use 23 to— 24 ‘‘(I) enable new technologies to 25 mature to the point where the tech`

`A grant awarded under this subparagraph for a 7 purpose described in clause (i) or (ii) may also 8 enable the institution of higher education or 9 consortium to provide training and support to 10 scientists and engineers who are interested in 11 research and commercialization, if the use is in12 cluded in the proposal submitted under sub13 paragraph (B). `

`USE OF FUNDS.—A recipient of a 5 grant under this paragraph shall use grant 6 funds to reduce the risks for commercialization 7 for new technologies developed on campus, 8 which may include—`

`—The Direc8 tor, acting through the Deputy Director, shall 9 establish a program in the Directorate to award 10 grants, on a competitive basis,`

`may be used for the purchase of 2 equipment, the support of graduate stu3 dents and postdoctoral researchers, and 4 the salaries of staff. `

`‘‘(e) AREAS OF FUNDING SUPPORT.—Subject to the 14 availability of funds under subsection (f), the Director 15 shall, for each fiscal year, us`
So many restrictions

`of $100,000,000,000 for fiscal years 2021 23 through 2025, of which— 24 ‘‘(A) $2,000,000,000 is authorized for fis25 cal year 2021; 39 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 ‘‘(B) $8,000,000,000 is authorized for fis2 cal year 2022; 3 ‘‘(C) $20,000,000,000 is authorized for fis4 cal year 2023; 5 ‘‘(D) $35,000,000,000 is authorized for 6 fiscal year 2024; and 7 ‘‘(E) $35,000,000,000 is authorized for 8 fiscal year 2025. `

`‘‘(B) ELIGIBLE CONSORTIA.—For purposes 14 of this section, an eligible consortium is a con15 sortium that— 16 ‘‘(i) includes— 17 ‘‘(I) an institution of higher edu18 cation; 19 ‘‘(II) a local or Tribal govern20 ment or other political subdivision of 21 a State; 22 ‘‘(III) a government of a State or 23 the economic development representa24 tive of a State; and 44 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 ‘‘(IV) an economic development 2 organization or similar entity that is 3 focused primarily on improving 4 science, technology, innovation, or en5 trepreneurship; and `

`CONSIDERATIONS FOR DESIGNATION AND 2 GRANT AWARDS.—In selecting an eligible consortium 3 that submitted an application under paragraph 4 (4)(A) for designation and support under paragraph 5 (1)(A), the Secretary shall consider, at a minimum, 6 the following: 7 ‘‘(A) The potential of the eligible consor8 tium to advance the development of new tech9 nologies in a key technology focus area. 10 ‘‘(B) The likelihood of positive regional 11 economic effect, including increasing the num12 ber of high wage jobs, and creating new eco13 nomic opportunities for economically disadvan14 taged populations. 15 ‘‘(C) How the eligible consortium plans to 16 integrate with and leverage the resources of one 17 or more university technology centers estab18 lished under section 8A(c)(6) of the Act of May 19 10, 1950 (64 Stat. 149, chapter 171; 42 U.S.C. 20 1861 et seq.) in a related key technology focus 21 area. 22 ‘‘(D) How the eligible consortium will en23 gage with the private sector, including small24 and medium-sized enterprises to commercialize 25 new technologies and develop new supply chains 53 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 in the United States in a key technology focus 2 area. 3 ‘‘(E) How the eligible consortium will 4 carry out workforce development and skills ac5 quisition programming, including through the 6 use of apprenticeships, mentorships, and other 7 related activities authorized by the Secretary, to 8 support the development of a key technology 9 focus area. 10 ‘‘(F) How the eligible consortium will im11 prove science, technology, engineering, and 12 mathematics education programs in the identi13 fied region in elementary and secondary school 14 and higher education institutions located in the 15 identified region to support the development of 16 a key technology focus area. 17 ‘‘(G) How the eligible consortium plans to 18 develop partnerships with venture development 19 organizations and sources of private investment 20 in support of private sector activity, including 21 launching new or expanding existing companies, 22 in a key technology focus area. 23 ‘‘(H) How the eligible consortium plans to 24 organize the activities of regional partners in 25 the public, private, and philanthropic sectors in 54 ROM20523 S.L.C. BX6 F6 50W 1 support of the proposed regional technology 2 hub, including the development of necessary in3 frastructure improvements and site preparation. 4 ‘‘(I) How the eligible consortium plans to 5 address economic inclusion, including ensuring 6 that skill development, entrepreneurial assist7 ance, and other activities focus on economically 8 disadvantaged populations. `

Conforming Amendments
(a) SCIENTIFIC AND ADVANCED-TECHNOLOGY ACT 23 OF 1992
(b) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA10 TION ACT OF 1998
(c) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA23 TION ACT OF 2002.
(d) AMERICA COMPETES ACT.—The America 22 COMPETES Act (Public Law 110–69; 121 Stat. 572) is 23 amended— 
(e) NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY, 12 ORGANIZATION, AND PRIORITIES ACT OF 1976
(f) AMERICA COMPETES REAUTHORIZATION ACT 25 OF 2010
(g) STEM EDUCATION ACT OF 2015.
(h) RESEARCH EXCELLENCE AND ADVANCEMENTS 17 FOR DYSLEXIA ACT
(i) AMERICAN INNOVATION AND COMPETITIVENESS 23 ACT
(j) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA9 TION ACT, 1976
(k) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA19 TION ACT, 1977
(l) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA25 TION ACT, FISCAL YEAR 1978
(m) ACT OF AUGUST 25, 1959.
(n) NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION AUTHORIZA8 TION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1980
(o) NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINIS15 TRATION AUTHORIZATION ACT OF 2005
(q) NATIONAL QUANTUM INITIATIVE ACT.
(r) CYBERSECURITY ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2014
(s) HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING ACT OF 10 1991
(t) ARCTIC RESEARCH AND POLICY ACT OF 1984
(u) STEVENSON-WYDLER TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION 13 ACT OF 1980
(v) CYBER SECURITY RESEARCH AND DEVELOP17 MENT ACT
(w) NATIONAL SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND COMPETI12 TIVENESS ACT OF 198
(x) WEATHER RESEARCH AND FORECASTING INNO17 VATION ACT OF 2017.

https://www.young.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Endless%20Frontier%20Act%20Bill%20Text%205.21.2020.pdf

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§Corporate R+D Constraints

People are professionally motivated by money, glory, autonomy, or impact

The statement ‘it’s all about the best people’ is either a suitcase handle term or lazy thinking

Unique impact is the reason that many people stay at NASA

# The incentives inherent to corporate R&D mean that researchers motivated by money leave and those who are motivated by glory are not the best in the world
# The incentives inherent to corporate R-D mean that researchers motivated by money leave and those who are motivated by glory are not the best in the world
The ‘best people’ usually know their market value so by default they can capture more monetary value by spinning out their own thing or going to academia where they can capture more glory. The exceptions to these may be when doing corporate research relaxes constraints. 
This assumes [[People are professionally motivated by money, glory, autonomy, or impact]].
*Money*
If an individual researcher is motivated by money and create something valuable, they can capture more of the value they create if they spin off a startup.[^1]  Therefore, researchers who stay in R&D labs long-term aren’t motivated by capturing value. 
*Glory*
Researchers can capture more glory because companies have the incentive to keep many more things secret. In academia, the only thing that keeps people from publishing is fear of being scooped. In a company you want to keep the research secret until you are already in a position where you can execute on the research better or you have no interest in executing on the research. Therefore, you would expect researchers who are doing things  relevant to the company’s core business to have restrictions on what they can do and therefore less publishing and glory-capture than if they were in academia. 
One exception to the ‘glory-restrictions’ on business-adjacent research may be if the company feels like they’re the only ones who can take advantage of the research. This suggests that one of the reasons [[Bell Labs didn’t have a unique model]] may have been able to publish so much was because their monopoly position assured them they would be the only ones able to execute on the research.  [[Google Brain]] may fall into this same category - they have an effective monopoly on search and video hosting. 
*Autonomy*
The “something else” could be doing interesting or novel work that would otherwise require months of grant writing. <[[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]> However novel, interesting work is often not aligned with the parent org because the value of innovations is not always clear and[[Big companies cannot start small things]]. If research doesn’t fit into an existing business unit, only outliers are incentivized to keep it going which means that researchers in corporate R&D can only be autonomous for a finite amount of time.
*Impact* 
Corporate R&D can potentially have large impact *if* you’re working on something that’s aligned with the main company. For example if you’re working on research that can become part of an existing Google product, it will affect billions of lives. However, to sound like a broken record because [[Expensive research needs to address an existential threat eventually at an organizational level to maintain support]], anything research not connected to a core product will have a finite lifetime and probably won’t have a large impact.
One way that Corporate R&D *can* get the best people is if they provide resources that would be hard to come by otherwise - the massive compute at [[haoMessySecretiveReality2020]] and [[Google Brain]] for example, or access to world-class labs at pharma companies. 
The incentives to get the best people to stay may also be part of the reason why [[Corporate R+D orgs are expensive]] - you need to provide them with hard-to-get resources, which usually translates to $$. The other way to keep the best people is to make them feel exceedingly comfortable - call this a ‘local optima’ - which is also expensive. 
(Of course [[Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory]] for very specific reasons)
[^1]: This is especially true in the world of software but may hold less true in areas with higher capital costs.  Also depends on the company’s willingness to acquire. [[Are there ideas that create a lot of value for a big company but would make terrible startups?]]
## Related
 [[Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory]]. 
## References
* [[Conversation with Charlie Songhurst 12/2018]]
* [[Conversation with Alex 7/1/20]]


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The government grant process depends on politics and committees

# Younger professors have to spend more time getting money
Which is ironic because they statistically will have the most new ideas. 

Younger professors have less of a track record and less of a relationship with people who give out grants ([[Professors have long term relationships with their NSF program officers]]) so they need to spend more effort getting those grants and the size of the grants they get is usually smaller. Spending more effort getting smaller grants means that they need to spend proportionally more of their time raising money instead of doing research. 

### Related
- [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]]
- [[§Academia Constraints]]
- [[Szilard point]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]



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Benʼs working notes

Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia

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