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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§Academia Constraints

Charities raise money on a yearly or sub-yearly basis

How does money work in PARPA?

Most people give money to philanthropy to make themselves look and feel good

The traditional non-profit structure is a bad idea for an organization that requires a significant chunk of capital and produces uncertain results on a long timescale

What if there was a clean philanthropy-to-government policy pipeline?

Alex Rider Convo 17-1-2020

The C3SOP structure appears to allow non-profit employees to get stock options

Nadia Eghbal conversation 7 Jul 2021

Lots of philanthropy is based on small checks even from big donors

There’s lots of money out there … for good investments

# §Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints
Philanthropy is the funding mechanism and Non-Profits are the Organization in an Organization-Funding Diad. ([[Organizations and their funding mechanisms are coupled]])

- Profit in non profits goes back towards the mission
	- Could this involve investing it?
- Non-profits must spend all of their income every year 
	- This can lead to very cyclic activity 
	- Cyclic hiring harms employee’s ability to think long term because there is no buffer to pay them in income draught periods
	- Are universities non-profits? They invest their excess income. 
- Non-profits need to constantly be fundraising 
	- Is this because they need to spend down every year?
	- This means that they can’t do anything that looks bad in the short term 
- What’s the difference between a foundation and a non-profit? 
	- A foundation is a *type* of non-profit. The other type is Public charities.
	- The money for foundations comes from an initial gift from an individual or business and spends out of interest. 
	- Foundations can only spend in ways that adhere with 501(c)(3) of the Internal revenue code
	- Foundations can be operating or non operating
		- A non operating foundation give money to orgs
		- An operating foundation distributes funds to its own purposes
	- Public Charities
		- A charity must receive 1/3 of its contributions from the general public OR at least 10% from general public + subjective test of “support”
		- Public charities have higher donor tax deductibles
			- How much?
		- [[Only charities can receive tax-deductible donations]]
	- 501(c)(3)s all are exempt from paying income tax, but only charities exempts donors from income tax
		- [What rules do charities have to follow? | HowStuffWorks](https://money.howstuffworks.com/economics/volunteer/starting-a-charity/rules-charities-follow.htm)

- [[Funders want to follow other funders]]
- It’s easier for foundations to pay out grants than anything else ([A “Watch-Out” for Private Foundations Offering Prizes](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/a_watch_out_for_private_foundations_offering_prizes))  but  [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Charities raise money on a yearly or sub-yearly basis]]
- [[Most people give money to philanthropy to make themselves look and feel good]]
- [[Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories]]
- [[Philanthropies are forced to show consistent short term progress]]
- [[Most philanthropists give to specific causes]]
- [[Non-profits must meet several requirements to Maintain 503c Status]]
- [[People have different and unknown caring money thresholds]]
- A possible tweak: [[Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.]]

See also: [[§Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research]]

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Pay-it-forward tithing is underrated

Governments are well suited to funding research but effective research management is in tension with other government mandates

PARPA could walk the line between profit and non profit

# It is nebulous a priori which research should produce public goods vs private goods
The grad students you’re funding out of the goodness of your heart could use those funds to create a search engine that turns them into billionaires. There’s something irksome about the idea that charity would go towards making someone incredibly wealthy, even if it’s not the charity dollars that went into their pockets directly.  At the same time my hunch is that the Pagerank algorithm would have had nowhere near the positive impact it has had were Google not founded. 

Profit is really useful for aligning a group of talented people to do the grungy work necessary to turn a proof of concept into a delightful product and perhaps more importantly, to *maintain* that product in the case of software and to continue to *manufacture* it in the case of hardware. [[tensions]]. There’s also a ton of [[Nebulous]]ity around which pieces of a research project (especially one not explicitly out to create papers or patents) will become public goods and which will become private.[^1] 

For example, a new type of people-facing software requires a lot of design work which by its nature is effectively a public good. It is easy to copy, and while it requires a ton of skill to get it right the first time, it doesn’t take much time and skill to replicate accurately.  A lot of good design resembles [[Problems where it is easy to know whether an answer is correct but hard to get to that answer]]. On the other hand, the code itself does not necessarily end up as a public good unless it is open sourced. Like the Google example, arguably a lot of code can actually create more value by pulling in revenue that can support a team whose full time job is to improve  and maintain it. Similar to trying to assign credit for every piece of a tech stack, it would be absurd to try to keep track of which time was spent on pieces of the project that will be public goods vs private goods. 

[^1]:Papers and patents are a way of encoding research as either a pure private good or a pure public good. However, they both kind of suck at achieving what we normatively believe that they should. [[Current value capture mechanisms are crude]]. 



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§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints

Kevin Fischer conversation 28 Jun 2022

ICT Distillation

ICT Outline

# Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.
# Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research
Companies and individuals who benefitted from public-good should pledge to tithe 10% of their profit to research - especially that which falls outside of traditional institutions. [[It is nebulous a priori which research should produce public goods vs private goods]], especially if it isn’t focused on creating either patents or papers. Pay-it-forward tithing could enable people to embark on research projects focused purely on reaching whatever the goal of the research is without worrying about either needing to create specific ROI *or* making sure to adhere to the optics demanded by open source projects or charities. 

On top of enabling projects that don’t fit well into traditional boxes of non-profit charity or for-profit investment, a culture of pay-it-forward tithing could decorrelate research funding. The vast majority of research funding comes in the form of grants from either the government or large foundations. Putting aside the question of their ability to allocate money, money coming from a small number of similar organizations with a similar set of constraints on that money ([[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]], [[§Academia Constraints]]) will lead to more correlated lines of inquiry. Mechanisms to decorrelate research are good because [[More Uncorrelated Mistakes lead to more success]].[^1]

### Related
- [[Decentralized systems are the ideal way to enable many uncorrelated mistakes]]
- [[Uncorrelated samples of an idea space means that some people are working on something that other people would find absurd]]
- [[There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing]]

[^1]: More, different, funding sources aren’t a magic decorrelation bullet, of course. There will still be trends and hype cycles.



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§Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research

It is hard to capture value from research

What are the alternatives to grants?

PARPA could pioneer pay-it-forward tithing

Patreon-style funding can support an individual but not a team or capital

Yvonne Ploder conversation 24 Aug 2022

Kumar Garg conversation 24 Nov 2021

Peter van Hardenberg Conversation 20 Nov 2020

Research is charity for the future

# Pay-it-forward tithing is underrated
[[Tithing has a long history]]. However, most people wouldn’t consider charity and money they give to researchers and creators on platforms like [[Patreon]] in the same category. I’d like to suggest that this perception is wrong.  

While the idea of tithing is old, [[Sometimes there are new things under the sun]]. Specifically, two things that were created long after tithing are corporations as a primary unit of economic production and technological advancement as a mechanism to both alleviate humanity’s suffering as well as expand our knowledge and ability.  

We should adopt the idea of tithing to this new world by normalizing “pay-it-forward tithing” where organizations and people who are leveraging past research use 10% of their incomes to support research so that there is more research to leverage in the future. 

The most profitable companies in the world indirectly leverage research and [[It is hard to capture value from research]]. This research isn’t necessarily of the “very serious people in lab coats” type - it could just be someone like [[Andy Matuschak conversation 9 May 2021]] thinking, writing, and prototyping things that have never been done before. Also consider that [[There is a significant class of innovations that would create drastically less value for the world if their value had been captured by their creators]] (eg: Personal computing, the transistor, etc.)  We find ourselves in a situation where for the good of humanity it would be ideal to have people and organizations doing work whose results were spread as far and wide as possible. 

At the same time, it would be ideal if those people and organizations received some of the value they created, for both practical and ideological reasons. [[tensions]].

A quick aside on what I’m *not* advocating. I’m not arguing that Alan Kay (or anybody who invented the technologies that tech companies are built on top of) should be as wealthy as Mark Zuckerberg. That would basically boil down to value capture through another means.  [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]] and it’s not feasible to divide up spoils more fairly than the market already does. 

However, it *is* feasible for companies and people who benefit from low-value-capture research to pay it forward. 

One of the sticking points in giving money to someone doing technology research is that it’s often unclear whether the most valuable result will be low-value-capture research or high-value-capture research. [[It is nebulous a priori which research should produce public goods vs private goods]]

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

Angel investing in Silicon Valley is like pay-it-forward tithing writ extremely small. Successful startup founders have a long tradition of funding future founders, often focusing less on potential returns than on paying-it-forward and status. The possibility of a huge return (we’re all suckers for gambling) would need to be sacrificed but the status would not be. We should celebrate the people who funded CRISPR work or expansion microscopy just as much as we fawn over early investors in Uber. 

In an ideal scenario, we could quickly reach a steady state where technology-generated wealth is being propagated forward into research that probabilistically generates more wealth. 

Pay-it-forward tithing need not only be about technology. While [[The linear innovation pipeline]] is overly simplistic, it’s hard to argue that tech companies today aren’t reaping the benefits of the semiconductor physics work that led to transistors, general relativity work that enabled GPS accuracy, and even the math that formalized all of it. 

Speculatively, [[Pay-it-forward tithing could combine nicely with quadratic funding]]. 

[[There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing]].  

### Related
- [[Most people give money to philanthropy to make themselves look and feel good]]
- [[Philanthropies tend to fall into the trap of doing the normal safe thing]]
- [[Many companies have tried to build philanthropy platforms and failed]]



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# There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing
### The State is a looming question around tithing
In many people’s minds, our taxes (which are much more than 10%) have taken the the place of the tithe. Indeed, historically states were often the collector and distributor of tithes. Ideally, taxes would serve the purpose of a tithe administered by the state, going to the things that people would want their tithes to go towards. However, pragmatically this is not the case. 

I don’t have a good answer to the government question, but I don’t think that the current situation, where everybody is basically fighting to control where everybody else’s money goes is going to change any time soon. I’m going to avoid a huge, tangled, and centuries old question about the role and spending priorities of the state and treat it as a fixed sunk cost. Instead, pay-it-forward tithing could extend the fairly uncontroversial[^1]  line of thinking that asserts that it’s good that extra-governmental nonprofits and charity exist. If research inevitably leads to public goods and there are flavors of it that the government isn’t supporting it should fall into that same line of thinking. 

### It would be easy for bad actors to exploit the system
People could use tithe money to do work that impedes progress through excessive efforts to capture value (like patents and lawsuits) and then don’t tithe any of their own profits. 

However, the ‘bad actors can take advantage of it’ argument is true for almost any cultural movement. Additionally, by default, research-generated knowledge tends to diffuse through people inevitably sharing or starting their own organizations unless it’s stopped by legal structures like patents or regulations. 

### People are terrible at evaluating the quality of research
Tithing is absolutely not a way to “optimally” fund research. There will be potentially wonderful projects that wither on the vine and steaming piles of shiny nothingness that get funded. 

However, it’s not clear that current funding methods are much better than track-record and hype-biased randomness. At the very worst, pay-it-forward tithing would make that randomness less correlated. In a more likely scenario people would defer to well-informed friends or organizations like GiveWell would emerge. Of course, it is possible that we would end up in a situation where money just went to the new hotness like resonating water in a bathtub. 

### We should change institutions to allow markets to work instead of depending on charity
The idea that what we should be doing is building ‘markets for everything’ takes the assertion that [[tensions]] to the extreme. [[Current value capture mechanisms are crude]]. There is definitely some ideological appeal to this way of thinking: it feels fair that everybody who creates value should be rewarded for it. On the practical front, the possibility of profit can rally many more resources than the goodness of hearts and markets are the most efficient way we know of to coordinate large numbers of people who don’t know each other. Versions of this line of thinking suggest different [[Better value capture mechanisms]]

I find all of these ideas appealing, but I do not think that they can be the only solution because of the sheer illegibility and [[Nebulous]] ity inherent in research. Dig into the history of any innovation - even one that’s been cleanly attributed to one person - and you will see that there were other people involved, prior ideas they built off of, infrastructure and resources they utilized. It’s a fractal mess. Where do you draw the line? Should the neighbor who had a cross-fence conversation about a process she uses at work that sparked the realization that led to the invention capture some value? She was certainly instrumental to its success. What about the technician who knew how to twist the wire in just the right way to get the first proof-of-concept to work?  [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]]. And what about all the failed projects that left a pile of skeletons indicating where the traps were? [[Many things cannot be measured well]]. Maybe there is a way for a market to account for all of this, but I cannot conceive of how. 

### Related
- [[DARPA would not have a positive return]]
- [[Market failures are coupled to externalities]] 
- [[Technology increases the number of externalities in the world]]
- [[There is a significant class of innovations that would create drastically less value for the world if their value had been captured by their creators]]

[^1]:Even, I believe, in most authoritarian and socialist regimes.



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

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

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