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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Systemic decay theory of stagnation

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

The money from SBIR is barely worth the money

# Giving Away Money Costs More Than You Think
Rent seeking whenever you give something away and there’s a competition for how to get it.

For example, the work that people need to put into getting grants.

If 100 people put 15 hours into getting a grant at $8/hr, that’s $12,000 so if the grant is less than that it actually consumed more value than it created
### Published
2013
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Michael - Mike - Munger]]
## Link
[Giving Away Money Costs More Than You Think - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XwBP_pqkGJA)



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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

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]]
- [[40 percent of researcher time is spent writing and administering grants]]



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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

# 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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Grants only go so far

Problems With Peer Review And Alternatives

Many philanthropists theory of change involves influencing the government

Ryan Mitch Conversation 1 May 2020

Does NIH need a DARPA?

# Szilard point
1961 Physicist [[Leo Szilard]] once noted that, at some point in a competitive grant system, applying for grants would consume all of a scientist’s time, leaving none for research.

Arguably this could also be applied to startup fundraising

The less intense version of the Szilard point is when the amount of grant writing time * value of researcher time > value of grant, so by giving out the grant you’re destroying more research than you enable. 



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How does money work in PARPA?

# The money from SBIR is barely worth the money
The easy first order claim is that [[SBIR]] grants support companies that are doing the work that corporate R&D labs formerly undertook. However, the overhead and the amount of money create severe limitations that prevent them from living up to that promise. 

 [[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]] and small business owners are in the same boat. 

[Are SBIR funds just too difficult to win for their worth? | Acquisition Talk](https://acquisitiontalk.com/2020/09/are-sbir-funds-just-too-difficult-to-win-for-their-worth/)

“*To clarify the math, if it takes two man-months (~320 hours) to prepare a SBIR proposal, and you have a 20 percent chance of getting the award, that’s an average of 10 man-months per award.*”
https://twitter.com/EdgeworthBoxInc/status/1304827400467943425

*Let’s assume Orin’s estimate is true, and let’s value an hour of time at $100. That means the average SBIR award costs $160,000 to win. Likely benefits: $50,000 for a Phase I and $750,000 to $1.5M for Phase II.*
https://twitter.com/AcqTalk/status/1304861131601739777?s=20

[[Jonathan Blow]] concurs: https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1304863394269286400?s=20

On top of the overhead SBIRs, still suffer from the fact that [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]

### Related
- [[aroraChangingStructureAmerican2020]]
- [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Giving Away Money Costs More Than You Think]]



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Benʼs working notes

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

Related

Links to this note