Betting markets for research ideas could circumvent expert review killing ideas

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storrshallWhereMyFlying2021

The Idea Factory

The Hidden Half

Science as Falsification

# Could we make a system that could spin up transformer production from nothing in a day?
https://twitter.com/bankerweimar/status/1562532629781827585?s=12&t=fK9Fx1K4wioJwYytLDXtBQ



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§PARPA

§ARPA model

DARPA is ~0.5% of the Department of Defense Budget and ~12% of that is basic research

Person targeted questions for roadmapping

A 1B dollar PARPA budget could come from a 25B dollar endowment at 4 percent interest

ARPA Model Conclusions

PARPAs third evolutionary stage is a full private ARPA

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Asking questions

ICT Outline

# Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results?
# Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results
[[It is important for big things to start small]] and many attempts to replicate DARPA’s results start too big. [[Most DARPA clones start too big or with heavy process]]. So it makes sense to ask: can you start with a tenth of DARPA’s budget? A hundredth? A thousandth? 

There are two lower budget bounds that you’ll run into: the number of parallel high-risk programs you need to run to get a success and the budget per program to have a viable shot at that success. 

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that if each program generously has a 10% chance of success [[DARPA has a 5-10 percent program success rate]] then you need to run at least seven programs to give yourself a 50% chance of at least one program being successful. 

The question of minimum program budget is trickier. Let’s look at some comparison numbers. In the years 2018-2020 among DARPA programs not focused on assembly and production, the minimum budget was $2m, the maximum budget was $31.4m and the average budget was $12m. The ARPA IPTO directorate that midwifed the personal computer started with a budget of $47M in today’s dollars.  ARPA-E vacillates between ~$200-$300M/year, has about 50 programs running at any time, which comes out to roughly $4m to $6m per program. IARPA’s budget is classified.  Could a program go below a couple million dollars a year and still be effective? There are arguments both ways. On the one hand you could argue that surely bureaucratic inefficiency is pushing those budgets higher than they need to be. On the other hand, it might be that the sort of work that it’s most valuable for an organization riffing on the ARPA Model to do needs a relatively large budget, otherwise it would be picked up by other funding mechanisms. 

According to [[ARPA Does Windows - The Defense Underpinning of the PC Revolution]], the ARPA IPTO directorate started with a budget of $7M ($47M today.)

![](BearImages/E3D3DAFC-064A-4106-9667-16B6BB3A6866-1821-0002C788AA5781E9/198E2108-3613-44C5-9D9E-F91EEC23559B.png)

In the years 2018-2020 among DARPA programs not focused on assembly and production, the minimum budget was $2m, the maximum budget was $31.4m and the average budget was $12m. 

https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/DARPA_FY20_Presidents_Budget_Request.pdf

### Related
- [[Adam Marblestone Podcast 2020-03-31]]
- [[Do programs that fall out of scope for present institutions have a large threshold cost? If so what is it?]]
- [[Person targeted questions for roadmapping]]



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Top of mind

# Top of Mind Questions
- [[When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?]]
- [[Is there a minimum effective budget to generate outlier results?]]
- [[Can impact certificates work for research?]]
- [[Could we make a system that could spin up transformer production from nothing in a day?]]
- [[What does a modified Heilmeier catachism look like?]]
- [[How should SpecTech donations work?]]
- [[How can we make roadmaps living documents?]]
- [[What are the goals of the program design process?]]

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About these notes

# Top of mind
(Updated 26 Nov 2022) 

The intention of this page is to serve the function of  [a /now page](http://nownownow.com/about)  - shamelessly stealing the idea of a notes-based now page from the indomitable Andy Matuschak.

Most of my time is spent building the new [new institution](spec.tech) I outlined [in the piece I wrote on building a private ARPA-riff.](https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa). (More details soon!)

This entails:
- Finding [potential program managers](https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa#its_possible_to_find_people_who_are_both_willing_and_capable_to_be_program_managers) and working with them on the fist steps of [[§Program Design]].
- Working on our first two programs. Specifically [[Nanomodular Electronics]] and [[Molecular Additive Manufacturing core]]
- Finding the money to fund these things. 

The nature of trying to create the organization still raises a number of research-y questions: [[Top of Mind Questions]]

And of course, I can’t help occasionally durdling around with some other ideas:
- [[In Defense of Academia]]
- [[Research is not a commodity]]
- [[We have no good metrics for successful research]]
- [[Directly acknowledging alignment and misalignment can be powerful]]
- [[Periodic table of research organizations OR Innovation Engineering]]
- Recording an occasional [Idea Machines Podcast](ideamachinespodcast.com)as a way to talk to fascinating people and share it with the world.

On the physical front, I’m pretty plateaued on climbing :-/ I’m not quite sure how to break through it — probably need to get a coach. 



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Exploratory Program Organization

R+D orgs lie on a spectrum between externalized and internalized execution and benefits

DARPA doesn’t do any research in house

The higher a TRL the more internalized research should be

List of progress studies questions

Ways an ARPA-riff could improve on Things about DARPA that can be improved

The Management of Innovation

It’s easy to set out to build a DARPA but end up building a Skunkworks

Interactions inside an org vs outside of it comes down to how the interactions are mediated by contracts

What is the role of organizational boundaries?

Coordination and Coercion in Research Funding

Executing on multiple paths towards the same goal is hard within an organization

# When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa?
# When is externalized research better than internalized research and vice versa
[[DARPA doesn’t do any research in house]], which has several advantages. However even in the domain of [[Mission-focused research]] examples like [[Lockheed Skunkworks]], [[Bell Labs didn’t have a unique model]], and others have demonstrated that internalized research can produce excellent results and has clear advantages. Internalized research lowers some set of [[Transaction costs]], enables closer collaboration between disciplines, smooths transition to manufacturing, and makes capturing value easier.  The fact that internalized vs externalized work is not a binary distinction but a spectrum makes the situation even more complicated. My hunch is that there is some class of work where the advantages of externalized research dominates and another class of work where the advantages of internalized research dominates.  I don’t have a good answer to where that line is, but it is an important question to address. 

### Related 
- [[Modularization allows different groups to work on different pieces]]
- [[Modularization requires legible interfaces]]
- [[The higher a TRL the more internalized research should be]]

- UX/low-requirement systems feel like something that’s very hard to externalize
	- Low-requirement systems are hard to modularize [[Modularization allows different groups to work on different pieces]]
- Related: externalization, modularization

* [[R+D orgs lie on a spectrum between externalized and internalized execution and benefits]]


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Benʼs working notes

Top of Mind Questions

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