What we learned doing Fast Grants
future.com
future.com
To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the institution.
What would happen, for example, if we handed the entire education budget to teachers directly. No controls, reporting requirements... just a stack of cash? Teacher decides how to spend it. My guess is that we would see some amazingly positive things. We would also see some awful things. Fraud, failure, scandal... Perhaps, probably even, the average result would be good. Could we stomach the price though? Would year 10 be better or worse than year 1?
We tend to be scandalised by bad things, and take good things for granted. Hence controls.
"Let’s do it” was then the basic attitude and we were much more worried about missing out on supporting important work than looking silly"
Fine attitude, given the circumstances. Outside of seed funding and research though... is it viable? Is it viable after 10 years of repetition? Can it survive scandalous articles highlighting blatant abuses, face up to scrutinies year after year?
There are differences between early and late stage "games." Run this as a long term program, and scams might flood in. More insidious perhaps, proposals that are not quite scams. Observers are also less forgiving of repetitive "failures." Would the director of such a fund be willing to say "we will do nothing" to questions about fraud, scandal or whatnot? Would they want to?
Google once had 20% time, for similar reasons. Let smart people do what they do on their own. It devolved. They tried to fix it with controls. It sucked and then they killed it. The attempt was earnest, but the destination was precisely what G we're trying to avoid.
I'm not disagreeing with this author or the general sentiment on this thread. Getting past or around institutional mindsets is high potential. This project sounds great. We need these to exist.
I am saying that it's unwise to underestimate something this prevalent.
I'm reminded of a Dan Ariely quote about why daughters want bad boys on proverbial motorcycles, but parents hate them. Mothers don't get to ride the motorcycle, but they do get to deal with the consequences.
A lot of this relates to high risk, high reward stuff. Research, startups, etc. Employees, even CEOs are never compensated (including non money incentives) in a way that reflects true risk/reward.
I am disappointed that Yale with 30 BILLION USD ! in endowments did not have the same impact a hastily put together fund filled mostly with volunteers did. To weed out the poor capital allocators, you need skin in the game. Not saying it is perfect, but it probably would be way better than what we saw during the pandemic (and still see).
You set up institutions to protect the status quo. Individuals can go ahead with risks and experiments, but you don't want to risk an entire society with someone's wild idea. For every wild idea that works out, there's many more that didn't.
Of course we should mitigate risks before potentially destroying society.
Continuing to protect the status quo during a national emergency is irresponsible and leads to countless lives lost.
Aside from societal risk, there's individual risk too. When a society's mortality rate drops, it is appropriate to have more safeguards, and when it increases, it is appropriate to have fewer safeguards.
...and then there's also the systemic effects of a broader, more relaxed approach to funding. While distributing $50 million means you're getting high quality leads, if you're in charge of a $5 billion funding program (which the NIH did manage: https://covid19.nih.gov/funding), the net effect of opening up the flood gates is going to be very different. Even if you do a good job of distributing that money (and that is, in itself a HUGE challenge), you're going to be dealing with law suits and political challenges that you'd not deal with for a $50 million fund.
It may suck, but it's the reality of large systems.
> To me this was the most damning indictment of all.
Why?
One company in Texas geared up and started emergency mask production back when the original SARS/MERS hit. And it almost killed his company. He refused to wind up production for masks during Covid without cash and a contract. That's just smart business.
In the US, the Trump administration and a Republican Senate had absolutely demonstrated that it would absolutely leave people in the lurch who didn't kowtow appropriately.
That is NOT an atmosphere where you are going to bet the company on the fact that the government will do the sane thing.
"There's a place in the world for a gambler"
-- Dan Fogelberg
I think we need to codify what "emergency mode" is and when we switch to it. Bureaucracies, and those working in them, need to understand when the situation is not "business as usual" and get out of the way! Implicit in that is, when we are in emergency mode, more risk is taken, there is less red tape, we expect side effects and damage, but we also expect faster progress. We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and when to do it.
This is precisely the problem. Who is "we," and how are they going to define these new protocols?
The "systems" are not (exclusively) designed. They're evolved. They're impenetrable, or at least difficult to penetrate. They're autonomous. Only insiders have the requisite knowledge to figure out what emergency mode is.
The whole point is not to wait for "orders" to drop down.
There was a commission created to discover how many LAWS there were in the U.S.
Just basic LAWS that people and institutions have to follow(because ignorance of the law is no excuse)
And after years the final conclusion from this commission was that it was impossible to know how many laws there are.
You can google that.
A ton of what governments deal with are problems THEY CREATE THEMSELVES.
It's highly critical of others, the authors portray themselves as heroes and avoid almost all criticism of themselves. There are almost no sources and it doesn't show or attempt to show other points of view, and makes no attempt to address bias and self-interest.
In a sense, it works perfectly. Let's be aware of what it is: self-promotion from people trying to avoid scrutiny.
I wrote specific criticisms of the article, and why shouldn't I criticize the publisher? It's necessary to know your source. People criticize publishers all the time; many criticize all journalists and their publishers with one broad brush!
At the risk of drawing a conclusion too strong from the article, I would add that that Fast Grants' referee panel of 'earyl-career individuals from top universities' with [responses] given out within '48 hours' warrants thoughtful contemplation on its own.
Hiring great people, then giving them both autonomy and authority to make effective decisions seems to be a missing ingredient in high-uncertainty activities (and no wonder, how is someone supposed to take risks when failure is harshly penalized). It is also a telling demonstration that questions and challenges requiring domain expertise need not be subject to endless advisory reviews or require sophisticated statistical modelling/complicated decision processes.
Regarding the statistical modelling/decision processes, I by no means am suggesting such modelling is always unnecessary, just that it seems it can often be used to justify inaction, or simply to cover one's arse. I am reminded of the Challenger incident [1] where engineers at Morton Thiokol were deeply suspect of launching, but were unable to decisively prove that a launch was inadvisable for want of adequate evidence. The rich irony of the situation was that several engineers were suspect of the launch AND had domain expertise shared a "gut instinct" about something each had superior tacit knowledge about. Granted, going with one's "gut" generalizes poorly outside of a domain of expertise. However, twenty scientists saying 'yay' or 'nay' to an activity is compelling evidence if all are dispassionate, third parties with no vested interest.
I suspect such skilled, domain-aware groups with the necessary capacity to make important decisions would generalize well to high-uncertainty, risky activities.
But compared against the rigid and bureaucratic obstacles to conventional funding, it is actually closer to being a random application of criteria than what was otherwise available to the grantees.
The sad part about the mainstream academic institutions is that a more random award process is more sensible than what most researchers are normally facing these days.
No doubt 'late-career individuals who did top things even though they went to schools that were not well-known' would be a good qualification for a different success-prone panel, but you would expect the outcome to be vastly different.
Either way it gives some researchers a chance who would not otherwise have any near-term or appropriate opportunities.
Just different researchers.
The failure to accelerate vaccine development through challenge testing is a black mark on our ethical and regulatory system. the Moderna vaccine mRNA was developed two days after COVID-19 was identified, yet it took over a year to get through human testing. All the while, willing volunteers stood by at https://www.1daysooner.org
The FDA stamp will just be a stamp of quality to help guide people to a known quality product.
No enforcement of drug laws at the barrel of an authorities gun.
But if people want to do some experimental off brand use that their doctor recommends then they can.
If people do their own research and want to self prescribe they can.
Getting the monopoly out of health care would reduce health care costs as well.
At the same time, I think we would need to concurrently ban drug advertisements as other countries have. To me, that seems like a better balance between treating individuals as adults with autonomy and minimizing harm on the macro scale.
Inevitably, lots of people would become addicted and there would be many deaths.
Very critical news stories would run. People neglecting their children to use drugs. Testimonies of loved ones and shattered families.
Politicians would be inundated with calls to regulate these dangerous substances.
Politicians who refused to do anything would be mired in conspiracy theories, accusations of conflict of interest and profiting from suffering. They would be voted out and replaced.
Regulation ensues.
All drugs are decriminalized in Portugal, Uruguay, etc. with less addiction and better addiction outcomes than the U.S.
They treat addiction like a disease like diabetes instead of a crime.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/18/524380027/...
It's similar in my mind to self-driving cars. The first post-large-scale-rollout deaths will likely cause a political backlash, even if statisticians and scientists are able to show that the proposed regulatory response would cause more harm than good.
I don't agree that the successful implementation of such a regulatory response is a foregone conclusion in either case, but we will need to be prepared to deal with the reality of some people dying due to self-driving software issues and/or consumption of non-FDA-approved substances.
Outright wrong, baseless, and fear-mongering.
This is the reason. It doesn't require cynically blaming politicians. It's not wrong for politicians to act to prevent death, and to be responsive to their constituents. Those are good things.
Snake oil is a major problem, always has been. Drugs of abuse are a problem, like the oxi crisis. Antibiotic resistance. Etc. There are lots of reasons to have controls in place that don't have a first principles logic to them... just an empirical one.
I'm still pro-full-legalization for the moment, but wouldn't just sign a bill if presented to me today without first ensuring that my administration had a firm understanding of all the historical issues, and felt comfortable that the bill reasonably addressed them (or, if not, that the cure at least wasn't worse than the disease). I know there's a pop culture narrative that drug prohibition was primarily motivated by malicious suppression of anyone Nixon considered undesirables, but from what I understand the real history is much more complicated.
Perhaps simple decriminalization would be a better first step, if not ultimately a better long-term solution as well. And, oh hey, it looks like that may soon be on the table: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27522843
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012v...
Please explain how you think the link you provided backs your opinion. Give me your analysis of the data presented. Let me know you actually understand it.
This is one paper on one hospital and only looking at data after the fact.
Across the USA if you were hospitalized more than 10 days you had a much higher chance of survival. It did not depend on any medication given. That is a stat that runs across the board. This study only includes patients that were given a treatment AFTER 10 days of hospitalization. Most of those that were going to die did so before this study would show they would of been treated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534595/#:~:tex....
"HCQ was found to be consistently effective against COVID-19 when provided early in the outpatient setting. It was also found to be overall effective in inpatient studies. No unbiased study found worse outcomes with HCQ use. No mortality or serious safety adverse events were found."
Also the articles that claimed it DIDN'T work were retracted because the authors of the articles couldn't prove their data.
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Don't let your politics override fact.
Human challenge studies were a ethical no brainer.
Even other studies if we gradually increased the number of people allowed to take them would mitigate almost any real risk. So you let up to 1k people take it month 1, 10k month 2, 100k month 3, and so on. Basically no meaningful extra risk but faster results.
Vaccines have a very good safety record and efficacy record, this isn't like cancer which is much more speculative.
Banning vaccines is not the answer. Most US deaths were completely preventable.
I am doubtful that ~50M split into 260 grants would have any measurable impact on climate change. Just as this didn’t have any large wins. Arguably rather than research leveraging that into solar panels or other infrastructure would be a better use of funds.
In the end it’s a real gamble. One or more of those 4,000 applications was likely a great use of funds, but finding and funding it is hard especially if you’re trying to keep overhead low. Up the amount to say 1B/year and the tradeoffs become even harder between research and action.
Any discovery that take 20 years to go from a lab to production isn’t fast enough to make real change. Avoiding CO2 pollution today on the other hand gives us time to find better solutions.
As it happens, there's a program called Stripe Climate which aims to do exactly this! Money comes from Stripe and from businesses that would like to be able to truthfully say that they donate a percentage of purchases to fight climate change. It looks well thought-out and credible, at least to my eye. They elaborate more on the rationale here:
I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.
Much like The Fed provided public and private debt support, these applications are more pork for existing investigators with deep knowledge of the NIH bureaucracy, but sadly likely of little relevance to the larger issue.
I will say the drug repurposing landscape was an absolute fiasco last year. Every funding opportunity wanted reams of data supporting use in COVID19 which takes time to generate. Yet, somehow on-patent anti-IL-6 drugs were tried again and again and again even in the absence of elevated IL-6.
UK and the NHS really got this right by centralizing repurposing efforts. In the US, there aren't more than ~50 experts in drug repurposing. Why didn't HHS/CDC round them up, lock them in a room, and have to rank-order molecules for proposed basket repurposing trials? We could have saved ~10-100k lives in the US with better drugs for early- and mid-stage disease, but nobody wants to fund a drug that can't generate an ROI. Truly a market, and institutional, failure here.
They are being really intellectually honest here. One thing you couldn't apply for for Fast Grants was a media effort to convince people to take the vaccine.
And speaking of the power of individuals, Robert De Niro (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et...) and other A-Listers actively campaign against vaccines. Fauci said he wishes DiCaprio would endorse the vaccine - as Fast Grants said, pretty obvious - and of course DiCaprio hasn't, he thinks vaccines cause autism.
Were there any institutions who were adversaries to vaccine adoption?
DeNiro continued: “In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be screened or gotten involved in the programming. However, this is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a discussion, which is why we will be screening “Vaxxed.” I am not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the issue.”
GOOD. If you're correct your viewpoint will stand up to dialogue.
They're not really a discussion forum. They're mostly about just showing things. They have some panels, but mostly any discussions kicked off by films are arranged by the attendees for themselves.
There are truly unjuried festivals, but they're much less high profile because the quality will be very uneven. That's not what Tribeca is about at all. So I don't know why she would say that.
The cynical view would be that they were looking to stir up controversy, and pretending they weren't. A less cynical view is to take them at their word, even though it's not entirely truthful since they do, in fact, regularly exercise their judgment. There are thousands of filmmakers who would have loved to have been in the theater that day instead.
I don't think that "It's an alternate viewpoint therefore it should be heard" is a very good argument, just because there are a lot of viewpoints that are Just Plain Bad. You pick and choose. I'd be curious to know why they chose this one -- because they did make a choice, and if they're saying otherwise, that's curious.
Choosing just gives the idea a platform for discussion.
If it's a truly terrible idea then it will be laughed out.
Many ideas that turned out to be significant in the world were considered crazy by society. Flight, The idea of hand washing, etc.
Also, many terrible ideas were considered acceptable ideas: tobacco, lobotomies, etc.
Discussing the idea is what revealed the truth.
Just because an idea is considered 'fringe' in society doesn't mean it's wrong. Ideas deserve a platform for discussion, they may turn out to be right.
Apparently, some ideas have gathered enough steam and collected enough initial evidence to deserve discussion.
And then there are questions about it even WORKING fully and one still has to wear a mask and you can still be contagious and it may not protect against other strains!
If that doesn't ring critical thinking bells in your brain then you're operating based on unquestioning BELIEF in the GOOD of the experts, gov't, and people in general which doesn't seem to always have worked out the best throughout history.
Yes, there's a difference between people who question vaccines as a whole and... a fabricated reality/false narrative.
The survival rate is not 99.99%, and the outcomes for "survivors" are all too often debilitating. The demand on our healthcare infrastructure is potentially crippling, as we've seen.
There has been FDA oversight... indeed the vast majority of the time from development to release of the vaccines in the US has been getting clearance from the FDA (you may recall the J&J vaccine was even paused by the FDA).
...and the liability shield is due to the never-ending unjustified legal claims that companies are invariably subjected to when they operate in this space.
There's a difference between critical thinking bells and having your bell rung. ;-)
>alternative models of science funding can work.
>The macro conclusion is that we don’t yet know what works or which combination of structures would make most sense.
One thing we all know is the type of things that don't work, when it comes to making the most of those researchers having the greatest talent for out-of-the-box experimentation & discovery.
Over a lifetime of effort tackling this exact problem, proven elements can be isolated and combined in ways that are not possible using any other approach.
So it's good that there are actually those who long ago foresaw today's sad situation, and who know lots of things that do work, even if those individuals are not in the mainstream.