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Comment by Fede_V | Hacker News Reader

I think it's great YC is funding some interesting research.

I'm a bit curious as to why they didn't partner with some established academics in this area (there's plenty of economists who have done excellent research here) rather than start a new program - but it's YC's money, and they can choose how to spend it.

How open do you plan to be about things like datasets/analysis plans and so forth? I think this would be an excellent opportunity to push forward open science http://osinitiative.org/about-osi/. Further, if you allow people who are skeptical of the minimum income to register the objections before you gather the data, you can address them before you proceed - at that point, post-hoc critiques are a lot less credible.

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We did consider it, and we are working with some established academics.

However, I think it's a good idea to push forward alternative models of doing (and funding) research. Frankly, most of the existing institutions we thought about partnering closely with were somewhat bloated, and it would have made the whole study significantly more expensive and slower.

> push forward alternative models of doing (and funding) research

> thought about partnering closely with were somewhat bloated

> made the whole study significantly more expensive and slower

Not to be obtuse, but these reasons sound an awful lot like the excuses Theranos gave when questioned why they didn't do things more correctly.

I mean, it sounds like ycombinator wants to help propel this idea forward, but you're attempting to minimize your cost and also rush it, instead of doing things right.

> it would have made the whole study significantly more expensive and slower

And so be it. This is a major paradigm shifting idea, and you're not going to be able to take short-cuts and come out with respectable results that hold up to scrutiny.

This is a real problem, and it sucks. By offering money with strings attached (about bureaucracy, overhead, etc) you have an opportunity to shape how things are done though.

I'll be interested to see if this actually works. As an established academic, we constantly interact with private companies that seriously underestimate how much research actually costs.

If the "actual cost of research" as you mention it includes some "overhead" amount which has some amortized portion of professorial salaries, departmental costs, university costs, etc, then I think you've just underlined Sam's point about bloat and expense

The problem is whether or not that's "bloat" or actual expenses. For example, at my university, the "true" cost of research, including all of those things, is actually lower than our overhead rate - the good people of our state are subsidizing the rest.

Companies often want a much lower overhead rate. I get why. But if things like the copy machine, our phone system, keeping the lights on, etc. aren't baked into overhead, then they need to be baked in somewhere. You'll just end up with agreements where you pay for itemized lists of expenses, and haggling over those instead of the indirect rate.

Universities are also often very flexible as to the indirect rate - we have several subsidized rates for specific groups or particular types of projects, etc. You just need a better reason for the lower rate than "I don't want to pay that much".

Like I said, I'll be interested to see if this works. But in my experience, companies that are newly "dabbling" in research are often shocked by how expensive research actually is. Calling something bloat because Sam doesn't want to spend the money doesn't automatically make it bloat.

By "lower than our overhead rate" I mean higher, but it's too late to edit.

What if there were a startup that partnered with science funders to help them distribute their money in a way that produced better models of doing science? That's the idea behind Thinklab: https://thinklab.com/d/38

> Frankly, most of the existing institutions we thought about partnering closely with were somewhat bloated, and it would have made the whole study significantly more expensive and slower.

Some of that "bloat" is due to compliance and ethics: has YC engaged an IRB yet? SV tech companies (Facebook, OkCupid) have shown very questionable judgement with respect to ethical considerations.

There's a reply to this elsewhere in the thread - they've said they're using an external IRB.

Excellent to hear, thanks for clarifying that.

Based on your tweet about 2 hrs ago, you seem to be in favor of equality of opportunity. What's your opinion about about parents who want to give their children the best opportunities in life?

In terms of data sets / analysis, we plan to be totally open and make them available.

Excellent. I look forward to playing around with the datasets as soon as they are released to the public.

Have you considered partnering with some differential privacy people and releasing the datasets to kaggle?

They are not partnering with academia because they think that academia is a joke and needs to be disrupted. I'm genuinely curious to see how that's gonna work out.

Any specific examples of established academic research you can link to?

It's such a huge topic - the modern starting point are papers by Galbraith and Tobin. Since then, there's been so much research/discussion it's hard to point to one thing in particular.

If you want good starting points for someone who isn't an economist, the Boston review had a good primer, followed by a public debate:

Article: http://new.bostonreview.net/BR25.5/vanparijs.html

Debate: https://bostonreview.net/forum/basic-income-all/fred-block-w...

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