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Comment by tylermw | Hacker News Reader

Love this comment left on the post by Peter Shor (of Shor's algorithm--the algorithm that kicked off the quantum computing frenzy). I assume it's him and not an imposter.

"It's not just that scientists don't want to move their butts, although that's undoubtedly part of it. It's also that they can't. In today's university funding system, you need grants (well, maybe you don't truly need them once you have tenure, but they're very nice to have).

So who decides which people get the grants? It's their peers, who are all working on exactly the same things that everybody is working on. And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down.

But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress. (Assuming they really did have promising crazy ideas, and weren't abusing the system. Of course, what would actually happen is that the new system would be abused and we wouldn't be any better off than we are now.)

So the only advice I have is that more physicists need to not worry about grants, and go hide in their attics and work on new and crazy theories, the way Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem."

(new comment right below)

"Let me make an addendum to my previous comment, that I was too modest to put into it. This is roughly how I discovered the quantum factoring algorithm. I didn't tell anybody I was working on it until I had figured it out. And although it didn't take years of solitary toil in my attic (the way that Fermat's Last Theorem did), I thought about it on and off for maybe a year, and worked on it moderately hard for a month or two when I saw that it actually might work.

So, people, go hide in your attics!"

View on HN

Sigh, so true. Heartening that Shor has the same thoughts about the grant system that I do.

I don't have quite the same critical perspective as the blogger, but I think there's a certain misguided attitude underlying the phenomena observed by Shor.

Yesterday or the day before I was listening to the radio and someone with a physics background was talking about something (I think quantum entanglement) and started asserting that physics has basically figured out almost everything. This is probably a somewhat unfair paraphrase, but not too unfair.

What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit. This is certainly true some of the time, but sometimes those little empirical cracks are what brings down a major paradigm, and leads to another one, one that has the same predictions as in 99% of the cases, but in the other 1% has totally different predictions with very different implications.

This carries over to grant funding, etc. in that the prevailing community often assumes that what they're doing is fine, and all that's left are these little empirical tweaks. That's certainly helpful some of the time, but it seems to dominate too much. Academics needs to leave more room for people to fail at high rates with good ideas, to increase those small percent of times they succeed wildly.

>> What irritated me about it was the assumption that, if most of your predictions are correct, your model is almost entirely correct, and just needs to be tweaked a bit.

Haha, no. We wish.

Epicycles worked very well and were highly accurate, because, as Fourier analysis later showed, any smooth curve can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy with a sufficient number of epicycles. However, they fell out of favour with the discovery that planetary motions were largely elliptical from a heliocentric frame of reference, which led to the discovery that gravity obeying a simple inverse square law could better explain all planetary motions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.

See also: relativity, quantum physics, etc.

>A theory can explain observations even perfectly well and still be wrong- because the frame of reference is wrong. The worse thing is that you can't figure that out until you've figured out what the correct frame of reference is, and looked at your obsrevations in a new light.

Well strictly speaking, it wasn't wrong. It explained the observations perfectly well. What a heliocentric description brought was a simpler description that illuminated the principles behind it, in a way that enabled us to discover the inverse-square law of gravity, link that to Gauss's theorem for gravitation, explain it even from a more fundamental geometric perspective with general relativity, etc.

It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles.

Revolutions happen when a new mental model - or frame of reference, or whatever you want to call it - can generate new kinds of math.

The old model is certainly wrong in the sense that it's not a good picture of how reality actually works.

If you really want to, you can still use epicycles for certain kinds of problem, just as you can use Newtonian physics for basic mechanics.

But this is engineering, not physics. These theories are useless for frontier research. They're absolutely wrong in the sense that their lack of completeness means they cannot be used to generate theory[n+1].

> It was wrong in the sense that epicycles are an entirely imaginary math artefact, and reality works on different principles.

How do you distinguish "an entirely imaginary math artifact" from the "principles" that "reality works on"?

(Hint: planetary orbits are not ellipses once you take GR effects into account.)

The same way we distinguish the shadows cast in Plato's cave from the objects occluding the light. The more situations in which a theory or model makes accurate predictions, the more correct it is. Epicycles are much, much more wrong than mathematically perfect elliptical orbits.

> Epicycles are much, much more wrong than mathematically perfect elliptical orbits.

Not if you define "wrong" as "inaccurate predictions". You can approximate ellipses with circles and epicycles to any desired degree of accuracy by putting in more epicycles. So you can match the predictions of ellipses to any desired accuracy with epicycles.

Also, as I noted, the actual orbits of the planets are not perfect ellipses once GR effects are taken into account. Have you proven mathematically that it is impossible to construct an epicycle model that makes more accurate predictions than perfect ellipses, based on the actual data (which confirms the GR predictions to within current observational accuracy)?

After reading this thread, I think I've discovered the real reason new physics isn't being done.

You're being intentionally obtuse. "Just add more epicycles!" isn't building a better model (for a sensible definition of "better"). It's just overfitting. You are the reason why regularization exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(mathematics)

> planetary orbits are not ellipses once you take GR effects into account

Super interesting. I'm a physics major (graduated) who didn't take GR, so I didn't know this. Want to learn GR now but very likely won't haha.

> the frame of reference is wrong

According to General Relativity, there's no such thing as a "wrong" frame.

True, but there are frames of reference that make understanding (and the math) vastly simpler. I can calculate the orbits of the Saturn's moons using my location on earth as the origin. It will take me a lot of work, but I can do it.

It's a fun exercise to reframe the laws of physics in terms of your "stationary" frame on Earth and I recommend it to everybody. Consider the speed of light in the Andromeda galaxy... except under these physics we can't speak of the "speed" of light, but the permissible velocities as a function of the location in question.

Running through this exercise with some honesty can give one a greater understanding of why our physics is framed the way it is, and why it is that while all sorts of reference frames are valid, "inertial" reference frames are still important on their own merits.

The Earth is demonstrably not a "stationary" (inertial) frame, in the sense that it's constantly accelerating.

Is there a deeper meaning to "Consider the speed of light in the Andromeda galaxy" that I missed? The speed of light is known to be constant in every reference frame.

The earth is still stationary with respect to itself. The Universe is accelerating around it. In the case of Saturn's moons the Sun and Earth are not significant factors, if I use the Earth as my origin I have to account for those anyway, but if I were to use Saturn as my origin I could safely ignore them (probably - I could come up with sci-fi reasons that they matter).

Your two paragraphs are connected to each other. The speed of light is known to be constant in every inertial reference frame. But reference frames are not required to be inertial, which is precisely why we call them inertial reference frames; the word "inertial" is not redundant.

You can reformulate all of physics into your Earthly non-inertial reference frame. You can formulate all of physics into a reference frame in which you personally are always stationary! Nothing stops you from doing it, and the physics will work, as much as they ever do (i.e., we know something's wrong with our theories). To the extent that the result is a hideous monstrosity, well, such is my point. Pondering the nature of that hideous monstrosity is something I think worth doing, at least for a bit. Not to the extent of actually writing the equations, though. It brings clarity to why inertial reference frames are so important that we almost consider "inertial reference frame" to be a single atomic word, because non-inertial reference frames are in general not very useful. (In specific they can be.)

I'm sorry, I don't know what General Relativity says, really. I'm not that kind of geek :0

What if I say there are frames of reference that are irrelevant to discovering the process that generates the observations?

Edit: Um, guys? I genuinely don't know what general relativity says and I didn't get the comment above. It'd be nice if someone explained.

I think your "I'm not that kind of geek" comment came off as condescending. It also makes you sound like you're not really interested in understanding the other side's argument.

I don't see that there is an argument - rather that a separate chain of discussion has started. It's fair to then say "well that's all fine but what I was thinking of was X" which is what I am reading. I think that there is a big difference between frames of Einstein (I don't understand these) and frames of reason and perception (I don't understand these either) but I do see that there are two different things!

Like I don't understand either Australia or Argentina.. but I know that they are not the same!

Sounded more to me like just a "that's outside my area of expertise so I can't really contribute".

Also, "frame of reference" has a specific meaning in relativity but it also has a more general meaning regarding the framework within someone understands something. It's pretty clear from the context (imo) that this latter is what was meant in this comment.

Thank you, yes, that's what I meant- I dont' know physics (well, very little) so the OP's comment left me confused and I didn't realise there's a technical meaning of "frame of reference". It doesn't help that, in the case of the theory of epicycles and the location of the Earth in space, the technical and colloquial term can mean the same thing.

"I'm not that kind of geek" is a bit of an in-joke so my bad for using it where the context is missing, but I thought it would work even so. The missing context is that a colleague used to tease me for my deplorable lack of a science background, although we did hit it off in terms of our fantasy and science fiction tastes. So, I was not the science kind of geek, although I was the science fiction and fantasy kind of geek.

General relativity holds that the universe has no “center”, either earth or sun. even more surprising, is that unlike newtonian physics, general relativity says the universe doesn’t even have a single “clock”, and what you observe in astrophysics depends on where you observe it from and how fast you are travelling when you observe it. the speed of light is constant, and space and time will bend in order to maintain the observation that light is always a constant speed.

The location, and speed with which you are travelling is what general relativity calls a "frame of reference", and none of them are "correct" or "incorrect", they're just predictors for what observations will be possible from that frame.

then the weirdest part is that one of the consequences is that planetery bodies are large enough for that “speed of light must remain constant” rule to matter in a particular way as to generate a warping of spacetime around them, the geometry of this warp perfectly explaining gravity. or put another way, we stick to the earth because time runs slightly faster at our heads than at our feet.

This youtube video explains it really well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E

Thank you, that's a good explanation- in the sense that I understand now what the previous comment, by Koshkin meant in responding to mine that there is no "wrong" frame of reference.

>> The location, and speed with which you are travelling is what general relativity calls a "frame of reference", and none of them are "correct" or "incorrect", they're just predictors for what observations will be possible from that frame.

OK, I see- "frame of reference" is a technical term, in General Relativity, that refers to your position in space, and determines what you can observe. Instead, I meant "frame of reference" as a more general "point of view" or "frame of mind" - a set of assumptions that give context to any observations and that inform interpretations of them.

Even going by the technical sense of a frame of reference, though, there are frames of reference that will not permit the cocrrect identification of a process that generates a set of observations- or at the very least, they will tend to favour incorrect interpretations of the observations.

I think that is in keeping with what your comment says about a frame of reference in General Relativity allowing a range of physical observations.

Right, so what was ground breaking about General Relativity, is that it challenged the newtonian axioms (assumptions) that there's a single universal clock, and that all objects within the universe are effectively rigid and exist in something resembling euclidian geometric space, and all move forward through time at the same speed. Newtonian physics explains many things very well, but couldn't explain other phenomenon.

Going from observation, that the speed of light is constant, regardless of how fast the light emitter is travelling relative to you, he made that the unbreakable assumption, and made the shape of spacetime flexible to always satisfy a constant speed of light. This theory was then confirmed when the light of a distant star was observed to bend when travelling through the strong gravitational field of our sun during a total solar eclipse.

Therefore the physics described by General Relativity have greater predictive power.

Quantum physics, can also predict everything in general relativity, but doing so is a lot more complicated than using general relativity. However, Quantum Physics can explain things that happen on small scales that General Relativity cannot. Quantum Physics has greater predictive power, but it's more convoluted. Like Epicycles. Einstein didn't like quantum physics and spent a great deal of time trying to debunk it, but, well, he couldn't.

This is all to point out that one should not confuse predictive power with complexity. Ockham's Razor is a rule of thumb that prefers "simpler" explanations for things. But the predictive power of the two competing theories must be equal for that to apply.

Thanks, I didn't kow about Einstein and quantum physics. I'll have to read a bit about that, it sounds interesing.

My original comment is grounded in an assumption that predictive power is not enough to identify a theory as correct, and neither is simplicity. There's nothing to stop any number of theories to have the same predictive power and the same kind of complexity. Sometimes, it's just very difficult to choose one, above the others.

Did I come across as confusing predictive power with complexity?

EDIT: it's interesting you bring Occam's razor up. It's part of what I'm studying, in the context of identifying relevant information in (machine) learning. There are mathematical results (in the framework of PAC-learning) that say that, basically, the more complex your training data, the more likely you are to overfit to irrelevant details. At that point, you have a model that explains observations perfectly well, but is useless to explain unseen observations (the really unseen ones- not those pretending to be unseen for the puprose of cross-validation).

...iiish. The result is that large hypothesis spaces tend to produce higher error. But, the size of the hypothesis space in statistical machine learning depends on the complexity of the data, as in the number of features. Anyway, I'm fudging it some. I'm still reading up on that stuff.

> Quantum physics, can also predict everything in general relativity

Unfortunately, the two theories, while both being extremely successful and accurate in their predictions, are incompatible with one another. Quantum Field Theory has successfully combined Quantum Mechanics with Special Relativity, but that is all.

thanks for letting me know- I’m not a physicist so I knew I was probably putting my foot in my mouth somewhere.

maybe some day we’ll find the grand unifying theory of the universe.

We need to to be specific here though: they are compatible at low energies. They only become incompatible at very high energy states like those shortly after the big bang, and those we can't produce easily in particle accelerators.

Which is to say: they break under conditions very unlike the every-day universe, which is important but also indicative that they are not that broken.

The incompatibility is important though, because if there's any more card tricks we can do with physics so we can do interesting things, somewhere in that bit of incompatibility is where we must find it.

Sorry, but I have to correct you there. There is a infinite number of Relativistic Models possible. In the one that is currently used, you are indeed right.

But now I understand why Einstein wrote in his last book, after much thinking, that this perspective is wrong. He called it "unthinkable" for a good reason. The model I'm using also has relativity, but with an absolute frame. It also behaves differently in extreme situations like the surface of super massive black holes and and near field of a proton. In fact, I have much more relativity but not everywhere and it's paradox free :)

As your article explains (but too briefly), epicycles do predict wrong. It predicts correct locations but incorrect phases.

"It was not until Galileo Galilei observed ... the phases of Venus in September 1610 that the heliocentric model began to receive broad support among astronomers."

My understanding is that these had not been observed before Galileo, or at least not observed by many and not long before Galileo's time. In that case, they weren't so much incorrectly predicted, as not observed.

Except you can’t just go hide in your attic. Everyone is more risk averse than ever as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education relentlessly increase faster than wages.

Reminds me a bit of the expression "desperate times call for desperate measures".

This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.

How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.

The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible:

(1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that.

(2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.

Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.

I don't dispute that our current system is inefficient. But the proposed change under discussion (universal basic income) does not just mean "increasing free time by a large amount" while keeping everything else the same. It means increasing free time by a large amount while removing the need for anyone to do productive work. It's the latter that I see as problematic, not the former.

What would a world where we did the former but not the latter look like? It would be something like everyone having to be, at least in some measure, an entrepreneur--everyone would be their own small business, having to figure out what product or service to sell to others in order to make a living, and having to decide for themselves what use of their time would best serve that goal. That might well, in the long run (i.e., after all the upheaval caused by people who were used to having someone else define their business objectives, now having to do it themselves, has died down), be a big improvement over what we have now. But the key incentive of having to make a living is still there.

I think you may be under appreciating the "basic" part of universal basic income, as well as the human drive to do better than their own baselines.

The "basic" part means that the level of income is generally set at an austere level. Think of living in the minimal existence of a monk. Some people would do fine with that, and would choose it, but the vast majority of people I believe would elect to work for more.

Humans over their history have always reached for more, including the most extremely wealthy, who basically have a capitalism granted equivalent of UBI, but significant numbers still choose to work.

> The "basic" part means that the level of income is generally set at an austere level.

And all history shows that that level increases over time to a point where "minimal existence" is enough luxury to be unsustainable. This is by no means the first time that the option of the state doling out basic necessities to everybody has been considered. The Romans had their bread and circuses. Today it would be food stamps and cable TV and Facebook and Twitter. Same difference.

I don't know why you find it implausible given that there are plenty of people who already do both those things while having enough money not to.

How many is "plenty"? What percentage of people who have enough money not to do those things actually do them?

My sense is that that percentage is pretty low. Yes, there are people like pg or sama who continue to work and add value even though they don't have to, and I think that's an admirable thing to do. But I think there are many more people who, once they have enough wealth to not have to work, stop working for good and don't produce anything after that.

How many people contribute to open source, wikipedia and debate stuff online?

A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns. But the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward. I would argue that we are better off abolishing intellectual property laws as well and allowing everyone to contribute to open source drugs the way they do in other sciences.

Watch these two videos:

Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs Collaboration

We need more collaboration and less capitalistic competition.

I know firsthand the righteous indignation that anarcho capitalist libertarians have at “violence” being used to redistribute wealth.

But these same libertarians ignore all the coersion used on the other side. They seem to want people to be FORCED to work out of fear of losing food and housing. Some freedom for the masses - the freedom to work or starve.

And of course Property is a coercive institution just like government. It has to be enforced. So Disneyworld charges visitors entry fees and vendors rent and pays people to dress up like Mickeys and it’s top down and Libertarians are ok with that. Next door is a city that’s run democratically and what if they want to charge taxes and redistribute basic income, how is that any worse than Mickeys?

> A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns.

Exactly.

> the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward

That might well be true. And it has nothing whatever to do with what I said. In fact, abolishing top-down institutions would, if anything, make it more difficult to have a scheme like universal basic income (the topic we're discussing here) at all.

> of course Property is a coercive institution just like government. It has to be enforced

Is the only thing preventing you from appropriating your neighbors' property the fear of enforcement?

Property rights are agreements. If it is a net gain for all parties to follow an agreement, they will follow it, even in the absence of coercive enforcement.

Property rights are agreements. If it is a net gain for all parties to follow an agreement, they will follow it, even in the absence of coercive enforcement.

The same can be said about the social contract. Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement?

For many people, yes. That's the only thing. And we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone. Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.

Property rights become "States" if the organization is large enough.

Property rights are basically monopoly rights to exclude others, by force if necessary, from the use of a resource.

Sometimes this exclusion actively harms wealth creation. Especially if the resource is a public good.

> Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement?

This is a very telling question. Of course the answer is yes--if you qualify "running red lights" to mean "running red lights when it is clear that it is not going to cause any harm or violate anyone's property rights". For example, it's very late at night, it's an intersection with clear visibility in all directions, well lighted, and there is obviously no one else in sight. In such a case, yes, the only thing preventing me (and probably any reasonable person) from running the red light is fear of enforcement.

But of course that's because any reasonable person has the common sense to know that running a red light under circumstances where it will clearly violate no one's property rights and cause no one harm is not a crime; it's just a violation of an administrative rule, which in practice is used as a revenue source by localities, not to improve traffic safety.

And of course any reasonable person will not run a red light if it would risk causing harm or violating someone's property rights. But in that case, it is not because of fear of enforcement; it's because reasonable people understand that harming others or violating their property rights is a net loss for everybody, including them, so they have a good, rational reason not to do it and would behave the same even if it there were no enforcement.

> we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone

If this does no harm, how is it a violation of property rights?

> Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.

Ideas are different because there is no such thing as exclusive "ownership" of ideas. Governments create "ownership" of ideas by making laws, but that doesn't make ideas the same as physical objects. If I take your car, I deprive you of it; we can't both have it. If I take your idea, you still have it; I can't deprive you of it. That is a key difference.

Across the of people I know from poor to wealthy, the percentage of people who do not work stays more or less the same in each bracket. Lazyness and motivation are pretty evenly distributed.

Human productivity is at its highest point in human history, so one can't help but wonder why we must all work harder than our ancestors to exist.

Because they realized they were in this together, unionized, not just demanded but fought for more rights and a better life balance. Since the baby-boomers more women entered the work force and used their "extra" income to buy things. That lead to inflation of those assets - especially housing. Now people continue to push down labor rights so they make even less than before.

I'm with you though, I find this to be extremely frustrating.

It's almost as though much of that productivity on an individual level is not making it back to those individuals, and going somewhere else, perhaps to others.

And more economically useless work is done than ever before by an enormous margin (advertising, CGI, video games, cosmetics, PR, social media addiction, etc.). Just briefly think about how many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs) and how many are simply trying to redistribute the demand of the general population so they can get theirs. Basically, there are fewer economic "sources" than ever and more "sinks" than ever.

> many people produce nothing of real value (i.e. value that would actually reduce housing, food, and medical costs)

Worse still, many people do work that exists for the purpose of raising housing, food, and medical costs.

Keynes famously predicted 88 years ago [1] that "the economic problem" would be solved 100 years thence (hence in 12 years), and assumed that people would only need to work 15 hours a week. But back then already he pointed out two issues:

* what will people do with their free time? "It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing!" He asked whether there might be a "general 'nervous breakdown'" of people "who cannot find it sufficiently amusing [...] to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing."

* While most of our needs would easily be fulfilled, he noted a second class of needs, jostling for relative status, that might never be: there are two classes, "needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they."

And he got somewhat overly optimistic then maybe:

"The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth – unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them."

Seems to me the massive inequality and concomitant struggle for relative status keeps most everyone working like crazy, even though we have many times more than what people had a century ago.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/...

EDIT to add: Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky has a book about it, How much is enough?:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/29/how-much-is-en...

One slightly cynical strategy I've heard is that your next grant proposal should be for the work you've already completed, giving you time to come up with the idea for the one after :)

Not really workable in practice. Are you going to lie in the project schedule section of the application? Nowadays the grant agencies expect to have Gantt charts and other crap. It also would require delaying publishing a work when it's finished, which then raises the chances of perishing...

What people however do is to smuggle more risky ideas into proposals for less risky ones. But that in the end means they'll be spending time also on low-risk things.

Probably works in mathematics and other theoretical sciences. If the way you use your funding depends on the particulars of what you're doing, then you're probably screwed.

And Einstein didn't write his breakthrough papers while employed at a university either

He had an easy job at the patent office so he had time and energy to work on other things.

And boredom and desperation. One thing is to have the rare talent and opportunity, another is to actually truly go for it. Most people lack the daring and rebelliousness to think that they can prove that all of humanity in all of history have misunderstood something truly fundamental.

I wonder if some rich people could start a form of charity where they just pay a few incredibly brilliant people a good salary to go do whatever research they want for the rest of their lives. Sort of like patronage. Just bypass the whole grant funding cycle and work on whatever you want, because you're a genius and want to study things other people don't like or understand.

A different approach to attempting something similar (in a wider range):

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/07172018/tyler-cowe...

No idea how Cowen's thing will turn out, and I'm not sure the idea scales well, but I really like the concept.

The problem with education/science/welfare by charity is that it doesn't scale as well and isn't as stable as societal contracts.

A developed country can be recognised by the fact that the society doesn't rely on the goodwill of the rich.

Surely both models can coexist? I don't think there should be any decrease in government science funding.

Another issue with relying on charity is that there is often strings attached to the money donated. We really want to allow students, scientists, engineers, etc. to have agency, not be under some wealthy person's patronage.

A first problem is how to recognize these incredibly brilliant people. The current answer to this is the tournament to tenured professorship. If you select those who already succeed in this system, you are not really doing anything new, so something different should be done but it is not clear what.

A second difficulty is the "rest of their lives" part. It's quite hard to believe ROI would not be required when rich people are involved in some way or other. Charity is PR, and so the system will optimize for PR.

Something like this happens, actually. It's often in the clothing of small nonprofits with small teams of people who are brilliant, or who are basically the support department of the 1 or 2 funded geniuses. Question mark on the efficacy.

It's kind of like what happens with the people who invest in startups... the founders who fit the investors' conceptions of what brilliant people look like get funded. It's also a big problem in philanthropy and why many times it's better to have (even slow and inefficient) government depts with set criteria and review processes deciding who gets funding.

Something like OpenAI?

I think John Bell discovered his revolutionary Bell's theorems of quantum mechanics in a similar way.

I can't find it now in a quick search, but I remember reading that he thought every physicist should devote something like 10% of their time thinking about the foundations of physics/quantum mechanics. (What would he do with 100% of his time?)

It's basically another form of premature optimization as it pertains to discovery and research. It stems from the misbegotten idea of permeating the last few decades that cost-benefits accounting and ROI should drive the entire world (and choosing the entirely wrong accounting model to apply uniformly on top of it).

As a scientist, fund raising of grants is by far the worst part of the job. NSF rejects proposals with 3 "very good" scores as low competitive regularly. It isn't that they don't think the work is terrible. It's just limited resources.

>And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down.

>But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress.

The problem is, as I understand it: suppose some people locked themselves in their attic and worked on physics problems; how does society know that they're actually working on physics and not merely twiddling their thumbs?

The whole publication-review-credit-tenure-grant circuit was invented to address exactly that situation. In order to replace it, you need some other way of convincing the funding bodies that their money is actually paying for something.

If this theory about the grant system is right, then we should expect to see philanthropy-funded research pull ahead. Philanthropists will vary in how much they tolerate long-shot ideas; but will generally not tolerate a recipient sitting around doing nothing -- and even if they do, it's their own money.

The only question then is whether there is enough philanthropic research around. Are there perhaps, 2000 different projects around the world getting something like 5M USD each from an philanthropists? Or does the modern zeitgeist that assumes science funding is a thing for governments to do crowd it out?

This is what I'm doing:

https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/

So, maybe we need VC funding for science?

>> And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down.

That's just people being chicken. You know someone got to research why wombat poop comes out in cubes:

https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-thei...

I could spend a couple hours giving physicists off-the-wall ideas that have some degree of plausibility. All worth exploring rigorously IMHO.

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