UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).
https://www.theweek.co.uk/951989/what-next-for-dominic-cummi...
Perhaps it hit a raw nerve or two.
It wasn't widely reported in the mainstream media, but it drew attention via Byline Times. Similarly, the Tufton Street gang, with the same cast of characters, whose tentacles also reach across the Atlantic, will never be featured as comprehensively by the MSM; far too many incestuous relationships.
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/02/13/mapped-boris-johnson-s-g...
This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the pricing offered to government can be FOI'd by a rival or other customer, to get granular price offered.
If you want to get the best value for money, and get below list price, you need the ability to have a commercial negotiation, with the confidence that granular pricing information (i.e. emails with discounted price lists for government customers) aren't becoming public.
That's not to say the total amount spent should be kept secret, but if exact breakdowns of unit pricing were going to be made public, it would likely cost the public more in the inability of government to negotiate around price with suppliers (or rather their unwillingness to enter into such negotiations)
Similarly, any kind of serious negotiation needs to have secrecy - it's very hard in a practical sense to have a negotiation with a party that has to (or might be forced to) publish everything. The number of startups (and even larger companies) that do everything as price-on-request should show industry's willingness to see the kind of price tarnsparency that FOI would expose. And that would give the taxpayer poorer value for money in the long term.
Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).
Don't disagree about this being a wider issue, but it's hard to see how you ever force price parity, short of published price lists. But we still have "list price", and people will still negotiate discounts below that "list price". I imagine in the long run, even across industry, we'd just end up back where we're at right now, with opaque price reductions and rebates, and potentially that process ends up more corrupt, as it's less visible?
I don't know what the fix is, but I'm not sure it would be as easy as just requiring everyone to publish transparent pricing and go for pricing parity.
I’ve also seen fees being used which is technically legal and is supposed to be a reasonable administrative charge but can be multiplied by the number of subjects involved for instance.
https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw
> The Advanced Research Projects Agency model is of an organization set up to maximize the agency and effectiveness of world-class program managers (PMs) who coordinate external research to midwife technology that wouldn’t otherwise happen (Programs.)
> The model has changed over time, but has still produced outlier results over time so it is worth paying attention to modern DARPA with more focus on informal process than formal process. PMs need specific characteristics to succeed: thinking for themselves, curiosity, low ego, vision, and ability to act under uncertainty. PMs also need to be trustworthy because the model depends on their ability to deploy funds quickly and redeploy them as needed. These PMs have temporary tenures, which enables idea turnover, aligns incentives, and enables DARPA to hire people it wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It’s worth deeply thinking about PM motivations because they are so core to the model.
> Organizationally, DARPA is tiny, flat, and opaque. It is set up to combine bottom-up and top down approaches through different-scale feedback loops. It is more ideas limited than money limited. DARPA’s project design and execution framework boils down to first showing that a precise technological vision is not impossible, then showing that it is possible, and finally making it possible. On top of many tacit tools, PMs execute on these steps by building focused networks and using seedling projects to derisk assumptions during a <$1.5m exploratory tranche before presenting a program design to an advisory group to the director known as the tech council.
> DARPA provides a critical ‘in-between’ role in the world. It facilitates cross-polination and derisks wacky ideas for both private, academic, and government organizations.
- The internet
- GPS
- Graphical user interface and mouse
- Onion routing
- Voice assistant
Hopefully this program executes well. There is clearly a big social payoff to betting big on credible people doing risky research with high potential impact.
https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...
What makes an (D)ARPA? What (besides funding) made it work?
Is secrecy and/or low accountability important? Defense/weapons focus? Was the cold war a necessary condition? Do they have an investment philosophy that could be copied? Managerial philosophy?
Is high level stuff even relevant or is it details like 5 year PM appointments and selection criteria? I always thought tenure-like jobs would be useful if you have high creativity/risk goals.
Thoughts? Any agencies (outside the US, also) that should also be considered shining example? Any failed attempts at creating a DARPA?
A couple things I'd pull out:
Program managers sit limited terms to prevent empire building
Program managers have a great deal of autonomy once funding is initially allocated
DARPA has a high appetite for risk. They're ok with 90% of projects failing to hit their goal.
> I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take action than by a broad audience who will find it merely interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for indulging me!
You maybe shouldn't have shared that here, but thanks!
DARPA research is performed in response to real challenges that service members and officers are faced with, and also in response to new capabilities that our adversaries develop.
I mean, just look at how they’ve fared in the last 18 months alone - how many unaccountable tens of billions did they pay out to their donors?
I had Tory ministers’ children approaching me about putting together business plans to help them get covid grants - same crowd who I used to help with R&D grants, which were also used to get high net worth individuals with money of dubious origin into the country. I anticipate I’ll be hearing from them again.
This kind of funding will not develop anything but the wealth divide.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/31/10000-grant-given-boris-johns...
IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is "They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering."
I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the UK is at the point where everything is just corruption and nothing more. There is room to talk about things other than corruption too. Besides, this particular flavour of corruption is almost always present. Whether it's the VC's boyfriend, bank manager's mistress or political boys clubs. Insiders get insider access. I don't like it either, but where/when is this not the case? It's not a coincidence that so many of your (or american) parliamentarians went to school together?
I am sure knowing people at DARPA, being married to a general or whatever is a big help too.
Americans are worse than you guys on these fronts, and they're not the worst either.
Only because he's so enthusiastic and shameless about it. Open corruption is corrosive in a democracy, they deserve to be hit on the head with it until they stop.
And there's no point lamenting these poor (!) tories. If you were around when a bunch of ministers and high-ranking politicians were sacked, some of them thrown in jail, for using public funds for their benefits, you know they did not get away with it. Both media and public opinion were relentless, and that was under New Labour. And the sums were much, much smaller than these phony contracts to old mates.
A key moral principle for a democratic government is to maintain public trust in democracy and its institutions. By pilfering public funds to enrich themselves and their friends, this government (and Johnson himself) has broken that principle, and until that has been remedied with resignation or impeachment, and ideally jail, it’s reasonable to talk of nothing else.
Except of course in this case we might also want to discuss this government’s appalling record elsewhere: allowing more of its citizens to die than almost anywhere else, per capita, by prioritising “the economy” and ignoring its own scientists; or destroying tens to hundreds of billions of pounds in wealth and tens to hundreds of thousands of livelihoods through their extraordinary scorched-earth Brexit.
Applied as it is hear, unless I'm missing something, your take means that there's no point or legitimacy to any conversation (EG a HN post) about any new UK agency (or sewage plant, school, energy plan, etc.) besides "they're corrupt, look at their other dealings."
I'm sympathetic to the moral principles. In particular, some have made the case that salacious shamelessness itself is the problem. It's corrosive.
But... Are you really at a point where you're calling quits on politics as a whole until this corruption stuff is sorted? Isn't this corrosive too?
I'm not saying that you can't put anticorruption first. It's definitely relevant here. This is a way of distributing money and contracts, after all. It is designed to not be accountable in conventional ways. Anticorruption is relevant and it's good to have people making that their top priority. But anticorruption is not the only thing at stake in anything and everything government related. There's also whatever the hell the thing is supposed to do.
Being uncorrupt, but failing to produce useful technology is also be bad. Maybe not murder bad, but I didn't think this is a useful way of thinking about it.
> I think this sort of thing has to be contextual.
The context is that UK government gave £22 BILLION to private companies for Test and Trace, and they wasted most of it contributing to the very high death rate to covid in the UK.
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/906/covid19-test-track...
> At times, parts of the national tracing service have barely been used: in May, DHSC signed contracts for the provision of 3,000 health professionals and 18,000 call handlers. The call handler contracts were worth up to £720 million. By 17 June, the utilisation rate (the proportion of time that someone actively worked during their paid hours) was low for both health professional (4%) and call handler staff (1%), indicating that they had little work to do. This means substantial public resources have been spent on staff who provided minimal services in return.
> National and local government have tried to increase public engagement with tracing, but surveys suggest that the proportion of contacts fully complying with requests to self-isolate might range from 10% to 59%. NHST&T acknowledges that non-compliance poses a key risk to its success and has taken steps to increase levels of self-isolation, for example by making follow-up calls to people while they are self-isolating. For as long as compliance is low, the cost-effectiveness of NHST&T’s activities will inevitably be in doubt.
That's one example. There are dozens of other examples.
> Companies awarded pandemic-related contracts include Randox, which received £479m for Covid testing. The firm pays Conservative MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year as a consultant.
> Meanwhile, Dominic Cummings’s father-in-law Sir Humphry Wakefield is an associate of the director of Admiral Public Relations, which received £670,000.
> Health minister Edward Argar is a former senior executive at Serco, which is in charge of much of the contact-tracing system. The company’s chief executive is Rupert Soames, brother of ex-Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames.
> Public First, whose directors previously worked for Mr Cummings and Michael Gove, was also paid £840,000 for “focus group research”.
etc etc.
Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge.
Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption.
Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The "Boris' girlfriend gets a £100k grant" storyline is salacious, but I don't think it's unusual. Insiderism exists. It existed yesterday, last year. I'm sure Winston Churchill's girlfriend also did well out of the deal. c'est la vie
I'm definitely interested in ideas about insiderism, any solutions to it... but are you really at a point where you're against everything that the government does on the assumption that it's all going to Boris' girlfriends?
I'm guessing you're not living in Britain? The last few years have been on a different scale entirely. We've had to get used to a government that delivers contracts free of tender to shell companies owned by friends and donors that fail to deliver and don't even pretend to be legit (have you heard the one about the "ferry company" that thinks it's a takeaway restaurant?), while on the other hand openly jeering and mocking such causes as health worker pay.
In such light, tell me how you would expect "New project, £X hundred million initial fund, will use novel legislation to remove public oversight" to be received. It's not rocket science to work out that if you want people to be grateful instead of angry and you're a cabinet with a documented history of lying and corruption, just remove the last clause.
I appreciate the faith in progress, but in honesty, our legs are being peed on from a high height while you're in here nobly suggesting it could be raining.
As an American, no, so I Googled it. [1]
> It added: 'Seaborne Freight (UK) Limited reserves the right to seek compensation through legal action for any losses incurred as the result of hoax delivery requests and will prosecute to the full extent of the law.'
> ...
> And Bristol North West MP Darren Jones added: 'Hilarious. Government Hard Brexit start-up champion Seaborne Freight Limited reserves the right to sue you if you order a hoax pizza.'
OMG, I'm dying here. This is gold. A level of corruption and incompetence rivaled only by our own Republican Party.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6554499/No-deal-Bre...
It's exactly this type of dismissal that allows this level of corruption to fester. It was unacceptable yesterday and it still is today. The point is to try and do something about it rather than sit back while they make it harder to punish because "it's already a problem".
A research fund where the public will be forbidden from scrutinising the spending of people who are known to be corrupt is not comparable to a public park.
Then you've totally missed the point. People aren't arguing against the creation of a government research agency, they're arguing against the creation of one which makes it even easier for those in charge to put it to corrupt use. Remove the secrecy clause and the majority of the opposition disappears.
That this inscrutable agency is being set under a government with a record of misappropriating public funds for their personal gain is an aggravating factor and only servers as further proof as to why it's a terrible idea.
We aren't.
> Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me.
It's not. In the background schools/hospital/roads are being build/rebuilt just fine.
This is only about the projects personally spearheaded by those at the very top, i.e. Boris Johnson and those close to him. These seem to be almost exclusively ways to funnel money to friends and relatives. Afterwards it usually comes out that the contract was awarded without tender on the personal reccomendation of the minister, or that the advice of the officials on who to give the contract too was overriden. Boris Johnson's former Chief Advisor is currently defending himself in court on this point: https://goodlawproject.org/case/money-for-dominic-cummings-m...
- Once you leave office, you get a big salary for life, but can't have another job. No working for a bank, or happening into consultancy. No speaking fees, though you are of course free to give speeches to whomever you like. Yeah it's draconian, but there's plenty of people who want the role.
- Make all the government's accounts visible to everyone. All the money, wherever it goes, is tied to some contract. Website where you can find out who they paid to do the plumbing in number 10, with a full paper trail.
- You have to certify that you're not mates with anyone who is offering the contract for the new bridge. Someone finds out you went to school with him. You go to jail together (more likely a fine), lose the contract, he loses his job. Yes, it's a bummer if you're competent and you happen to know the PM, who needs you for something. But again, there's a lot of competent people.
2. That pretty much exists as it stands [2], at least for sums above a certain level (usually 25k). Similar rules exist for spend above £500 on purchasing cards [3].
3. In some niche sectors, there aren't a lot of competent people. There are generally a lot of people who think they are competent. It could be problematic in these areas (some of which are pretty important), but clearly this doesn't apply for all. Competitive procurement is the ideal approach, but it has many, many flaws when you know the system and how to game it. The big outsourcing companies have that finessed down to the N'th degree. Over-promising and committing to things that can't reasonably be delivered make competitive procurement a problematic system, but short of the ability to "blacklist" suppliers who inexcusably fail to deliver in bad faith (which would be controversial too!) this one seems hard to fix.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-publ...
[3] https://data.gov.uk/dataset/42c4d19b-aef7-45d1-bd92-1167d2f8... (as a random example for purchase card payments above 500)
The UK needs Proportional Representation.
What is a job, exactly? How about I do you a favor, and you do me a favor, but no money changes hands? It would probably be an improvement over the status quo, but determined minds will find a way
Corruption is bad, but not necessarily that bad, of course. But this case is about an agency almost literally immune to outside investigation.
If someone were proposing building a sewage plant immune to FOI requests, I'd be feckin' terrified, much less worried about corruption. And I'm pretty blase about corruption in various activities (such as the ever-popular road construction and maintenance) in the US.
I don't read that as being about this agency.
So the objection is to that specific clause and based on very real facts about recent and ongoing corruption. Priti Patel is another example and there is a very long list if you want one of abuse of public office from the current cabinet, this is not an abstract concern or one without foundation.
Nobody on this thread has said that everything the Conservatives do is bad, just that they are proven to be corrupt and therefore a FOI exception is a bad idea in this case.
Also, remember that FOI isn't some magic tool for stopping corruption. Blair brought it in, and has said several times that it needs to be changed. FOI isn't public oversight.
The Conservatives are not proven to be corrupt. This self-evidently not true because no-one has proved it.
If Tories believe an agency without oversight is in the public interest they're supposed to come to the public, get a mandate for that, win support. I strongly suspect this is vehicle for backhanders, but even if it weren't then in a democracy they're care to win approval first.
If it's worth doing, it's worth knowing the cost of. I'm happy to explore having a low-financial return science/engineering group funded by pubic money ... but only if it's completely transparent (financially and politically).
No, there are a ton of things the US et. al. do in secret, it's normal.
There needs to be oversight, public is better, but an independent council can work.
But yes, there's going to be a problem with graft.
I mean, if you FOI the MoD, they say no, but they don't have a blank cheque to avoid any scrutiny either.
They believe there is massive levels of corruption because, unfortunately, the media is largely composed of neuralgics too and they are quite happy to feed the beast. The past twelve months or so has gone from: Brexit is stupid to there are huge levels of corruption, all these people are evil, and should be in jail. It is alarming, although not surprising, that untruths have been swallowed so eagerly (to be clear, this is 100% about Brexit, not corruption).
So: under Labour the same stuff happened, when anyone asked for polling or consulting (the latest issue de jure) it inevitably came from people connected to Labour (McKinsey's London office in the 2000s was largely composed of people with political connections, they worked closely with Blair), this is normal because (shock) if you are in politics, you have certain ideas and aren't going to hire people who will try to actively sabotage you.
In terms of public contracts, what isn't made clear to the public is that the UK has several bodies who examined all of these contracts. The public believes that because they were fast-tracked, there was no scrutiny. No, the NAO looked at all the contracts, and found no evidence of corruption (there is a substantiali report on this topic). There is a certain publicity hungry lobbying group which has repeatedly claimed there was no corruption...the actual evidence of this has, still, not been found (and they have moved on from their earlier claims to yet more "shocking" new claims of corruption that they will still likely be unable to prove...unsurprisingly, they are raising significant funds to reverse Brexit...which is presumably their angle with all this).
So I would say: this isn't "corruption" in any global sense of the word. Most of the things that people attribute to "corruption" are bad govt. For example, PFI means some companies do very well but the issue was that civil servants and govts signed these deals, and paid no attention to the terms. There is massive scrutiny of govt purchasing in the UK. If you are corrupt, the risks are infinite and the return is zero. What does happen is: people choose to buy things from people they know and who agree with them (the latter being very important in politics), it is someone knowing someone else, this happens in business. Talking about "corruption" in British politics is, however, ludicrous.
This sort of thing doesn't seem even a tiny bit questionable to you?
I'm surprised NAO have investigated them all, could you link that report/or a compendium? They didn't have problems with consider who has never delivered PPI getting multi-million pound contracts; nor the prevalence of associations to Tory hierarchy?
https://www.nao.org.uk/report/government-procurement-during-...
https://www.nao.org.uk/press-release/investigation-into-gove...
As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around people applying, and it will just become another grant vehicle for academics in the publish-or-perish regime, and instead of "making something people want," in the venture model, it means, "find things nobody else understands well enough to care about." To people outside of it, it will look a lot like corruption.
Government can invest in projects which have different types of return: projects which are only beneficial or more beneficial if given away for free, projects which will take a lot longer than a decade to come to fruition, projects which are important to government social objectives but just not big enough commercial markets to be interesting to VC and projects which the government will be the only customer for so might as well cut the VC middleman out. Even on a purely financial return basis, the VC captures only captures the part of the return the portfolio company can charge for: the government collects the tax receipts from everyone who benefits in the sector including competitors who copy, and doles out resources to the entire supply chain and consumers too/
Sure, making it secret certainly increases patronage slush fund potential but it's not like that isn't already there, or like VCs are perfectly efficient investment machines who never consider their network or biases before spending LP funds, or had much role in many of last century's significant inventions.
I have done a few “hold your nose” consultancy gigs for an outfit that specialises in the entirely legal, if morally dubious, process, of importing the family of high net worth individuals on entrepreneurship visas - and laundering their money into the U.K.
I was approached in 2016, after I cashed out of my business, by an acquaintance from school who had spent a few years as a Tory MP, and was now using his barristers chambers to run this scheme. He was the head of chambers’ nephew, and is still considered their golden goose, because this stuff is seriously lucrative.
I’d provide a business plan, and would be the U.K. national director. They’d be the investor director from overseas. I assigned all reporting etc. over to the agency, so I was just producing business plans and providing a U.K. taxpayer’s identity.
They’d put in their money (as it’s an investment the burdens of UWOs and so-forth don’t apply, as it’s counted as a liability, not an asset), the government would match it, and they then come to Mayfair, pay themselves a salary for three years, do an annual R&D tax credit and get a nice big cheque from HMRC, and then wind the whole thing up when it “unexpectedly fails”.
I did two of these before I got cold feet. A Russian oligarch’s son, a Kazakh oligarch’s wife. Never met them, only found out their IDs after the companies were incorporated.
Whole damn thing stinks to high hell, but it’s essentially the intended purpose of the scheme.
The problem is that local politicians can stay in power using "donations," from this grey/black market foreign money, laundered through the R&D credit system, and they don't need the support of the local citizens or businesses. The R&D credit system risks being more than just a public spending problem, it's a corruption problem.
As I'm sure you know there are less um... creative uses of R&D tax credits and SEIS too, and I've heard some very strange entirely private sector funding arrangements ("but we don't need to worry about whether the losses on taking on this project with that obligation will burn our remaining capital, because someone who used to work at that company will be impressed enough to angel invest") proposed too. And some rank bad recipients of everyday properly tendered government procurement, for that matter.
And I presume oligarchs and money laundering operations actually want the paper trail to provide vaguely plausible explanations for being in London with the ability to write large cheques.
[1] - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/in-q-tel/recent_inve...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [note] not every company is listed
How should government fund basic vs. moonshot research? Incentives. If they think they are smart enough to allocate funds via a committee, they need to be smart enough to figure out how to structure incentives.
I can't find the reference right now, but fairly recently there was a report on the declining ROI of NSF (or possibly NIH) research grants, in that the bias toward proposals that seem likely to produce results was foreclosing high risk high reward proposals, while the funded proposals don't actually fulfill the expectations of the selection committee (in part because what was really being selected for was the ability to write a convincing proposal).
Committees just aren't all that good at their job of picking research proposals (or researchers) that are likely to produce results that advance our knowledge.
Several proposed remedies were examined, but the one that seemed best able to overcome the issue was reserving a tranche of funding for proposals randomly selected from a pool (said pool only excluding the very worst proposals that don't meet basic eligibility requirements).
50 years (give or take) and with a lot of government help yet did we have private space exploration.
How many medical companies sat on their hands and have not pursued a covid treatment of vaccines?
The free market can't solve everything.
Governments (or more specifically, countries) don't have the existential threat incentive that companies have.
If your VC makes an investment 2 years into the fund, the expected return must come within 8 years if it's a 10 year fund.
I guess it comes down to what we consider "long term". If "long term" means 5-10 years, then the VC model works.
But if "long term" means 10-25 years or longer, the VC model becomes an unrealistic financing option.
Venture capital funding is a great way for product research and development to be outsourced---nobody is going to notice if the project fails but if it doesn't there is money to be had. Near-basic research has an extremely long time horizon (internet research started in the 1970s and didn't become publicly useful until the 1990s) and may never be profitable. Further, nobody wants the results of a long term research project until they already have it and can see the utility.
Isn't the difference that VCs are looking for short-to-medium term opportunities as they want a return on capital? Presumably gvt funding means riskier projects can be undertaken.
If you can keep things on the level, humans can achieve a lot, there are other goals than just making financial profit.
The internet is probably a cliche example, but it came out of DARPA as a resilient control network for the military. Nobody at the time envisaged the impact it would have - it was an interesting technical piece of work that scratched an itch. Funding it resulted in a huge economic and strategic benefit for the US. It makes sense for other countries to attempt to replicate this model.
Being able to strategically fund technically interesting (but highly adventurous) moon-shots is not really attempting to out-perform VCs - the goal is to evaluate and fund a portfolio of crazy (but credible) ideas, accepting they may fail, and that they won't run according to nice quarterly deliverable schedules, as things will go wrong.
Academic funding is very broken to begin with, as it focuses so hard on reducing the risk of projects that non-delivery (i.e. negative outcomes) are frowned upon or not tolerated (depending on the field) - this is a very unhealthy set of incentives. We should allow research to fail and return negative results, and not penalise the researchers. Not everything will work. Especially for early career researchers, they might be over-optimistic about how long something will take.
Researchers are trained to be so risk-averse that they are often seeking grant funding for work they've already done, in order to reduce (to near-zero) the risk of non-delivery. They then use that grant funding to tide over doing innovative research on the side, or doing the majority of the de-risking of it, in order ot be ready to bid for future funding for that idea, keeping the conveyor belt moving. But you have to find a way to get onto the conveyor belt and get started running on it.
Hopefully this research approach will embrace failure and delayed delivery for good reason, and focus instead on what can be learned, rather than on having low-skilled box-tickers focused on managing other people's projects - the two hallmaks of current govt funded research.
The governments should not be inventors, though, I agree. Government should regulate and protect without uncalled for interventions.
Publicly funded non foi sounds like a playground for scammers and corruption.
If there was an effective way to enlist VCs while aligning goals then they would opt for it.
Space exploration is a good use case here. The US government has found a way to align its goals with that of the private space industry and is therefore seeing tremendous efficiencies. However, because of a whole bunch of reasons (largely because there was a lot of basic open ended R&D that needed to be done) this alignment was probably not possible in the 60s and NASA was more successful.
Many moonshot projects require a very large amount of capital to get up and running, and run a high risk of failing. For a typical VC firm, they will rarely choose to invest in something like that if there are other opportunities that don't require as much up front capital, and with better odds of succeeding.
When you don't have LPs and/or shareholders to answer to, you can afford to take greater risks on more ambitious projects.
Equally, the UK has a gap in research funding. The private sector has had, literally, decades to close it. The gap is closed in many other economies by the govt, so this is a reasonable solution. The govt has also done a huge amount to involve the private sector, most of the approach has been about the private sector but this is targeted on an area where it is basically understood there is market failure.
There are always risks around politics, this has happened to an extent with Scottish Enterprise and the new SIB, but this problem isn't going to solve itself, and the path to oversight is relatively straightforward. Saying that has to be corruption just makes no sense when any funding is going to be under the same constraints as most other govt funding (I have no idea why people FOI is public scrutiny, it isn't, FOI would not help you uncover corruption to any degree...that isn't what it is for or how it is used, if you believe that the govt is corrupt, defund all services, that is it...that is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that belief, we have FOI and it isn't stopping corruption...so defund it all).
In Government? I chuckled.
> it will just become another grant vehicle for academics in the publish-or-perish regime
I can already see the selection committee, all from non-technical backgrounds, getting clear instructions on who to fund and who to reject based on the demographics the party wants to appeal to and existing donors.
DARPA lists biographies of its newest program managers. All but one has a doctorate in a relevant field; the lone exception has a master's degree and aerospace work. They turn over every few years too, so it's not like their experience is stale.
So the public will never know why a project was selected over another. Or why it failed, or what happened to the money.
Different structures yield different results. Venture backed startups produce results different to internal R&D departments, for example. Open source/open culture projects yield different results than typical startups.
I don't think a VC fund would have invented the internet, not in the 60s. I don't think the worldwideweb could have been invented by a typical corporation. If it had been, it would have been more like facebook than the www. America Online and others were attempts at a proprietary FB-esque www. The web would have been different if they won. Linux is different from Windows. Different types of organisations make different kinds of things. If we only have one type of organisation, we limit the possible outcomes.
The vast majority of current VC success stories are neither here nor there in terms of public benefit. The next tiktok is a great return for VCs, but consumers are not likely to lack for social networking innovations either way. I think this is a sign of overinvestment in one category. They're fighting over the pie, more often that baking it now. This wasn't the case circa 2005.
Funding structure and organisational structure are kind of similar for these purposes.
Tesla's uniqueness is another case in point. Musk funded it himself. There isn't really a type of financing, besides self financing, that could have done that. Banks and hedge funds don't want high risk projects. VCs don't want projects that require lots of funding once successful. Despite being a superstar CEO, Musk's initial investment diluted him from 100% to nearly 0 at one point. Technically, the shares that he owns were earned back as CEO performance bonus. Not attractive to a VC... compared to a facebook.
I doubt that Tesla is the only such project possible, technically. Funding structures just make it less likely.
In much of the west (UK certainly), our economies have gotten very intangible. Software, Banking, financing, entertainment, patentable tech. Some of this is because the world presents those opportunities. Some of it is because of financial structures. We have bigger/better financing structures for some things more than others.
Silicon Valley developed a unique economy based on a pretty unique web of financiers, angels and VCs.
All that said, I have no idea if this agency is good/useful. Sounds dubious, honestly.
For me the issue is they intend to invest into 'projects', why phrase it like that? If it's research, then you're finding out new information, proving theories etc, so to deem it as high risk project is strange, just treat it as research, it's allowed to fail!
Another one is the FOI. This is just stupid, we should know what the money is being spent on, what the outcomes, things learnt etc. It doesn't have to be the costings down to how much a tea bag costs. Just the top level stuff. I'm happy for top secret projects to be exempt if there is serious national security concerns. But if the public aren't allowed to see it, then who is getting the benefit? Could very well be private companies (which isn't a bad thing, but we've paid for them to gain advantage...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_Evaluation_and_Researc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinetiq
However the tory gov is currently busy handing out questionable contracts to friends like a pez dispenser so not super excited about the no FOI part.
Who is going to benefit from any discovered new tech? Are the benefits going to be socialised, or is it just the risk?
If it was supporting pure research - finding great researchers and freeing them from the grant treadmill - I'd be supportive, but this doesn't sound like that.
Same here. I am all for more research but we want more transparency, not less.
> Ministers will announce plans tomorrow for an £800 million scientific research agency legally entitled to invest in projects that are likely to fail and which will be exempted from freedom of information laws.
This makes no sense to me. Why would they need to be exempt from freedom of information?
> It will be exempt from rules designed to prevent taxpayers’ money from being invested in projects with little chance of success. Ministers hope that the agency, to be set up next year, will produce next-generation technology.
This I completely support. From what I understand, the COVID vaccine wouldn't be here if it wasn't for some scientists working on some seemingly dead-end path for years.
Overall, I don't understand this initiative at all. The last thing I'd want is pulling funding away form fundamental research and putting it in some Instagram clone. I'd even be OK if this money went to some kind of James Bond/Quartermaster/DARPA thing instead.
So no-one can find out where the best part of a billion pounds went?
Perhaps that is the UK's reason, besides wanting to keep projects related to national security or industry classified from foreign eyes. US government research grants often have pundits pointing out how trivial and wasteful they seem at first glance, and it sometimes leads to grants being redirected or cancelled entirely.
Leaving this specific agency/project aside, what would be the right way to do this? How do we do public investment in high risk projects well?
FWIW, from my experience in UK public projects, I think the question of how to improve their varied success is complex and would take a long time to fairly cover. Though, off the top of my head:
* Pay market rates; non-private research seems to be struggling to attract and retain talent due to the lower wages, and without meaning to be unkind to anyone in particular, there is an evaporative effect where those that leave tend to be higher achievers that can find better offers elsewhere, so the organisation becomes increasingly mired and less functional over time.
* End the mentality of "promotion" meaning "to management", which eliminates at a stroke any meaningful technical contribution from the promotee. I think this one is improving lately, but it's taking a long time to undo the damage of the 1990s–2010s.
* Have advisers for scientific programmes at the level of policymaking, and *listen to them*. It's vexing enough from the outside, but an acquaintance employed in this capacity for the previous government described the scene from inside as "a shit show".
Look at what happens when the Daily Mail and/or opposition MPs find out that an IT boffin is being paid more than a nurse. They stoke unjustified outrage until the hospital is forced to outsource to Crapita to hide its costs.
It would definitely seem reasonable to shield a high-tech risk-taking organisation from overtly political attacks that ultimately jeapordise its mission - even the need to accept and handle FOI requests, correctly applying an existing exemption, will introduce more friction on an R&D-heavy, tech first organisation. If the programme managers are expected to spend a day a week checking FOIs to ensure the exemption claimed is accurate and valid, this just detracts from the mission.
It's strange this is the aspect people hare focused most on - one easy way to avoid the issue would be to set it up within the MOD as a defence research facility (as DARPA was). Making it more civilian focused may give better outcomes, but you raise a good point that if this initiative is held back by inability to pay market rate (and performance bonuses), it may end up worse in the long run.
But you're probably right that public visibility has spoiled other perks that are otherwise part of a functioning job—travel to conferences, overnight stays, on-site food outlets; it feels like they've all been cut from fear that they could end up as a bile-filled column in the Mail.
As an aside, I've gladly said to many people that as an IT boffin, nurses should be paid more than me!
A general "pay scale" mindset is also part of the issue - when you try to put everyone on a scale that was designed around a model of generalists, it starts to fall apart when you need specialists skills that industry also wants. Government simply won't get the skills it requires, with the experience needed, if it insists on paying a 10-year experienced senior engineer with niche skills less than their non-technical generalist senior.
> But you're probably right that public visibility has spoiled other perks that are otherwise part of a functioning job—travel to conferences, overnight stays, on-site food outlets; it feels like they've all been cut from fear that they could end up as a bile-filled column in the Mail.
This is definitely a factor too. There is often a culture of cost-cutting in the wider public sector for the purpose of "being seen to be frugal". I've watched people (in their best intentions to be frugal) waste huge amounts of money, through short-sighted attempts to save money through false economies. Think people booking hotels dozens of miles from their destination to get what they perceive to be a cheaper room, without then thinking about the travel cost and time. Think booking a budget airline ticket to get to the wrong side of London, then rushing across London to get to the airport late for an expensive long-haul flight they now had to re-book... Or booking a hand-baggage only fare for a flight they know they'll take hold luggage for, then paying airport rates to check in luggage.
I've seen dedicated public servants doing early morning rush-hour trips to London to avoid staying overnight, because their "hotel allowance" per night wasn't enough to stay in London. The cost-differential between their ensuing peak-time early morning train ticket and an off-peak one the night before was such that they could have covered the "surplus hotel cost", had a nice dinner, and still had change left over. Computer says "no", common sense says "yes". All, as you say, to ensure nobody is seen as benefiting from anything remotely resembling a "perk".
All this makes it really hard to hire in good people, sadly.
One hundred percent... we probably all have stories of this that could go on forever! For my part, one of the most costly ways I've seen it manifest is a culture of treating staff time as free in comparison with any expenditure. Getting a purchase—even say a £10 book—is a protracted process that ends up draining hours of multiple peoples' time trying to find and convince a budget holder and get the right forms signed, and even that often doesn't meet with success. It's a double-whammy for wastage because there's not just the gross cost of funding staff doing this, but the opportunity cost of lost productivity on whatever else they would have been working on.
1000x this. First it's ignoring the opportunity cost, but there's also the lack of acknowledgement of staffing costs (as they are considered sunken) - the person's pay was already budgeted for, but the £10 book hasn't been budgeted for. Also using up the time of senior (valuable and expensive) people in these kinds of processes. The argument is always that it prevents fraud or corruption, but anyone who knows internal processes would realise that there are far easier (and more lucrative) ways to commit fraud or corruption than the travel expenses system, that would be far harder to detect, and far easier to explain away.
2 more big problems that need solved (one of which alludes to your point):
- Your book is a capital expenditure, but the people administering the kakfa-esque process of approving your expenses are paid as opex. Your department has an Opex budget it aims to spend each year. There's no recognition that "money is money" -- if your budget is for capex, it cannot be used to buy a book! And vice versa! In some organisations (generally handling research grants), money is further ring-fenced into buckets like "Travel & subsistence" and "consumables". Even mid-pandemic, good luck spending money set aside for Travel & subsistance on a consumable, even one arising directly from not being able to travel...
- Annualised accounting, meaning budgets disappear into thin air on the 5th of April, thus driving spend to happen sooner than it needs to, and creating a culture of "spend it or lose it" - the inability for funds to roll over, even when there's a good reason, leads to programmes being pushed to spend more money faster. Letting funding roll over, by allocating budgets as "cash" would be so much more effective.
I hope ARIA will be able to escape from annualised accounting and simply spend its budget, without worrying about capex/opex etc.
(1) DARPA (and NASA) appear to be models. Secrecy and unaccountability are a big part of what makes them them. (2) The state of university grant making is currently terrible. A lot of what makes it terrible is accountability.
A agree with the premise that you need independence to pursue high risk stuff. The whole premise is investing in things that most people think it are stupid and will never work. That's just not compatible with standard accountability norms.
Meanwhile, as you say, contracts go to insiders regardless. It's not like FOI is preventing this corruption. I also feel that (at least on this thread) the British take on corruption is overblown. Was there ever a time or place where sleeping with the mayor of London was not good business? £100k seems cheap. Not saying this is good, just that I don't see the escalation that some here see.
On the one hand it is good that they recognise that big wins often involve big risks. On the other hand, it is important that they decide how to tell the difference between great potential and milking the cash cow.
As long as they have an independent ethics group who can make sure nothing untowards happens, it might be OK!
OTOH... IDK anything about VCT/EIS specifically. Any good examples success stories?
Removing a platform for people that say, in hindsight, ‘it was obvious that was going to fail’ is a step in the right direction.
If western societies insist on outsourcing R&D through misguided tax laws, they have no idea the amount of harm they are doing to the next generation of young people (who will be subservient to the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies).
I'm all for DARPA-like initiatives, but when it comes to taxpayers' money we should have decent accountability mechanisms.
Not all of DARPA's work is public, yet I'm sure that DARPA is fully accountable.
By excluding this new agency from FOI the UK government simply wants to be able to decide which projects to publicise and when, and which projects to keep secret, in the same way as DARPA operates.
A current example is the covid 19 vaccine contracts, which were multi billion dollar/euro/pound deals, with accelerated research and approvals, and so far only one contract was made public.
It is specially concerning when some vaccines were developed with public funding.
Genuinely, the only thing that mattered was working, safe vaccines as quickly as possible. Whatever government paid is absolute peanuts compared to the costs associated with locking down economies let alone the lives potentially saved.
Covid19 was and is a crisis, you may well have a point in terms of other initiatives in this space, but with covid all that mattered was finding a solution as quickly as possible.
It matters a lot, because who the hell knows what else is going on those contracts. It's not like any pharmaceutical company was gonna sit this one out.
Some of these companies were into shady shit in the past, and while they are playing a role in this pandemic, I'd be way more comfortable know exactly what they are getting out of this and at what cost to the tax payers.
What's to stop someone spending a bunch of money on a dead-end project that benefits them and no-one else, and then saying "hey, it's risky, bummer we couldn't make a vaccine"?
We can be generous to make sure it gets done by someone, but we should also make sure that people actually try.
The current UK government has a lot of stories about procurement, and it gives the impression that they mainly benefitted their friends, with the procurement of PPE and vaccines being a nice side-effect.
It's the worst kind of bike shedding, it's "well we can't do much about the most life changing event since WW2 but we sure can argue about the transparency of contracts!"
In most cases, the money was for a pre-order of vaccines afaik and if they don't produce, they don't get paid.
PPE contracts was another cock-up all together!
The downside is that when they're too transparent politics gets involved and you can't study touchy things because people don't want the risk of conclusions they don't like.
Imagine the uproar if the navy said they think asbestos PPE might be less lethal than what it's protecting you from in some circumstances so they were planning on researching it. Congressmen would get involved. They'd grandstand and make all sorts of sound bites for the cameras. And the research wouldn't get done or it would have to be neutered in order to get done. Look at the political football that is women's PT requirements for the armed forces for a more mild real world example.
Of course, if there's no transparency involved the risk is MK-Ultra type crap which is bad too.
If politicians would refused that, then that's a problem of politics, not of transparency.
I do understand that some subject might be too difficult to explain to the public, but that's more of an annoyance and extra work then anything else. Also could be a symptom of a education system with a lot of problems.
Jornalists FOI clearing house: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/01/an-important-victory-in-t...
Culture war: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universities-...
Dominic Cummings claims:
Cummings described Frayne and Wolf as his “friends”, but added: “Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends. I would never do such a thing.” He said he “requested” civil servants hire the firm because, in his experience, it was the only company with the expertise to carry out the required focus groups urgently.
From: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/revealed-cummi...
Not sure why I've been down voted?
Source?
Also, isn't it illegal to not respond to valid FOI requests? Otherwise wouldn't that defy the whole point of FOI?
Government should absolutely have to justify how it allocates funds and which projects are taken on. This is a transparent attempt at avoiding the need to justify what is done with public money.
> Removing a platform for people that say, in hindsight, ‘it was obvious that was going to fail’ is a step in the right direction.
It really isn't. Covering failures up only makes the problem worse. Anything that does eventually leak will be blown much further out of proportion than if it has been clearly stated that it will probably fail from the start, but the benefits should it succeed outweigh the risks.
You would do even better to build a culture tolerant of failure. But the emergence of that culture depends on improving people's standard of living.
That this secret spending is coming from the same party that just months ago insisted there was no money to continue feeding children during a pandemic and who are also mired in corruption scandals regarding nepotism in government contracts just makes the idea look even more grotesque. Trying to do it during a pandemic you've just majorly fucked up the handling of makes it even less endearing.
Incidentally I happen to be in the middle of reading "The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin. A core element of the book is how humanity is affected when standard of living is reduced and basic needs are unmet in order to meet technological research goals that will curtail an "undefeatable" foe. It generally leads to discontent towards the projects that are supposed to "save" them.
If the goal was to prevent the outsourcing of R&D then the government would be much better off taking a greater stake in universities and making sure both parties are compensated more from companies who go on to exploit that research.
Such as? Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?
(I'm inclined to believe that it could work - it was after all the model that gave us Concorde - but there are also a lot of ways in which it could go wrong and I absolutely do not trust the government with a track record of bunging corrupt money at shell companies.)
The miniaturisation and cost reduction of electronics achieved as a result of continual investment by the phone industry is almost miraculous. A lot of innovation has happened to fit a supercomputer into your pocket.
The WWW example in a sibling comment is a great example of the contrasting sort. It benefits humanity as a whole, and would be very unlikely to be invented privately. We want more decentralised technology solutions - really standards rather than products - and government research have a different set of incentives that might make them better placed to deliver that sort of innovation.
That said, I work in telecomms. A large number of self interested telecomms companies have got together and agreed standard over the years (this is obviously not unique to telecomms), including making patents available (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...). The technology is not decentralised, but it is interoperable.
At greater scale the State is definitely better at innovating compared to the private sector. Look at the internet itself and at www (CERN is basically a state project), and if we want to go even larger look at the war industry.
There's no way a "private entity" would have had the gall to build some rockets in order to bomb out London and its environs, and without the V2 rockets we probably wouldn't have had NASA and we wouldn't have had two private persons ~70 years later (Musk and Bezos) trying to build and innovate in private and with lots and lots of money what the Nazi regime did in 1943-1945 while being bombed out to hell and back by the Allies.
And then there's the entire nuclear industry which wouldn't have happened without Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both state-run (killing) projects.
That's why the title of the article is actually "Secrecy for high-risk tech research". It's 'high risk' but also aimed at being high rewards and potentially targeting sensitive domains so they don't want others to know what they are doing until after they have reaped the benefits.
I cannot read the whole article because of the paywall but the freedom of information laws do not prevent anything in terms of what to invest into. They only create a legal duty to provide information on demand.
The aim of this new agency has never been altruistic. It has always been discussed as a tool to further the UK's interests in the global competition. Clearly the government thinks that a level of secrecy, or at leat government control, is required.
Just for reference, the FOI already provides for the following exemptions:
22A Information obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research.
24 Information for the purpose of safeguarding national security.
26 Information that would, or would be likely to, prejudice defence of the realm.
29 Information that would, or would be likely to, prejudice the economic or financial interests of the United Kingdom or of any part of it.
43 Information that constitutes a trade secret or would, or would be likely to, prejudice commercial interests.
I think that pretty much 100% of that new agency's work will fall within one of these exemptions so IMHO it makes sense to exempt it altogether and avoid having to deal with FOI requests in the first place. The agency along with the government will then have full discretion to make research and results public as they deemed useful and that will also allow them to work with private companies to license/commercialise stuff.
(Note that a lot of DARPA's work is also secret.)
There's a shocking number of people high up in UK tech influence circles who got there solely by networking, holding events and being on the peripheries of successful startups
Like Boris Johnson's lover.
Similar to Rohan Silva who advised Cameron; set up a co-working space, is on many boards, speaks at a lot of events
(Apologies if I just ruined the joke and you didn't really mean Carrie Symonds)
https://fas.org/man/eprint/contract-fraud.pdf
Highlights: from 2013-2017, there were 1,059 criminal convictions of defense contracting fraud (1087 defendants total), including 678 individuals and 409 separate businesses. Further, there were 443 fraud-related civil cases.
These are just the ones who got caught. It's not that much of a stretch to think that this much money is going to be super tempting to well-connected cronies of our representatives.
>it's a good thing the US in general, it's government more specifically, and it's defense establishment particularly
That's what they said.
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/4665/documents...
* drown them in documentation paperwork for the little money they get
* give money to private companies for free and without transparency
Corruption.
It makes me furious, and it should make you furious too, reader.
A solution is definitely needed for that, I don't think a government funded agency will do it though.
The last thing I want is for my taxes is to go into venture capital. Especially if it's run by the government.
I wonder what's the best place where to run to, to escape this trend. Maybe South America or South East Asia?
The only way out of this is to build better ways to keep the powerful accountable.
That's a terrible precedent.
is this supposed to be a double entendre ? I don't see how this follows from the parent comment.
Tunnel, no. It’s very feasible and practical from a civil-engineering perspective, but the economic value of a road connection between NI and Scotland has not been demonstrated to outweigh the economic cost of its construction.
I believe they have done similar things in Norway when they need to go across fjords which are about 1km deep on places.
Though of course all government will have secret projects in one way or another