Who Funds Misfit Research?
blog.spec.tech
blog.spec.tech
MakeSunsets has raised ~$1.8M from angels + VCs and another ~$133K in Cooling Credit sales over the past 12 months from individuals [1]. These purchases directly fund stratospheric aerosol injection — bringing awareness and cooling the Earth.
We’ve applied to SBIRs, explored DAOs, crowdfunding platforms, and are in conversations with family offices and UHNWI.
Most of our closed deals? They’ve come from Twitter and Substack. The key: talking directly to decision-makers — not committees.
[1] Climate dads: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0685/0042/2976/files/Make_...
> I could see funding research into it
SBIR == Small Business Innovation Research. Phase I is up to ~$314k and pretty short term. Phase 2 is up to ~2M and a bit longer. I've worked on and won some NASA, DoD, and DARPA and these were usually around $150k and 6mo for Phase I and $750k for 2 years on Phase II (those were STTRs)[0]. So those maximums aren't always being handed out. (The first few Phase I awards I saw for 2025 were $140k and the first Phase II was <$650k)
So yeah, it's not much and they're not going to have a huge impact.
> It would likely be illegal if the amount weren't so small as to be useless.
=> @andyjsong <=
Or are you just saying you applied and have no award? Good luck, these can be tricky to write but once you get the hang of it it isn't too bad.
[0] They've since bumped the numbers, but not a ton. You can go look at awards on [1] to see actual numbers.
Also it can help getting some STTRs first. They like to promote the collaboration and from what I'm aware of it's considered less risky. Once you have a few under your belt they become easier to get
Of course, there is research outside of academia in many more practical disciplines like STEM and medical research. But I doubt the situation is very different there. If you're too much of a "misfit" chances are high that your research proposals just aren't good enough. If you have many publications in top journals, you will get funding.
What's more concerning is that for lack of career prospects and job security, mostly those postdocs seem to prevail who are very adapted to the system and those who are extremely persistent and willing to relocate indefinitely. There is too much talent wasted in the second category. I've seen too many good and talented people drop out of the "publish or perish rat race" because they got children or wanted to settle down. These were the opposite of misfits, though.
Things requiring unorthodox (but not incorrect) combinations of knowledge are met with the kind of skepticism that forgets to be skeptical of its own skepticism.
Things on longer horizons than the short term, corporatized ROI of our research institutions—who are themselves supposed to be less beholden to quick wins at the expense of knowledge generation—leads to a chilling effect on trying anything revolutionary at all.
The outcome is echo chambers, local maxima/minima in research, and promising avenues of research that are underfunded simply because they aren’t popular. Inevitably it also leads to the kind of institutional stagnation that results in p-hacking, and so on.
Generally, science lives off skepticism. Skepticism requires a decent number of skeptics who try to show that you're wrong. That requires your research to be sufficiently popular for others. Without that control, it becomes crackpotery very fast. You've got it the wrong way 'round.
> Philosophy doesn't have any ROI.
I'm going to back lemonwaterlime here. The truth of the matter is that even as scientists we aren't very good at predicting what technology or research will be impactful. There's a laundry list of ground breaking research and technologies that have failed to be funded or rejected. This includes mRNA research as well as many Nobel prize winning research. It's so common there's multiple cliches describing the phenomena!
It's pretty simple to see why lemonwaterlime's claim has merit: you can't cause paradigm shifts by maintaining the current paradigm.
I'm sure there's another aspect that you see in your own field: momentum. When winning awards is used as merit for winning more awards then you create a feedback loop that reinforces a narrowing of ideas. This is especially problematic when journals and conferences measure their quality by their rejection rates. One CANNOT determine quality or impact factor via a rejection rate. I left my PhD with a distaste for academia because I cannot fathom how so many researchers evaluate works comparatively and with so little care (as if it is an unproductive task that simply needs to be completed rather than the seriousness it deserves). You can only evaluate a work by its own validity, not by your personal belief if it is more impactful or not than your imagination of the quality of other submissions. It is insane and self-destructive. Reviewers should not be incentivized to reject works, but rather to write meaningful comments to improve works. It's far too easy to criticize a work, and in the current system metareviewers and ACs are biased to scrutinize rejects far less than accepts. I'm sorry, it just isn't working.
Here's all you can do in reviewing. For a grant, paper, or whatever
Objective:
- Contains factual errors
- Contains writing errors
Subjective:
- The validity of the work
- The impact of the work
- Properly communicated to the intended audience
- Contains the appropriate citations
- Is sufficient quality for the prestige of the venue/award
- It is void of *major* factual errors (that I am aware of)
- Is sufficiently communicated that I believe a junior level grad student would be able to replicate (maybe with some effort)
- It is not plagiarized
> Skepticism requires a decent number of skeptics who try to show that you're wrong.
> Generally, science lives off skepticism.
Science lives off of replication and the free exploration of ideas. Will you have failures and fund ideas that turn out to be wrong? Of course! What scientist isn't aware of the extreme difficulty of pushing the frontier of human knowledge? Even in the current system we have an absurdly large amount of fraud and an unacceptable failure rate for replication. The system only encourages these things. While we don't want to encourage futile pursuits, let's be real, if you've made it to the level of a PhD you are quite in tune with the nuances of the field and should have a fairly good intuition of what problems need to be resolved. If you do not, you really should not have been awarded your doctorate.
Our efforts to reduce waste only serves as a modern day cobra effect. I'm sorry, fundamental research is just inherently risky. But when it succeeds it can have profound impacts across the globe. I'd argue that the invention of a single topic has created magnitudes more value (in varying senses of the word) than all our failures combined. Would you not think that alone, Calculus produces trillions of dollars a year in value and aids in saving millions of lives a year? Or take the more recent mRNA results. How many failures, crackpots, and "waste" does this single success offset? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?
Mind you, Katalin Karikó is one of those "crackpots" you refer to. How many true crackpots are willing to allow in order to ensure such false negatives may succeed? Or inversely, how many high impact falsely labeled crackpots are we willing to sacrifice in order to ensure we do not misallocate funds to the crazies? I'm sure you've thought about countless variations of this question...
As someone who has been in various evaluation panels and also based on my own successful applications (the guidelines are always public), I want to stress that "popular" in the context of science evaluation really just means that the majority of evaluators think a proposal has more scientific merits, is original, can be expected to make substantial contributions, can be pulled off, is supported by the candidates CV, and so on. Providing more funding for "misfits" and "outcasts" could mean two different things.
First, it could mean that less popular proposals are getting higher chances of obtaining funding without jeopardizing the proposals of which the panel thinks they have most merits. Then this is merely a complicated way of saying that there should be more funding for everyone. I've never met a researcher who disagreed with that.
Second, it could mean that unpopular proposals of "misfit" candidates should be given precedence over more popular proposals in certain calls, for example by explicit guidelines or special grants. Although there are grant schemes for that (e.g. special grants for "high risk" projects in the EU Horizon 2020 scheme), this would be almost contradictory as a general guideline in all calls. It just doesn't make sense. Scientific peers must at one point or another evaluate proposals to decide over grants. This cannot be done by politicians or mere administrators. It would be idiotic to ask them to favor proposals they think have no merits.
So, Yes: Funding schemes for high risk proposals should exist, and they do exist. But these are the exception, not the rule, just like successful outsiders in science are outliers instead of the rule. Most of science is an extremely collaborative effort. (The same holds for philosophy, which is not a science.)
Regarding replication efforts: If someone's area is deeply unpopular and most people think the area or approach has no merits, then nobody will replicate it either. That's exactly my point. There needs to be a high enough threshold of scientists working on the same approach and the corresponding networking and embedding into the scientific community to ensure there are enough replication efforts and there is enough critical evaluation. Otherwise, the "misfit" is bound to publish in fringe journals with no quality control and nobody will ever check whether the work makes sense. That's not good.
Second off, we do work in different fields. Do you truly believe the way things work in your field are going to directly apply to STEM fields? Because
> Most foundational research also has no quantifiable ROI
> If someone's area is deeply unpopular and most people think the area or approach has no merits, then nobody will replicate it either
> Otherwise, the "misfit" is bound to publish in fringe journals with no quality control and nobody will ever check whether the work makes sense.
How do you not see this as a huge problem? If a *factually correct*[0] paper is unable to publish in main stream venues then we have entirely fucked up the system.
[0] We're not talking philosophy here where things are entirely subjective. We're talking about systems with verifiable results. If you disagree with this, then let's work with the philosophical thought experiment and pretend such verifiable results are possible.
Yeees, and "crackpots" are often close to "breakthroughs". You can't have your pie and eat it. Novelty is high-risk. This includes the risk that it's bullshit.
The idea that VCs or DAOs would give a penny for R&D is a sick joke.
> work that is a poor fit for academia
In the article most of the examples of funding sources give their funding to academic labs already.
Discussion about non-governmental sources of funding is fine, but they still almost always funnel back into a lab at a university.
Note that I don't think VCs or DAOs would care about this research either as it's not flashy enough.
I think it is because science is systematic, or step-by-step, and not systemic - lacking a "whole system" point of view. Both perspectives are needed to understand a reality made of systems.
> The idea that VCs or DAOs would give a penny for R&D is a sick joke.
And if we're looking at industry, it's laughable how much vaporware has received over the past few decades. Remember the Rabbit R1 that got over $30m in VC funding? Or the Humane pin which got over $200m and ended up being acquired for over $100m? How many billions has Magic Leap received? Did Theranos not raise well over a billion? Didn't Segway get over $100m back in 2001?! Or go look at any hype craze for VR, cryptocurrencies, or the current AI.
I'm sorry, you act like there isn't a massively high rate of failure in industry and that these VCs are making much more intelligent funding decisions. But we routinely see companies like Rabbit or Theranos get funded. Companies who no reasonable expert in their respective fields could conclude is anything short of obvious fraud.
I'm not saying there aren't companies and ideas that aren't worth the risks, but I think you don't realize how much your beliefs are based on survivorship bias. This type of investing is inherently high-risk high-reward. Investors, founders, and fanboys are routinely wrong about the level of impact and value something will have even if it is successful and not fraudulent.
The fact of the matter is that we tend to fund hype and charisma. Last I checked, these weren't the primary skills of technological innovators. Last I checked, the stereotype was in the exact opposite direction... Do you really think this is a more successful path?
> instead giving people the freedom to explore ideas and develop skills