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Comment by D_Alex | Hacker News Reader

We need a "save the eccentric professor" fund. But how would we distribute the money?

Edit: Actually, just increasing the science funding, say by 1% of the total government budget, would probably solve the problem.

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No, the money would go to the guys who are best networked to publish in the highest-ranked journals every 2 months.

I'm not sure that's as big a problem in academia as in other circles. I would imagine that academic researchers (professors) are highly discerning among their friends based to a large extent on competence.

It's like how recruiting for engineers is best done through the networks of your engineers; they really only hang out with top people anyway (give or take).

These people are still human, they can and will be swayed by something really well presented. If they weren't it wouldn't be a problem now.

My friend (who completed a computational biology PhD but was dismayed by the small likelyhood of being able to do meaningful science and left to do a ML based startup) has taken the route of becoming independently wealthy himself and then privately fund researchers he personally knows with his own wealth.

One way to circumvent a broken system I guess.

I feel like that would only work if many thousands of people had that attitude because the likelihood of a single person becoming independently wealthy is very small. Even if your friend was successful he would only be limited to assisting in a small number of scientific advances.

Wouldn't it make sense for your friend to try and organize a group of people with similar goals so everyone can work together to achieve them?

That's one very nice and ambitious end-run around the system. I really hope that he succeeds.

By the time he's succeeded though, is he still likely to know people, and that they're doing good stuff?

This also describes David E. Shaw, who was denied tenure by Columbia University. He now spends most of his time at D.E. Shaw Research, where he basically does what he would have been doing as a tenured professor anyway.

I set out to try to do that... ah, 34 years ago. Still working on it :-)

I think the issue is that eccentric professors aren't as good at competing for grant money as people who treat academics like any other career.

Increasing the funding probably just creates more of the latter, not of the former.

How much money would that be precisely?

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