Thread by @vgr

Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it.

On one extreme you can think UBI, which is roughly ~ early grad student level $.

On the other extreme, you could think of early career faculty grants.

An NSF CAREER grant is 100k/year for 5 yrs, and in 2018, about 150 million was disbursed or about 300.

A subset of ~20 get PECASE awards which push up the 100k to 500k/yr, sp that’s another 40 million. This 190 million basically supports 300 new faculty every year which I think is approximately ALL new faculty in say the top 25-30 universities.

At grad student stipend level, you’re talking about a quarter that. 25k/year. So you could support about 1200 grad student level researchers for the same amount. So $19- million gets you somewhere between 300 to 1200 bets on independent researchers. Now who can afford that?

Let’s look at Silicon Valley. Last I checked, Series A, B, C, and D rounds are ~10 million, 20mm, 50mm, 100mm. Might be off by a bit.

So... doubling research capacity of entire university system = 20 As, 10 Bs, 4 Cs, or 2 Ds.

Entirely within the capacity of SV capital market

I’m making this arithmetic comparison because SV investors sometimes act like basic research is entirely out of their reach and all they can do is draft off of output of big government R&D programs running over decades. This is just not true anymore.

SV people tend to be free market ideologues, yet their free market idealism mysteriously vanishes when talking about this stuff. SoftBank alone could fund something like this probably.

And indie research would dispense with indirect cost support (~50% overhead charge that research universities typically charge agencies to pay for brick-and-mortar infrastructure, a big innovation in its time, due to Vannevar Bush).

Basically there’s a bullshit R&D funnel argument that people trot out to explain slowing of new business formation and general innovation stagnation/falling business dynamism (similar to the one around diversity in tech hiring).

The research university model worked well for about 60 years after WW2. It supplied both the talent and the IP feedstock (not just STEM, humanities/liberal arts as well) to drive American business growth an leadership. Z

Basically free in-kind money for the innovation economy.

Now that model is struggling, I have to wonder why huge capital stocks created from that legacy investment aren’t being plowed back into the head of the funnel.

Possibly SV has gotten used to easy private wealth building off of publicly funded feedstock.

I think the R&D loop can be closed with tech wealth and investment capital. Universities can be unbundled. There’s no good reason to keep teaching, research, and service in the same costly brick and mortar bundle anymore.

I bet every top 5 VC, PE, and Big Tech firm could each sustain 20% NSF CAREER type indie research network, 3x-ing total R&D bandwidth of the US.

With expectations of open source/license output. Restock the commons without need for big 60s/70s style government programs.

I’d revamp publishing, peer review models, etc, as well, since the model that exists is failing even for university research (hence reproducibility crisis, impact factor gaming, purely cronyism predatory journal empires etc) but that’s a secondary mechanism design problem.

Income-share education models already exist and offer a competitive alternative to the teaching function of universities and get out of the unsustainable student debt balloon.

R&D can be unbundled too.

What’s the alternative? The innovation economy finally kills the dying golden goose for the last few golden eggs, and enters a late stage fraud economy competing with NIMBY grifters in decaying urban cores. Stockbuybackitis infects SV too. The music stops.

In this picture the traditional university doesn’t get disrupted so much as have its role refactored into a sort of infrastructure cloud provisioning role.

I’d expect much of this sort of thing to happen in university ecosystems actually.

There’s probably a way this solves the adjunct crisis too, but I’ll leave that for another day (it’s an overlapping population but not coextensive with indie research target population... maybe 30% overlap)

Personally I’m aged out of directly benefiting from this kind of infrastructure and am not missionary enough to try and lead an effort to make it happen for others.

Happy to play wingman to anyone with the hustle and network to try though. I’ve thought this through a lot 🙂

Would have been nice to have this option in 2006 though, when my choices were: second postdoc, govt lab, industry, a sketchy faculty position offer I didn’t like, and SBIR grinding. I created blogger-consultant option for myself ~2007 and that worked well for me but doesn’t scale

* SBIR and STTR, for those unfamiliar with it, is a rather sorry-ass federal small business innovation grants program that in theory should sustain indie research, but in practice ends up subsidizing military-industry complex subcontracting layer

My own future ambitions beyond indie writing and publishing are pretty modest, so I can self-fund most things I care to research on the margins of non-research stuff and don’t need anyone besides me to care about outcomes. No desire to shoot for John Carmack level goals.

I was very lucky btw, to have so many options, and a generally cheerful and positive mindset exiting academia, feeling good about myself and my choices. The university system traumatizes and destroys 4-5 people for every 1 it shapes positively. It’s ugly out there.

Clarification: I only considered CAREER grants rather than the vastly larger total funding pie because bootstrapping the”startup” phase is the hardest part of research. My speculative assumption is that if that’s solved, enough will succeed that larger pie will emerge organically

Several people seem to be misunderstanding this part of my argument. The CAREER grant is a good calibration point even though it’s only a tiny fraction, because it’s what creates new research CAPACITY in the university system out of new PhD ranks. That’s what I’d like to see 3xed

I seem to have accidentally joined a mini-wave of commentary on indie research. Here is @nayafia describing her experience, a kind of edge case between the sort of indie research I’m talking about and existing institutional margins. nadiaeghbal.com/phd

And here’s a piece by James Gallagher t.co/pcXzjxmUWX

Here’s John Carmack’s announcement which is what got me tweeting. Not sure what gotbthe others thinking about this right now. m.facebook.com/permalink.php?…

Aside: a few seem to be reading this thread as a proposal for a disruptive attack on the university research system rather than speculations for a parallel system for a potential indie research world. But yes, it could potentially lead to competition, which would be a good thing.

It’s a ritual in the university world to whine about how research funding is under threat. But from the outside, people would correctly conclude that the system has near-monopolistic access to a vast public funding budget. And my proposal doesn’t even envision touching that.

If the university research world is concerned about competition from a parallel independent research world catalyzed by private funding and alternate norms, one that currently has vanishingly tiny funding (mostly self-funding) compared to their world, you have to wonder: why?

I wonder what would happen if I invited people to send me 1-page proposals in a pro-forma for indie mini-CAREER grants and just threw up a page linking to all of them, then promoting that page. I bet I could match at least a few proposals to private funding sources 🤔