11 highlights
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I once gave a talk to Disney executives about ânew ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggsâ. For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.
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Oscar Wilde once said âIf you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh or they will kill youâ
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Most of these kinds of misunderstandings are because many people really want other people to be like them, and they want to be able to use what they would do to ask others to do, etc.
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Namely, the reason they are the funders is because they did something that got them in control â in one way or another â of money.
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Dave Evans used to pound into us in grad school âYou canât lie to funders to get funding and still do good scienceâ
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The âgolden ageâ funding included a lot of funding for âproblem findingâ â which means the funders were not vetting specific proposals or funding âdirected researchâ. The points of agreement were on a âvision of desired future statesâ, not goals or routes.
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One way to characterize this in modern terms is that the golden age funding was like âMacArthurs for groupsâ
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Socrates didnât charge for âeducationâ because when you are in business, the âcustomer starts to become rightâ. Whereas in education, the customer is generally ânot rightâ.
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By the way, this syndrome has been killing NSF funding in computing for many decades. They require in their proposals an explanation of how one is going to âsolve the problemâ, and this has effectively filtered out all but engineering type proposals
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The most important difference between the âGolden Ageâ funders and those of today, is that the former didnât confuse responsibility with control â they were responsible but they knew that the researchers had to control the choice of projects and methods.
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I think everyone would agree that making a billion dollars does not qualify a person to play professional sports, nor to be a classical violinist. Nor does it qualify a person to be able to direct fundamental research. These are all deep skills that anyone with a billion can learn, but if they donât learn them, then having them deep in the loop is a real problem for progress.