Plausibly, the key missing input is administrative capacity with: openness to fund peculiar, high-risk projects; enough sense to not fund exclusively crackpots; enough bureaucratic expertise to make things run smoothly; enough hatred of bureaucracy to mostly get out of the way
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This is an extremely unusual collection of abilities; and perhaps anyone who could do the job would not want it. But such people are found more often in Silicon Valley than anywhere else, and maybe some successful founder would be willing to take it on for the leverage?
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The mindset and skillset needed to manage alt-researchers is quite different from those most alt-researchers have themselves. Alt-researchers left academia because they want to be left alone to do research and hate bureaucracy. Creating institutions is the last thing they want
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
“Maybe a few of us can sacrifice 20% of our time to administration” is tempting, but you can’t really run an organization that way, and besides “sacrificing time to administration” is exactly what we didn’t want…pic.twitter.com/bQnoyPMrTF
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
What do you mean by administrative? Do you mean someone like Bode at Bell labs?
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Hamming: I went to my boss, Bode, one day and said, "Why did you ever become department head? Why didn't you just be a good scientist?''
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He said, "Hamming, I had a vision of what mathematics should be in Bell Laboratories. And I saw if that vision was going to be realized, I had to make it happen; I had to be department head.''
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Replying to @NeuroStats @michael_nielsen
Well let me think out loud a bit… with the caveat that I have zero relevant knowledge (BTW I’ve read the Haming book but don’t remember that exchange or who Bode was)
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Let’s say you have something around $10^8 you want to spend on nontraditional basic research (nontraditional because you understand there’s too much funding for run-of-the-mill science already).
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And you aren’t going to be hiring individual scientists because you don't have the expertise and also you want to spend your time sailing or whatever. Instead you want to create an institution that will do that work for you, that you control but don't have to manage.
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The anti-model and default option here is a "center of excellence." You pick an attractive-sounding, socially approved field and put up a building and fill it with the most credentialed people you can lure away from academic departments in that field.
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You free those people from their university admin responsibilities, which is a plus. But they will mostly do slightly more of whatever they'd be doing in academia. They're stars, so they wouldn't be struggling for grants anyway.
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