I don't know to what degree this is how operates, it's the closest thing I can think of.
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Indeed! From an essay I published a few days ago:
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My 2c (having experienced both RC and I&S): important diff between framing work as “I want to explore for *my* personal satisfaction/growth” vs “we have important goals to do, which will require super-unconstrained exploration to achieve”
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Both are great but the latter is obviously more attractive to funders. Hard part is to make it legible without overly constraining, and to keep incentives/timescales aligned
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I think the premise here though is that this is self-funded by the PIs. So my question would be more, what makes it attractive to the grad-student or postdoc-equivalents who are being paid to collaborate.
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Yeah. This is roughly a problem I have now. Maybe I can fund a grad-student-equivalent… but there's no clear next step after they "graduate", so it's not an attractive proposition.
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Hmm yeah, tricky question. Personally don't care at all about "graduating", I find a ton of value in working in "non-startup-legible" problems w/ awesome people, enough to offset low salary for now. Not sure how many people would agree w that though...
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i'm in a phd program because it's a stable paycheck for diverse, self-directed work; as well as being at least somewhat socially legible. the accreditation itself isn't obviously useful. definitely interested to see people exploring alternate approaches here
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Ok, so maybe something like:
- Form a 501(c)(3) research organization.
- Research directions are broadly set by the donors, who are also the PIs.
- Aim for endowments rather than project grants. $3-4M per researcher the organization wants to hire.
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- PIs who have endowed positions effectively have tenure. Researchers are hired on shorter terms (1-2 years?)
- Researchers can freely transition between projects/labs once hired (?)
- Some of the endowment goes to overhead (fulltime admin help) but keep that as light as possible
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Right! I guess this describes lots of non-academic institutes: Buck, Salk, Arc, Perimeter, etc.