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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And, in case it needs saying: no attempt is made to get any kind of accreditation, no physical campus, and the PIs put in however much or little time they want depending on other obligations. (With the risk that if they slack off too much their researchers will go to other labs).
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Ah, this seems like the big delta!
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Replying to @avibryant @disconcision and 3 others
Right! I guess this describes lots of non-academic institutes: Buck, Salk, Arc, Perimeter, etc.
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That said… boy, I'd really like a physical campus! Having recently looked for studio spaces in SF, I suspect you could get something bare-bones for "only" the cost of one PI.
space is good but I feel something informal/coworkingy could suffice, and potentially offer interesting synergies; being in a flexibly mixed academic/industry/arts space versus my current campus space where sometimes I feel my relation to neighbors is incidental/institutional
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If you can get one artist to sign up, you can get some of the hunters point art studio space. :)
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I love the idea of a workshop out there but with so few places reserved in SF for artists, I think it's probably best to leave those spaces alone.
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