michael_nielsen

So, what to do? That's a subject for another essay (or multiple lifetimes of building). But I can't resist a few thoughts.

One huge success of science is how good it is at displacing ideas. If an individual or group has a new, genuinely better idea about the world, it can rapidly grow and displace old ideas. Evolution! General relativity! Etc.

It's mirrored in the business world: one person can start a business, and with skill and luck that business may grow to outcompete billion-dollar incumbents.

But suppose an individual starts a grant agency or university in their proverbial garage. They simply can’t grow it to outcompete incumbents ("We're replacing the NIH!" “We’re replacing Harvard!”), even if their approach is vastly better.

That is: there is no strong growth model or notion of competitive displacement for scientific institutions. And this means stasis and homogeneity and monoculture, a lack of organizational change and learning. This is terrible for science.

Indeed, it creates a sense that science _must_ be done this way. We must have PIs, a group is composed in such-and-such a way, scientists have a particular career path, are of a particular age, have a certain type of mentoring, produce a certain kind of output, etc.

But we could change each (or every!) one of these in radical ways.

Furthermore, it produces apathy. Every scientist has ideas for how to do things differently at the institutional level. But without a growth model for the best ideas, it's easy to feel it's not worth it, that things are forever stuck.