3/ But I'd frame our disagreement a little differently than Julia.
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11/ But there's no reason to think our grant allocation mechanisms allocate money in the right way.
12/ In particular, suppose we have some key scientific problem, and the two leading approaches have a 20% and a 5% chance of working.
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13/ With current mechanisms, the default is for approach 1 to end up with disproportionate funding.
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14/ AFAICT, this is a consequence of accidental historical decisions about the mechanisms used to fund science.
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14½/ (In an interview, Michael Seibel said that for YC to accept a startup, just 1 person in the room needs to be strongly in favour!...
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14 3/4 ... Opposite of usual approach in science, & produces different risk profile.)
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15/ Returning to main argument: Insofar as long-held suspension of skepticism helps overcome this, I'm in favour of it.
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16/ Indeed, that long-held suspension of skepticism seems to be one of the main mechanisms we currently have for this.
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17/ In that sense, I support Julia's phrasing in 4, with the proviso that I don't think we need "most" scientists to do this, just many more
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18/ And I don't think lifelong is quite right, though many years-long, sure. And, for a few, life-long is fine.
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19/ This is something I like about SV: I view the many ludicrous startups as a feature, not a bug, even if they're sometimes annoying.
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20/ They indicate a system willing to support a lot of really weird ideas. Most fail.
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21/ But a few turn into Wikipedia-size successes.
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22/ A priori, of course, WP looked really silly - wild optimists like Kevin Kelly and Larry Page thought it would fail.
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23/ Point, as with Hinton, isn't "fund Wikipedia", but rather "support many things that will look silly after the fact"...
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24/ Finis.
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Coda: Wikipedia wasn't exactly SV. Funded by Bomis, which was part of the US startup bubble though.
End of conversation
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