michael_nielsen

There are also great anecdotes of the failure of peer review to recognise an outstanding grant proposal: David Prescott’s grant related to the discovery of a novel form of DNA was initially rejected outright, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/prescott_david.pdf …

The US Federal Communications Commission once awarded mobile telecoms network licences this way. At least, this method is provably fair.

@FQXi does the same thing for their minigrants

I guess this cuts down on the cost of reviewing them

Luck plays a big role in people's success in most endeavours https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068  so it makes sense to screen for luck. A seeded prng is a more scientific way of doing this than discarding half the applications for a grant unopened as we do now. This is the future.

They may be following the recommendations from this study that shows that random selection for funding can perform better than strategies based on the "naively meritocratic" approach.: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ …