The NIH's "high risk" grant programs: https://commonfund.nih.gov/highrisk Anyone know on what basis they call it high risk? Do they actually track failure rates? Or is it just signalling?
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An idea I like: in a genuine high-risk program, the funder should commit to an independent assessment process (say) three years after grants are given. If at least 50% of grants aren't assessed to have failed, then major changes are to be made.
That should, in principle, include firing the PO. (Obviously, not something I desire - but if the program is badly off the rails by not taking enough risk, it's legitimate.) Basically, the funder needs skin in the game to convince scientists they're serious about risk.
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Lots of other things needed to make this work - especially to credibly argue to scientists that it's worth their time - but I think something like it could work.
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Didn't we talk about this a while back? Incentivizing risk appropriately is a hard problem, you can get cases where people would aim to pick surefire failures. (I think akin to how optimizing for calibration over discrimination can mislead.)
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Sorry, I'd forgotten, you're right. That particular issue doesn't seem difficult to sort out. If nothing else, just monitoring the issue would likely be sufficient (e.g., it may turn out to only be a small problem, in which case doing nothing but monitor would be enough).
End of conversation
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