[HN Gopher] What we learned doing Fast Grants
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What we learned doing Fast Grants
Author : sundaypancakes
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-06-15 13:10 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (future.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (future.com)
| mrkurt wrote:
| The US has created so much bureaucracy, it's hard to imagine
| clawing ourselves out from under it.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's not entirely a ratchet. Look at what happened to the
| Interstate Commerce Commission.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| If the gov't was a tech company, the laws that have been
| created are a massive amount of technical debt that has been
| built up over a century and rarely has anyone ever gone back to
| prune bad laws.
|
| There was a commission created to discover how many LAWS there
| were in the U.S.
|
| Just basic LAWS that people and institutions have to
| follow(because ignorance of the law is no excuse)
|
| And after years the final conclusion from this commission was
| that it was impossible to know how many laws there are.
|
| You can google that.
|
| A ton of what governments deal with are problems THEY CREATE
| THEMSELVES.
| [deleted]
| haskellandchill wrote:
| We need to fix our economy to encourage the flow of money to
| productive ideas and individuals.
| draklor40 wrote:
| Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions.
|
| To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders
| leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become
| a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for
| self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the
| institution.
| mathattack wrote:
| It's growing the pie versus fighting over it. Most large firms
| have economies of scale that allow the managers to fight over
| the surplus. Hard to restrain this without moral authority of
| founders.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| On the flip side, there are basically no institutions that
| campaigned against vaccine adoption, whereas there are many
| prominent celebrities and politicians who did.
| dalbasal wrote:
| An indictment, or just an admission that we're not generally
| willing to make?
|
| What would happen, for example, if we handed the entire
| education budget to teachers directly. No controls, reporting
| requirements... just a stack of cash? Teacher decides how to
| spend it. My guess is that we would see some amazingly positive
| things. We would also see some awful things. Fraud, failure,
| scandal... Perhaps, probably even, the average result would be
| good. Could we stomach the price though? Would year 10 be
| better or worse than year 1?
|
| We tend to be scandalised by bad things, and take good things
| for granted. Hence controls.
|
| _" Let's do it" was then the basic attitude and we were much
| more worried about missing out on supporting important work
| than looking silly"_
|
| Fine attitude, given the circumstances. Outside of seed funding
| and research though... is it viable? Is it viable after 10
| years of repetition? Can it survive scandalous articles
| highlighting blatant abuses, face up to scrutinies year after
| year?
|
| There are differences between early and late stage "games." Run
| this as a long term program, and scams might flood in. More
| insidious perhaps, proposals that are not quite scams.
| Observers are also less forgiving of repetitive "failures."
| Would the director of such a fund be willing to say "we will do
| nothing" to questions about fraud, scandal or whatnot? Would
| they want to?
|
| Google once had 20% time, for similar reasons. Let smart people
| do what they do on their own. It devolved. They tried to fix it
| with controls. It sucked and then they killed it. The attempt
| was earnest, but the destination was precisely what G we're
| trying to avoid.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with this author or the general sentiment
| on this thread. Getting past or around institutional mindsets
| is high potential. This project sounds great. We need these to
| exist.
|
| I _am_ saying that it 's unwise to underestimate something this
| prevalent.
|
| I'm reminded of a Dan Ariely quote about why daughters want bad
| boys on proverbial motorcycles, but parents hate them. Mothers
| don't get to ride the motorcycle, but they do get to deal with
| the consequences.
|
| A lot of this relates to high risk, high reward stuff.
| Research, startups, etc. Employees, even CEOs are never
| compensated (including non money incentives) in a way that
| reflects true risk/reward.
| bsder wrote:
| > Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions.
|
| > To me this was the most damning indictment of all.
|
| Why?
|
| One company in Texas geared up and started emergency mask
| production back when the original SARS/MERS hit. And it almost
| killed his company. He refused to wind up production for masks
| during Covid without cash and a contract. That's just smart
| business.
|
| In the US, the Trump administration _and_ a Republican Senate
| had absolutely demonstrated that it would absolutely leave
| people in the lurch who didn 't kowtow appropriately.
|
| That is _NOT_ an atmosphere where you are going to bet the
| company on the fact that the government will do the sane thing.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a damning indictment.
|
| You set up institutions to protect the status quo. Individuals
| can go ahead with risks and experiments, but you don't want to
| risk an entire society with someone's wild idea. For every wild
| idea that works out, there's many more that didn't.
|
| Of _course_ we should mitigate risks before potentially
| destroying society.
| andreilys wrote:
| Institutions operating in "peace-time" mode during war-time
| are failing the people they are supposed to represent.
|
| Continuing to protect the status quo during a national
| emergency is irresponsible and leads to countless lives lost.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Part of the trick is determining what the baseline risk
| levels are and what safeguards should be dispensed with.
| It's not binary "peace-time" vs. "war-time". It's about the
| baseline risk factors.
|
| Aside from societal risk, there's individual risk too. When
| a society's mortality rate drops, it is appropriate to have
| more safeguards, and when it increases, it is appropriate
| to have fewer safeguards.
|
| ...and then there's also the systemic effects of a broader,
| more relaxed approach to funding. While distributing $50
| million means you're getting high quality leads, if you're
| in charge of a $5 billion funding program (which the NIH
| did manage: https://covid19.nih.gov/funding), the net
| effect of opening up the flood gates is going to be very
| different. Even if you do a good job of distributing that
| money (and that is, in itself a HUGE challenge), you're
| going to be dealing with law suits and political challenges
| that you'd not deal with for a $50 million fund.
|
| It may suck, but it's the reality of large systems.
| ike0790 wrote:
| well said
| unchocked wrote:
| > Making human clinical trials cheaper and quicker is probably
| one of the biggest opportunities for improving U.S. healthcare
| both during and beyond pandemics.
|
| The failure to accelerate vaccine development through challenge
| testing is a black mark on our ethical and regulatory system. the
| Moderna vaccine mRNA was developed two days after COVID-19 was
| identified, yet it took over a year to get through human testing.
| All the while, willing volunteers stood by at
| https://www.1daysooner.org
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| How about we quit treating people like children and make all
| drugs legal?
|
| The FDA stamp will just be a stamp of quality to help guide
| people to a known quality product.
|
| No enforcement of drug laws at the barrel of an authorities
| gun.
|
| But if people want to do some experimental off brand use that
| their doctor recommends then they can.
|
| If people do their own research and want to self prescribe they
| can.
|
| Getting the monopoly out of health care would reduce health
| care costs as well.
| buu700 wrote:
| I've thought the same thing and generally agree with it. Why
| shouldn't I be able to walk to CVS and pick up a bottle of
| heroin and various prescription drugs? I'm an adult; I
| shouldn't even owe anyone an explanation.
|
| At the same time, I think we would need to concurrently ban
| drug advertisements as other countries have. To me, that
| seems like a better balance between treating individuals as
| adults with autonomy and minimizing harm on the macro scale.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IMO, it's a mistake to approach these kinds of questions
| from first principles only. We have a history, and a lot of
| where we are is a response to past problems. That doesn't
| mean where we are is optimal, just that it's not simple.
|
| Snake oil is a major problem, always has been. Drugs of
| abuse are a problem, like the oxi crisis. Antibiotic
| resistance. Etc. There are lots of reasons to have controls
| in place that don't have a first principles logic to
| them... just an empirical one.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| The reason you can't go to CVS and pick up heroin or crack
| is:
|
| Inevitably, lots of people would become addicted and there
| would be many deaths.
|
| Very critical news stories would run. People neglecting
| their children to use drugs. Testimonies of loved ones and
| shattered families.
|
| Politicians would be inundated with calls to regulate these
| dangerous substances.
|
| Politicians who refused to do anything would be mired in
| conspiracy theories, accusations of conflict of interest
| and profiting from suffering. They would be voted out and
| replaced.
|
| Regulation ensues.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Your entire post is pure speculation and fear mongering
|
| All drugs are decriminalized in Portugal, Uruguay, etc.
| with less addiction and better addiction outcomes than
| the U.S.
|
| They treat addiction like a disease like diabetes instead
| of a crime.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/18/5243800
| 27/...
| buu700 wrote:
| I didn't get the sense that GP was necessarily agreeing
| with those positions, more illustrating the high-level
| political hurdles (right or wrong) that legalization
| fundamentally faces.
|
| It's similar in my mind to self-driving cars. The first
| post-large-scale-rollout deaths will likely cause a
| political backlash, even if statisticians and scientists
| are able to show that the proposed regulatory response
| would cause more harm than good.
|
| I don't agree that the successful implementation of such
| a regulatory response is a foregone conclusion in either
| case, but we will need to be prepared to deal with the
| reality of some people dying due to self-driving software
| issues and/or consumption of non-FDA-approved substances.
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| The only reason I like this idea is that we know a certain
| political segment of society would of been killed off by dumb
| decisions in this area via hydroxychloroquine.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Didn't that turn out to work?
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.28.21258012
| v...
| cbsmith wrote:
| Keep in mind that vaccines solve a systemic problem, and a bad
| vaccine can _exacerbate_ a pandemic. Yes, vaccines can be made
| in a day or two, but it takes a long time to know if they are
| _effective_.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| "This is an instance of a broader theme: we were surprised that
| many entities continued with something close to "business as
| usual" rather than switching to emergency pandemic mode"
|
| I think we need to codify what "emergency mode" is and when we
| switch to it. Bureaucracies, and those working in them, need to
| understand when the situation is not "business as usual" and get
| out of the way! Implicit in that is, when we are in emergency
| mode, more risk is taken, there is less red tape, we expect side
| effects and damage, but we also expect faster progress. We can't
| just expect systems designed to be slow and cautious to instantly
| flip to aggressive explorers without defining what we expect and
| when to do it.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> We can't just expect systems designed to be slow and
| cautious to instantly flip to aggressive explorers without
| defining what we expect and when to do it.
|
| This is precisely the problem. Who is "we," and how are they
| going to define these new protocols?
|
| The "systems" are not (exclusively) designed. They're evolved.
| They're impenetrable, or at least difficult to penetrate.
| They're autonomous. Only insiders have the requisite knowledge
| to figure out what emergency mode is.
|
| The whole point is not to wait for "orders" to drop down.
| rattray wrote:
| This is worth reading all the way through for anyone with an
| interest in science and innovative projects.
| TheCanuckster wrote:
| Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
|
| At the risk of drawing a conclusion too strong from the
| article, I would add that that Fast Grants' referee panel of
| 'earyl-career individuals from top universities' with
| [responses] given out within '48 hours' warrants thoughtful
| contemplation on its own.
|
| Hiring great people, then giving them both autonomy and
| authority to make effective decisions seems to be a missing
| ingredient in high-uncertainty activities (and no wonder, how
| is someone supposed to take risks when failure is harshly
| penalized). It is also a telling demonstration that questions
| and challenges requiring domain expertise need not be subject
| to endless advisory reviews or require sophisticated
| statistical modelling/complicated decision processes.
|
| Regarding the statistical modelling/decision processes, I by no
| means am suggesting such modelling is always unnecessary, just
| that it seems it can often be used to justify inaction, or
| simply to cover one's arse. I am reminded of the Challenger
| incident [1] where engineers at Morton Thiokol were deeply
| suspect of launching, but were unable to decisively prove that
| a launch was inadvisable for want of adequate evidence. The
| rich irony of the situation was that several engineers were
| suspect of the launch AND had domain expertise shared a "gut
| instinct" about something each had superior tacit knowledge
| about. Granted, going with one's "gut" generalizes poorly
| outside of a domain of expertise. However, twenty scientists
| saying 'yay' or 'nay' to an activity is compelling evidence if
| all are dispassionate, third parties with no vested interest.
|
| I suspect such skilled, domain-aware groups with the necessary
| capacity to make important decisions would generalize well to
| high-uncertainty, risky activities.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380822
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > Most importantly, Fast Grants didn't change the vaccine
| timeline, and vaccines were clearly the most important component
| of the response.
|
| They are being really intellectually honest here. One thing you
| couldn't apply for for Fast Grants was a media effort to convince
| people to take the vaccine.
|
| And speaking of the power of individuals, Robert De Niro
| (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et...)
| and other A-Listers actively campaign against vaccines. Fauci
| said he wishes DiCaprio would endorse the vaccine - as Fast
| Grants said, pretty obvious - and of course DiCaprio hasn't, he
| thinks vaccines cause autism.
|
| Were there any _institutions_ who were adversaries to vaccine
| adoption?
| eloff wrote:
| What's disturbing is people taking health advice from
| celebrities instead of medical experts.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| What about taking health advice from the NEWS MEDIA.
| eloff wrote:
| Not recommended to take any kind of advice from the news
| media. It's not even recommended to consume much news
| media. The less you're exposed to that garbage, the better.
| gpm wrote:
| Screaming isn't necessary...
|
| Taking advice directly from the reporter is as ridiculous
| as taking advice from celebrities.
|
| Taking advice from the health officials/professionals the
| reporter is quoting... well as long as you trust the
| reporter to be quoting them accurately that's about as
| reasonable as taking advice directly from the health
| officials/professionals. Advice can roughly speaking be
| evaluated as [probability it was quoted correctly] *
| [probability you should be taking advice from that health
| official/professional]... (that's only rough, because you
| also have to account for reporters doing things like
| selectively quoting bad advice... but it's a reasonably
| first estimate)
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Your comment is misleading.
|
| _DeNiro continued: "In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film
| Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be
| screened or gotten involved in the programming. However, this
| is very personal to me and my family and I want there to be a
| discussion, which is why we will be screening "Vaxxed." I am
| not personally endorsing the film, nor am I anti-vaccination; I
| am only providing the opportunity for a conversation around the
| issue."_
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| "Tribeca, as most film festivals, are about dialogue and
| discussion. Over the years we have presented many films from
| opposing sides of an issue. We are a forum, not a judge," a
| spokeswoman said in a statement on behalf of the festival
| earlier this week.
|
| GOOD. If you're correct your viewpoint will stand up to
| dialogue.
| jfengel wrote:
| That seems like an odd thing for them to say, since they
| _are_ judges. They "curate" the entries that come in, and
| then celebrity judges award prizes.
|
| They're not really a discussion forum. They're mostly about
| just showing things. They have some panels, but mostly any
| discussions kicked off by films are arranged by the
| attendees for themselves.
|
| There are truly unjuried festivals, but they're much less
| high profile because the quality will be very uneven.
| That's not what Tribeca is about at all. So I don't know
| why she would say that.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| They are the people who run the show. I'm sure they know
| better than us!
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Yeah, I don't get the hostility. If an idea is bad, then
| let it be revealed as bad. Banning people just creates more
| conspiracy theorists.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| There's a difference between people who don't think vaccines
| are good as a whole...and people who question a rushed vaccine
| developed with no FDA oversight or testing by companies who
| have absolutely no liability if things go wrong for a disease
| that has 99.99% survival rate for most people.
|
| And then there are questions about it even WORKING fully and
| one still has to wear a mask and you can still be contagious
| and it may not protect against other strains!
|
| If that doesn't ring critical thinking bells in your brain then
| you're operating based on unquestioning BELIEF in the GOOD of
| the experts, gov't, and people in general which doesn't seem to
| always have worked out the best throughout history.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > There's a difference between people who don't think
| vaccines are good as a whole...and people who question a
| rushed vaccine developed with no FDA oversight or testing by
| companies who have absolutely no liability if things go wrong
| for a disease that has 99.99% survival rate for most people.
| > > And then there are questions about it even WORKING fully
| and one still has to wear a mask and you can still be
| contagious and it may not protect against other strains!
|
| Yes, there's a difference between people who question
| vaccines as a whole and... a fabricated reality/false
| narrative.
|
| The survival rate is not 99.99%, and the outcomes for
| "survivors" are all too often debilitating. The demand on our
| healthcare infrastructure is potentially crippling, as we've
| seen.
|
| There has been FDA oversight... indeed the vast majority of
| the time from development to release of the vaccines in the
| US has been getting clearance from the FDA (you may recall
| the J&J vaccine was even paused by the FDA).
|
| ...and the liability shield is due to the never-ending
| unjustified legal claims that companies are invariably
| subjected to when they operate in this space.
|
| There's a difference between critical thinking bells and
| having your bell rung. ;-)
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| > Covid chance of death in general population (Deaths / US
| population):
|
| 100 - (600000/350 million) = 99.9982857143% survival rate
|
| > "Currently, no coronavirus vaccine is fully approved by
| the FDA, but three were given emergency use authorization
| by the agency"
|
| https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/coronavirus/are-covid-
| vaccin...
|
| > The demand on our healthcare infrastructure is
| potentially crippling, as we've seen Completely false. Not
| a single hospital was crippled.
|
| Most of what you said is false information and the idea of
| a 'having my bell rung' appears to be a subtle violent
| threat!
|
| Such a rational critical thinking person you seem to be and
| the others like you!
|
| Best wishes sweetie!
| Kydlaw wrote:
| Fast Grants, but to fight climate change?
| pjscott wrote:
| I'm not Patrick Collison, but if I were then I might say that
| there are already a bunch of impressively plausible-looking
| carbon capture and sequestration technologies, they look like
| our best bet on the margin, and what they mostly need is a
| large enough early customer base to let them scale up and
| reduce cost.
|
| As it happens, there's a program called Stripe Climate which
| aims to do exactly this! Money comes from Stripe and from
| businesses that would like to be able to truthfully say that
| they donate a percentage of purchases to fight climate change.
| It looks well thought-out and credible, at least to my eye.
| They elaborate more on the rationale here:
|
| https://stripe.com/climate
| PeterisP wrote:
| I don't think climate change is a research problem. The key
| solutions to it are known but just require political will to do
| what needs to be done and bear the short-term disadvantages;
| but that doesn't seem plausible (and, arguably, if politicians
| just went ahead with major sacrifices to fight climate change,
| their voters would throw them out and replace with other
| politicians who keep the current policies), and research isn't
| going to change that.
| Retric wrote:
| New emergencies generally offer more low hanging fruit.
|
| I am doubtful that ~50M split into 260 grants would have any
| measurable impact on climate change. Just as this didn't have
| any large wins. Arguably rather than research leveraging that
| into solar panels or other infrastructure would be a better use
| of funds.
|
| In the end it's a real gamble. One or more of those 4,000
| applications was likely a great use of funds, but finding and
| funding it is hard especially if you're trying to keep overhead
| low. Up the amount to say 1B/year and the tradeoffs become even
| harder between research and action.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| The FDA bureaucracy is arguably the number 1 cause of mortality
| worldwide.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The US went all in on vaccines. I'm disappointed but not
| surprised that the US didn't fund more academic R&D; that's the
| MO I expected during that administration.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| There's plenty of funding for academic R&D
| (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/COVID-Related.cfm), TFA
| focuses on how slow it took to get that funding or repurpose
| existing funding.
|
| I was following some research into repurposing existing drugs
| for COVID that started early last year. Only last month did
| they complete gathering enough people for the experiment.
| eganp wrote:
| I worked with a group trying to get a drug repurposing study
| running in June of last year. U01 submissions were often
| Sept-Aug with no cash until April 2021. To a degree, these
| NOTs and RFAs are deeply unserious and woefully underfunded.
| There are 10s of absurdly narrow sub-focuses (e.g. "Medical
| Consequences of Smoking and Vaping Drugs of Abuse in
| Individuals with HIV and COVID-19" really??) that are great
| add-ons to some existing research problem, but totally miss
| the point. It's not wrong to study these the ideas, but why
| prioritize over larger more impactful studies of drugs to
| treat ARDS or ALI?
|
| Much like The Fed provided public and private debt support,
| these applications are more pork for existing investigators
| with deep knowledge of the NIH bureaucracy, but sadly likely
| of little relevance to the larger issue.
| eganp wrote:
| I'm glad we did. Vaccines were a home-run solution. In a
| crisis, what does academic R+D get you on the margin? Better
| testing for sure, but that wouldn't solve the crisis like
| vaccines would.
|
| I will say the drug repurposing landscape was an absolute
| fiasco last year. Every funding opportunity wanted reams of
| data supporting use in COVID19 which takes time to generate.
| Yet, somehow on-patent anti-IL-6 drugs were tried again and
| again and again even in the absence of elevated IL-6.
|
| UK and the NHS really got this right by centralizing
| repurposing efforts. In the US, there aren't more than ~50
| experts in drug repurposing. Why didn't HHS/CDC round them up,
| lock them in a room, and have to rank-order molecules for
| proposed basket repurposing trials? We could have saved
| ~10-100k lives in the US with better drugs for early- and mid-
| stage disease, but nobody wants to fund a drug that can't
| generate an ROI. Truly a market, and institutional, failure
| here.
| efitz wrote:
| Well worth the read, although I would have liked to have seen
| more depth on "what could have gone better".
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