[HN Gopher] Why Innovation Prizes Fail
___________________________________________________________________
Why Innovation Prizes Fail
Author : ohjeez
Score : 95 points
Date : 2022-04-30 17:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.worksinprogress.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.worksinprogress.co)
| anon946 wrote:
| There are lots of problems with the way research is currently
| funded. But replacing the current system completely, or mostly,
| with prizes has an issue that I've not seen discussed, and that
| is the social/organizational aspects of it. In order to fund the
| work (that might lead to winning), a pool of money will be
| needed. Where does that pool come from? One way would be tax the
| winners. If, say, 1 in 20 efforts wins, this tax will need to be
| quite high. If too high, however, then you've essentially negated
| the "prize" aspect of it.
|
| Then, within the institution, there will need to be internal
| competitions as to see which proposal(s) gets the funds to go
| after a prize.
| sidibe wrote:
| But when they're effective it can be really effective. DARPA
| self-driving challenges really jump started that field for a few
| million dollars. Even if people were working on it already, the
| competitions got Sergey Brin and others obsessed enough with the
| idea to spend billions per year on it much earlier than they
| would have.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Notably, the DARPA grand challenges funded the competitors
| _before_ the competition. If you tell me you 'll give me $100
| million to solve global warming, I'll say "great, I'd love to
| try and get that money, but I'll need $1 million to get
| started". If the answer is "no startup funding, you have to
| show me the thing first before any money is given", then I'm
| not even going to try.
|
| In the DARPA had two tracks for their competition, with
| competitors in one of the tracks being granted $1 million to
| fund their entries. Now, you had to qualify to get that funding
| so a reputation and some prior work was needed, but the
| consolation prize was you were able to advance your career
| whether you won or lost. That is why it worked. You can't just
| dangle a giant carrot at this level and expect people to bite
| if it's a zero-sum game.
|
| Let's say I invest millions and years of my time to get the
| $100 million prize, and someone gets it right before me. What's
| my consolation prize? If it's absolutely nothing, then I'm not
| going to risk my career on that bet, and probably the person
| who would actually crack that egg won't either. Moreover, they
| might still try but it will be through tested funding channels.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Let's say I invest millions and years of my time to get the
| $100 million prize, and someone gets it right before me.
| What's my consolation prize? If it's absolutely nothing, then
| I'm not going to risk my career on that bet
|
| Isn't that exactly how startups work? A $100 million prize is
| reaching into baby unicorn territory (a fully grown unicorn
| is "only" $1B in value), so why wouldn't the prospect of
| winning the grand prize be enough to attract funding?
| ModernMech wrote:
| If you squint, but really academic incentive structures are
| such that this isn't an attractive bet. There's really no
| scenario where you can shoot for the $100 million without
| getting interim funding from grant agencies. And if that's
| what you're doing, you'll need to publish and conduct
| research in the usual way. Which begs the question, if
| everyone shooting for the $100 million is doing research as
| usual, what's the $100 million really incentivizing?
|
| The DARPA grand challenges recognized that this incentive
| structure doesn't work well. What they did instead was they
| held 3 smaller prizes instead of one large one. This meant
| that development was incremental over 5 years, which they
| also funded.
|
| What they did in those 5 years was take driverless cars
| from running off the road into rocks in the middle of the
| desert in 2003; to converging on an architecture that could
| reliably navigate an urban environment by 2007, an
| architecture which is now the basis for all commercial
| driverless car efforts. If they had offered just a single
| lump sum for a demonstration of such a car, I think the
| entire industry wouldn't be where it is today.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Startups often take venture funding. So, would a VC fund a
| shot at a $100 mill prize? Probably not. It's not big
| enough.
| melling wrote:
| The author completely left out Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic
| too.
|
| https://www.herox.com/blog/428-history-of-challenges-the-ort...
|
| I haven't investigated the effectiveness of modern DARPA
| Challenges but they seems like a good value for our defense
| dollars, where we spend trillions.
| mdorazio wrote:
| What? The 2004 and 2005 challenges participants were basically
| all university teams (i.e., the teams were students &
| professors who didn't need the prize money in the first place).
| The participants in those teams then went on to leadership
| roles in the various self-driving startups, but they didn't
| start there.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > the teams were students & professors who didn't need the
| prize money in the first place
|
| Weird to phrase it as "need". I look forward to your proposal
| for replacing supply and demand determine wages with ones
| based on number of dependents.
| melling wrote:
| Not sure what argument is being made here. The DARPA Grand
| Challenge was an incredible success
| sidibe wrote:
| I didn't suggest it was corporate teams. But I think it was
| the competitions that led these companies to start working on
| it when they did and caused the startups to spawn and get
| funding.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Does pitting these teams directly against each other to
| achieve a specific purpose advance the field better than
| letting them do their normal research thing?
| lief79 wrote:
| In this case, it made it clear what was possible with the
| currently available technology and some focus. That
| certainly drove more funding into self driving vehicles, as
| they no longer seemed like pure science fiction.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is ignoring that the main competition to prizes are large
| scale research efforts from governments, labs, universities, or
| some combination of these. Relative to institutional research
| prizes have a good record, though the best way to see that is to
| look at more specific and better run awards rather than what Elon
| Musk and the Prince of Whales are doing with their spotlight
| time.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Personally I would love to know what the Prince of Whales does
| with his time. That sounds fascinating
| [deleted]
| yvdriess wrote:
| Not competition as much as complementary or even necessity.
| Institutional funding funds enables people to have a career in
| research. A career that allows them to build up the necessary
| expertise in order to have a stab at the research prize. As
| with development programs, such prizes tap into an existing
| reservoir of know-how.
| bluGill wrote:
| I could do research. I'm smart enough and all that. (we can
| argue about who is smartest and all that, probably
| institutions are right to not come knocking at my door trying
| to hire me - but in the end if somehow I ended up at a
| university I could do at least okay at research) My day job
| is not doing basic research though, so it would take me some
| time to come up to speed on the important hard problems that
| researchers are working on. Then more time to contribute.
|
| There is nothing unique about me above. There are a lot of
| smart people around who are not doing research. Basic
| research is important to progress humanity, but for every
| person in basic research thousands are needed in the more
| applied areas to take known research results and apply them
| to life thus making our life better.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does
| almost never enable research. Almost all research funding
| comes from competitive grants. So "researchers" in research
| institutions spend most of their time looking for funding. I
| was talking with a colleague the other day and he said the
| head of a research group is essentially running a startup,
| except you're constantly in the search for funding phase
| without the prospect of it ever becoming self-sustaining. The
| process is completely broken.
| yvdriess wrote:
| > The process is completely broken.
|
| I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to
| industry to do research.
|
| > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does
| almost never enable research.
|
| Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding
| sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company
| grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or
| profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that
| overhead.
|
| Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in
| competitive research grants, research labs can scrap
| together funding with some form of continuity.
|
| What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab
| can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd
| students and series of impactful papers, but at some point
| there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of
| new research projects.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > I was talking with a colleague the other day and he said
| the head of a research group is essentially running a
| startup, except you're constantly in the search for funding
| phase without the prospect of it ever becoming self-
| sustaining.
|
| Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research lab
| is a lot like being a startup founder. But we shouldn't
| take that to mean that research labs _should_ be startups,
| with goals like establishing a profitable revenue stream
| that will assure a self-sustaining operation. That 's just
| not the purpose of research, and trying to make it as such
| would change the kind of research being done.
|
| The other thing is that like a startup, research labs get a
| significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to get
| their research agenda off the ground. Depending on the
| agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a million
| dollars or more.
|
| Third, there is other institutional funding that goes
| beyond that. It's true that most funded research is through
| grants, but at the same time it's hard to get grants
| without some prior research results. That's where
| institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little
| boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to a
| funding agency.
|
| > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of
| their time looking for funding.
|
| I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare quotes,
| and that is because of a common perception that "research"
| is limited to the technical work of running an experiment
| and writing papers (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I
| disagree with this view, and instead I consider research as
| also including getting the money.
|
| Why? It has to, because getting the money involves setting
| clear research objectives, communicating those objectives
| to others in an understandable way, forging alliances with
| other researchers, navigating regulatory obstacles, hiring
| competent research personnel, designing research
| experiments, and most importantly managing the project over
| a decade or more without the whole thing imploding. _That_
| is research, because if you don 't do those things you're
| just doing a "project". Getting something into the world
| and getting buy-in from external agencies is important
| precisely because there is no revenue stream and no
| customers who provide feedback to your venture.
|
| Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments, or
| even writing the paper is important to the scientific
| research process, but it's still just a part of it.
| Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper"
| research, distinct from securing funding.
|
| > The process is completely broken.
|
| You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the
| process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that
| those who are part of the process and those who are outside
| of it think it's broken in different ways. Sometimes people
| outside of the process suggest to fix it in ways that will
| make things worse or are not actually a problem. Sometimes
| the solution proposed would in fact likely cause more
| problems that those outside the process can't anticipate,
| or were fixes to problems that have already been patched.
|
| It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a new
| codebase and start changing legacy code that looks wrong
| because you know a better way of doing it. Well... maybe
| it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you just
| don't know it yet.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > > I was talking with a colleague the other day and he
| said the head of a research group is essentially running
| a startup, except you're constantly in the search for
| funding phase without the prospect of it ever becoming
| self-sustaining.
|
| > Your colleague is right that being a PI in a research
| lab is a lot like being a startup founder. But we
| shouldn't take that to mean that research labs should be
| startups, with goals like establishing a profitable
| revenue stream that will assure a self-sustaining
| operation. That's just not the purpose of research, and
| trying to make it as such would change the kind of
| research being done.
|
| I agree that research should not be about creating a
| profitable business stream. This is not what I meant to
| say. I meant that this creates a constant pressure to
| find funding, you essentially can never switch off, and
| you never get to a stage where you can say, ok now I can
| focus only on research for a while. It also creates an
| absurd incentive of not taking risks, because if things
| don't work out you are likely not getting funding again
| because of the gap in your research output.
|
| > The other thing is that like a startup, research labs
| get a significant chunk of "startup capital" in order to
| get their research agenda off the ground. Depending on
| the agenda, this can range from 10s of thousands to a
| million dollars or more.
|
| This is highly dependent on the country and university,
| but it should also be said that even a 1M startup does
| not last very long if you are an experimentalist (it
| often just barely pays to equip your lab with the
| essentials).
|
| > Third, there is other institutional funding that goes
| beyond that. It's true that most funded research is
| through grants, but at the same time it's hard to get
| grants without some prior research results. That's where
| institutional funding comes in -- to give you a little
| boost to bootstrap some results that you can then take to
| a funding agency.
|
| I think this is were experiences will differ dramatically
| between countries. For example in Sweden academics have
| to find ~50% of their own salary (+80% overhead), some of
| this can come through extra teaching or adminstrative
| duties. In Germany a professor in engineering will
| typically get 1-2 PhD student salaries with their
| position. What I know is typically done is that you apply
| for a grant were you have done significant work already
| (also helps with the feasibility) and then use that grant
| to do research to apply for the next grant. Institutional
| funding plays a very minor role typically.
|
| > So "researchers" in research institutions spend most of
| their time looking for funding.
|
| >I think I know why you put "researchers" in scare
| quotes, and that is because of a common perception that
| "research" is limited to the technical work of running an
| experiment and writing papers (please correct me if I'm
| wrong). But I disagree with this view, and instead I
| consider research as also including getting the money.
|
| Actually this was not meant to be scare quotes, I put the
| quotes because researchers is such a broad term (there
| are a researchers in industry or the big national
| research labs, where much of what I said does not apply
| to the same degree).
|
| > Why? It has to, because getting the money involves
| setting clear research objectives, communicating those
| objectives to others in an understandable way, forging
| alliances with other researchers, navigating regulatory
| obstacles, hiring competent research personnel, designing
| research experiments, and most importantly managing the
| project over a decade or more without the whole thing
| imploding.
|
| I don't know where you are but most research grants
| projects I'm aware of don't last for 10 years (5 is
| already considered long, 3 is much more common for ones
| I'm aware of). That said, I think the list of
| responsibilities is crazy, because generally you can not
| hire anyone to help out with any of those, and there are
| the administrative and teaching duties that are on top of
| that. No wonder that most academics work well over 60h
| per week.
|
| >That is research, because if you don't do those things
| you're just doing a "project". Getting something into the
| world and getting buy-in from external agencies is
| important precisely because there is no revenue stream
| and no customers who provide feedback to your venture.
|
| See and there I disagree. The above responsibilities
| actually lead to the least risk taking possible. If you
| constantly need to convince people that what you're doing
| is great, based on somewhat arbitrary metrics which
| typically do not reflect the actual importance of the
| research, then you get academics optimising for short
| term metrics.
|
| >Sitting down and doing the coding, running experiments,
| or even writing the paper is important to the scientific
| research process, but it's still just a part of it.
| Certainly it's not enough to be considered "proper"
| research, distinct from securing funding.
|
| I agree, project management designing a research project
| etc. are important parts of aspects of research. However,
| getting research funding should be a means to an end.
| What I often observe is that obtaining research funding
| becomes the end goal, largely because of necessity.
|
| >> The process is completely broken.
|
| > You're not going to find a lot of disagreement that the
| process is broken. But one thing I've often found is that
| those who are part of the process and those who are
| outside of it think it's broken in different ways.
| Sometimes people outside of the process suggest to fix it
| in ways that will make things worse or are not actually a
| problem. Sometimes the solution proposed would in fact
| likely cause more problems that those outside the process
| can't anticipate, or were fixes to problems that have
| already been patched.
|
| I should clarify, I'm writing this from the inside I am a
| research academic, have attracted significant funding
| etc.. I also agree that outside solutions are often very
| much missing the mark, in particular solutions from
| communities like HN who often look for quick technical
| solutions for social problems.
|
| >It's a lot like systems engineering -- when you go to a
| new codebase and start changing legacy code that looks
| wrong because you know a better way of doing it. Well...
| maybe it's not wrong but that way for a reason, and you
| just don't know it yet.
|
| The issue I have is that we have seen in fact seen strong
| changes in research funding over the last decades. The
| ratio of competitive vs non-competitive
| (institutional...) funding has increased strongly in most
| western countries I'm aware of. At the same time
| reporting responsibilities and the importance of metrics
| has become bigger as well. All this based on the
| reasoning that there needs to be accountability for the
| money the government spend on research. I think we are
| seeing the failures of these changes now.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > It also creates an absurd incentive of not taking
| risks, because if things don't work out you are likely
| not getting funding again because of the gap in your
| research output.
|
| I think the root problem here is not that money is needed
| to do research, but that negative results don't advance
| an academic career and actually hinder the ability to get
| future monies. It's a very hard landing if you take too
| big of a risk.
|
| Honestly I think needing to constantly get external
| approval for one's research is a very helpful forcing
| function for academics, who in my experience can be
| quite... nose down in their work to put it mildly. How
| can a researcher evaluate the actual importance of their
| research without larger buy-in from the public? Certainly
| many think whatever they are working on is of the utmost
| importance for the world, and they all have quite a long
| story to tell you how.
|
| > I also agree that outside solutions are often very much
| missing the mark, in particular solutions from
| communities like HN who often look for quick technical
| solutions for social problems.
|
| That's exactly what I was reading into your words, my
| apologies.
|
| > All this based on the reasoning that there needs to be
| accountability for the money the government spend on
| research.
|
| But what's the alternative? We all agree research takes
| money, and money is limited. We have more research to do
| than we have money to spend on research. Therefore we
| can't research everything, and must instead choose how to
| allocate our limited funds. I suppose at this point we
| could say that research funds are allocated by a lottery
| where no one proposes anything. Some people feel the
| current funding model is akin to a lottery. But I don't
| think we really live in a world where allocating lots of
| public money to unseen projects is going to fly. The only
| alternative then seems to be that researchers should put
| forth a description of their proposed research agenda so
| we can discern one project from the next...
|
| You see where I'm going with this? Every attempt I've
| seen to revamp the funding process inevitably reinvents
| it, or tries to turn it into a corporate profit-seeking
| model. We already have that, so I don't think we need to
| duplicate it in another context.
| ape4 wrote:
| *Prince of Wales ;)
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's just bad economics bad incentives. The costs vastly exceed
| the payoff from the prize.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This. The prizes are crazy low. If you want a good team to work
| on something, consider what that good team is giving up.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| _Last year Elon Musk announced $100 million to come up with ways
| to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere._
|
| I'm not sure why the author is convinced this approach won't
| work, but there is certainly a better option for any country that
| wants to address the situation, and it's been done in many other
| areas. Establish federal funding agencies devoted to the goal,
| and use those funds to establish dedicated research departments
| at leading universities, which employ professors and technicians
| who bring in grad students and postdocs to work in their labs.
| The result has been very successful in areas like cancer research
| - childhood leukemia has gone from a almost uniformly fatal
| disease to one with a 90% survival rate. Why? How many
| universities have some kind of NIH-funded 'Center for Cancer
| Research'?
|
| However, you won't find any such comparably funded centers for
| renewable energy research at leading universities, because the US
| government won't fund them through the obvious agency, the DOE.
| DOE budgets make for interesting reading, because it becomes
| clear that the history of the DOE - from Manhattan Project to
| Atomic Energy Commission to 'DOE' - rather reveals it was set up
| mainly to deal with the nuclear weapons program, and the vast
| amount of highly toxic waste it generated. The DOE foray into
| 'clean coal' initiated around 2000 has been one of the most
| fraudulent 'scientific' programs ever run in the USA, from bogus
| nonsense like 'FutureGen' on down. They were characterized by
| 'public-private partnerships' which allowed DOE partners (coal
| and oil corporations) to hide the data about their gross failures
| behind proprietary claims. Literally billions of taxpayer dollars
| have been poured into these rat holes with nothing to show for it
| for over 20 years. Case in point:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureGen
|
| This leaves countries who have invested heavily in basic R&D in
| the solar/wind/storage sector well ahead of the USA. China is
| certainly the leader in solar, having mastered large-scale
| production of monocrystalline silicon wafers for high-efficiency,
| durable PV. Germany and Japan are in a similar position.
| Australia, even with its heavy reliance on coal, has long funded
| innovative solar research. The US government instead has devoted
| itself to funding fraudulent fossil fuel games (whatever CO2 gets
| captured at DOE-financed plants has almost universally been used
| for enhanced oilfield recovery, and much of it just gets boiled
| back off to the atmosphere during crude oil processing).
|
| I don't know why the author didn't mention any of this, but if
| you're going to base an article on a line about Musk's $100
| million effort, you might want to dig into that history, right?
| As far as Musk's approach, here's the latest update on how that's
| going:
|
| https://grist.org/technology/elon-musk-funded-carbon-removal...
|
| However, if the USA really wanted to get on top of this and move
| towards a rapid transition to renewable energy (read: 3%
| reduction in fossil fuel production and consumption per year,
| with an equivalent growth in renewable energy to meet demand), it
| would probably need a new funding agency outside the DOE/NNSA,
| with a budget comparable to that of NIH, i.e. $30 billion a year.
| Given that the USA is almost as much of a petro-state,
| economically speaking, as Russia and Venezuela are, I don't
| really expect much progress on this from our fearful political
| 'leaders' (who are, in reality, more like corporate middle
| managers).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > I don't know why the author didn't mention any of this, but
| if you're going to base an article on a line about Musk's $100
| million effort, you might want to dig into that history, right?
| As far as Musk's approach, here's the latest update on how
| that's going
|
| From the criteria: "[...] and that they have a pathway to
| scaling up to 1 million metric tons removed per year. (The most
| conservative estimates say the world will eventually need to
| remove 1.5 to 3 billion metric tons of carbon per year.)"
|
| So 100 MegaUSD for someone to deliver something with the only
| the potential of being a 1 promille solution: not sure if this
| strikes me as super promising.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Isn't 100 million usd to fix 0.1% of global warming actually
| a pretty amazing return? I would imagine most solutions cost
| a lot more than 100 billion in total.
| mbbutler wrote:
| It's $100M to develop tech that would allow carbon to be
| pulled out of the atmosphere at the price of $100-$500 per
| ton of CO2. Even if the tech is successful then it would
| still cost $100B-$500B per year to pull out the 1 bilion
| tons of CO2 by 2050 that the IPCC has built into their
| models.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It's _not_ 0.1% of global warming, it 's 0.1% out of ~1/60
| th of all emissions we need to eliminate.
|
| See figures SPM.5 and SPM.7 of the "Mitigation of Climate
| Change" IPCC report for a picture of how much needs to be
| cut to reach a stable state, and how much Carbon Capture is
| estimated to contribute.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The seed money approach is not a bad approach. This would
| allow small research groups that the US government has
| decided to starve for cash to continue their work for a few
| years, and it also creates a bit more of a incentive, i.e,
| successive funding rounds. The approach does look more like a
| VC route than a federal agency approach, which has some
| benefits. The stories about how it takes six months and half
| a dozen reviews at a government agency to purchase some
| inexpensive lab equipment that was needed yesterday are not
| entirely apocryphal.
|
| This approach seems interesting: > "Heirloom, a company
| working on capturing CO2 directly from the air, recently made
| headlines after raising $53 million in venture capital. For
| the XPRIZE, Heirloom teamed up with a company called Carbfix,
| which specializes in turning CO2 into stone. Carbfix is
| already demonstrating its technology at a working carbon
| removal facility in Iceland."
|
| Note also that there's a real tie-in with SpaceX here, which
| runs rockets on a variety of fuels, i.e. RP1 which is
| essentially highly refined jet fuel, and methane, CH4.
| Mastering carbon capture and conversion technology, i.e.
| running processes like CO2(atm) + H20 -> C + H -> CH4, long
| chain hydrocarbons (RP1), would be critical to synthesizing
| fuel on Mars for example, which has an atmosphere of CO2 and
| apparently, water ice in the subsurface. This could also make
| SpaceX independent of fossil fuels: imagine a giga-scale
| carbon capture and methane synthesis factory in Texas
| providing all the fuel Starship needs.
|
| Also, in a fossil-fuel free world, international air travel
| would require jet fuel, and that's possible with DAC and
| water-hydrogen, via a modified Fischer-Tropsch process, first
| used with coal gas / steam as inputs.
| mbbutler wrote:
| The tech for Direct Air Capture (DAC) is already quite
| efficient at removing CO2 from the atmosphere (80%+
| depending on the particular process). At best, new
| innovation on the chemistry of the removal process can only
| increase the efficiency by 25%.
|
| The real issue with DAC is that it is incredibly difficult
| to innovate around the fact that CO2 in air is just
| immensely dilute. You need to process enormous amounts of
| air to remove an appreciable amount of CO2 and, even worse,
| as the plant operates and recirculates processed air, the
| local air around the plant becomes more and more devoid of
| CO2 leading to a decreased amount of CO2 captured per unit
| volume of air.
|
| The only real improvement that I could see occurring in
| this space is coming up with a process that creates less
| back-pressure against the fans pumping in unprocessed air
| which could bring down the energy cost per ton of CO2
| removed. But even in that case the back pressure created by
| a DAC process is normally caused by flowing air through a
| porous catalyst, which is essential for high efficiency. So
| there's a trade-off there as well.
|
| Ultimately I am not very sanguine about DAC and I have been
| disappointed to see news agencies reporting as if DAC is
| even in the top 10 technologies most important to reduce
| carbon emissions.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Staggered extraction cycles, where each round leads to a
| 10X increase in concentration, is one option. If you look
| up how D2O (heavy water, where the hydrogens are replaced
| by deuterium) is produced, the first step is often done
| that way. The initial stage is the concentration of HDO
| from H2O, which is naturally found at about 1 part in
| 3200. 400 ppm CO2 is 1 part in 2500, so it's comparable.
|
| Proof-of-process for Starship fueling would be generating
| a stream of pure CO2 from air at a rate sufficient to
| feed into a methane production facility (which would
| require a similar stream of hydrogen from water
| processing) to produce around 500 tons of liquid methane
| in a reasonable amount of time. Possible?
| baybal2 wrote:
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| I'd also say that the strategic problem space is seldom located
| where the tactical problems space is that "solves" the strategic
| problem. And we can not know where or how far away the latter is.
| You see this a lot when you study the history of technology. What
| often happens is "Survivorship Bias" - you don't hear about all
| the other attempts that didn't work - so the historic narrative
| tries to form a story where "They knew all along" and that's
| seldom substantiated by actual history or facts.
| rhdunn wrote:
| The issue I have with this type of thing is that it is difficult
| to work on the goal if you don't already have the funding to do
| so. This then incentivises institutions like Universities that
| can front that cost to work on it, and disincentivises
| independent people from getting together to work on the problem,
| or from hiring people to help out on the project.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| This could work in certain sector, like drug discovery.
|
| Right now, a drug company (like Pfizer) will spend a billion
| dollars, then if successful, they have a patent and have to
| recuperate their investment before expiration (meanwhile,
| patients and their insurance providers are paying the premium,
| and those who can't, can't get the drug). But (depending on
| where you stand politically), these drugs have some public
| good, and it could be more direct to award prize money, then
| remove any restrictions on the drug after discovery.
| anon946 wrote:
| Also, a sustainable model, even at large universities, would
| need to have a source for funding the up-front work. Most
| obvious source would be to tax the prize money. Long-term, I'm
| not sure what the end-game would look like, but I have a lot of
| doubts.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Why innovation prizes fail? Because past performance isn't
| indicative of future results.
|
| You may want to incentivize discoveries by financing proven
| talent, but that approach ignores the fact that being successfull
| has an important component of luck.
|
| There's a recent economic model [1] studying the effects of sheer
| luck in acquiring wealth; and it shows that the richest people
| end up being those who accumulate a streak of lucky breaks,
| independently of their talent (above a minimum).
|
| The model predicts that the best strategy for getting talented
| people to deliver results is giving a small amount of funding to
| everyone equally. This way, you maximize the chances that someone
| will start a project with the right approach, AND that are least
| some of them will have the lucky breaks required for it to
| flourish.
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-
| your...
| credit_guy wrote:
| "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure
| luck," say the researchers.
|
| Yes, but remember, Fortune favors the prepared.
|
| I was very lucky many times in my life, but I didn't follow
| that with work and grit. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did. So they
| are where they are, and I am where I am.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| > Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did
|
| Elon Musk was born into an already wealthy family and failed
| his way upward.
|
| Jeff Bezo's wife was already a millionaire when he started
| Amazon
|
| Neither of them had "hard work" or "grit", despite the
| whitewashing both of them have done of their rags-to-riches
| story. They are where they are because of generational wealth
| and familial connections.
| exolymph wrote:
| There are a million and one rich kids with generational
| wealth and familial connections. Yet not all of them turn
| into Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Luck is assuredly a big
| component of success, always, but saying things like Musk
| "failed his way upward"... lol no
| gowld wrote:
| > The model predicts that the best strategy for getting
| talented people to deliver results is giving a small amount of
| funding to everyone equally.
|
| How does that protect against people squandering the funding?
| They need some incentive to try to achieve something with it.
| That's what an innovation prize offers -- a _reward_ for
| performance. "future performance" is the candidate's problem,
| not the funders.
|
| This is how sports and stock markets work, relatively
| effectively.
| kawaiikouhai wrote:
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
|
| This is a far superior summary of the aforementioned study. It
| also explains how the computer-simulated experiment was
| conducted
|
| >All agents began the simulation with the same level of success
| (10 "units"). Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a
| certain number of lucky events (in green) and a certain amount
| of unlucky events (in red). Whenever a person encountered an
| unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever
| a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled
| proportional to their talent (to reflect the real-world
| interaction between talent and opportunity).
|
| The issue with this study I always had was how contrived an
| unlucky event (halves success) was. Do these parameters
| actually map to the real-world? If anyone with actual chops in
| this field could comment on this, it would certainly be very
| helpful.
| tgflynn wrote:
| > Why innovation prizes fail? Because past performance isn't
| indicative of future results.
|
| That's largely true but not very relevant because most
| innovation prizes are independent of past performance. Your
| criticism might be applicable to one of the solutions the
| author proposes (essentially grants to people pursuing ideas,
| which presumably would be based on past performance) but not to
| innovation prizes as such.
| guhidalg wrote:
| I think the challenge with implementing this approach is
| overcoming people's bias for rewarding success. At the extreme,
| some will pull socialism/communism arguments out of their ass
| to justify why it's not a good idea to equally distribute
| funding and it's superior to give more funding to the [lucky]
| proven innovators.
|
| I don't have a solution except to run a brainwashing campaign
| on funding sources to convince them that luck is a thing (maybe
| put it as "luck needed = 1 - risk") and that multiplying many
| risky experiments increases the probability that one of them
| will get lucky.
| TuringTest wrote:
| _> I think the challenge with implementing this approach is
| overcoming people 's bias for rewarding success._
|
| Those are not incompatible. You can have your Noble Prices
| for recognizing and publicising outstanding achievements,
| without any expectation that they will create any further
| equivalent outcome.
|
| And at the same time, have a general talent program financing
| anyone who applies, expecting most of it to be non-refundable
| losses, but with the expectation that a couple of them here
| and there will pay off and recoup the cost of the entire
| program. Isn't this what first-round VC is in essence?
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