J Strother Moore would disagree with you, the development of ACL [1] is going on from 40 years!
Re:YC Research
by andyjohnson0 on Thursday October 08, 2015 @04:47AM
(#10351547)
An interesting project - thanks for pointing it out.
I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.
"We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. "
Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual - and not just because results are increasingly expected in the short-term, but because 25 years is about half of a long career and few people (imo) have the commitment and self-belief to embark on such a project. I can think of some, like SETI [1] and Mass Observation [2], but they tend to be highly distributed. The danger might be that you end-up with something like the Institute for Advanced Study [3] with its debatable productivity record.
Nevertheless, this is a massively positive announcement from YC. We need more stuff like this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#C...