I'm more curious why the "European Commission" is even giving extremely ambitious (aka extremely risky) research projects $1 billion dollars. That seems like a lot of money for any single project.

> In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative—the Human Brain Project (HBP)—a staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time).

It's essentially a way of outsourcing management structures. Instead of having to handle and process 1000 $1M projects (and probably 20000 proposals) it awards a $1B project that is then in charge of managing that money and awarding subprojects, etc. It's also a good way of getting press and making sure that a fair amount of$ ends up in the pockets of your buddies working on a specific topic.

This is why the US NIH gives out a lot of $3-5M R01 grants.

Why the scare quotes around European Commission?

The scare-quote type of usage for quotation marks is common in English but not universal across all languages. As many Hacker News commenters are not native English speakers, it makes sense to assume quotes are not always used for that meaning.

I assume because this is the first time they've heard of it.

It would be far better to give one thousand risky cutting edge projects one million dollars.

The various European governments already do that kind of thing through their national agencies. The thinking behind these giant EU projects is to fund larger-scale ambitions over a decade or more. (Not saying it's been the best use of money so far, but that was the aim anyway.)

Reminds me of all of the "innovation" grants and credit schemes the Canadian government keeps trying to do to "foster innovative companies and entrepenuership" and "create jobs" but on a much, much bigger scale. In Canada almost all of it gets siphoned off by useless projects started by ex-executives from big name mega-companies (ie IBM) or by people who are experts at navigating gov grant processes. Meanwhile the actual startups who lack access to angel/venture capital in Canada rarely see any of it and continue to flock to America.

10yr run ways and massive amounts of capital sounds like the perfect recipe for black hole a money pit.

I'd rather leave 'innovation' to academia and private industry. If they want to help then make those two things easier, don't try to do it yourself (like trying to pick the winners).

And the European Commission also does it, see ERC grants. Giving risky cutting edge programs 1 million dollars is almost their definition (except that it's 1.5 to 2M).

I'd say that in this respect most researchers operate very similarly to startups that are often featured on HN. Seems a bit unfair to say the research should be closed down without saying the same thing, e.g., about Uber/Lyft, Doordash, or even Amazon (insofar as they are all promising to revolutionize something and make money sustainably)?

That is not to say that the HBP wasn't widely perceived as ridiculous from the outset by people with relevant technical knowledge. I think the bottom line is that we should respect scientists that are able to cast an audacious vision, raise crazy amounts of money, and then actually deliver, e.g., Christoph Koch/Allen Institute.

Publicly funded research must be held to a higher standard. Investors can throw their own money at whatever, but when you're throwing someone else's money, there's a duty to actually communicate to the public what you're spending it on.

Investors being wasteful with money is a good argument for them not having it in the first place (and having a more progressive taxation system dustribute that money). There is still a cost to society of investors throwing away "private" money.

My current favorite evidence for this cost is Gates' horrendous attempt at reshaping education

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/06/...

it's pretty standard in granting to overpromise like this and if you don't do it you will be at a disadvantage relative to your peers.

I recently saw (1) and this brought it to mind - as someone who has written a few funded $250-500k grants, it's a very familiar feeling, and I assume it only gets worse when you get to RO1 and "infinite euromoney" levels.

1) https://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/cgy6uz/comment/e...

On my first RO1, it was returned unscored (basically not even reviewed). It was a clever idea that was ahead of its time. the next year I noticed that the same section had several proposals which were effectively copies of mine written by more experienced PIs and at least one of them was funded even though they had no expertise in the area.

I left academia shortly after that (no interest in that competition) for FAANG and got more and better research done in my 20% time than I ever did in academia. I've spoken to many program managers who would love to fdund clever new ideas from creative young PIs, but are under strain to produce a reliable stream of papers from more experienced PIs who train postdocs.

If you read the article, this audit and redtructing of the project has and is occurring.