Those "salaried employees" started life as curious people, yeah some of them might be looking at the world with a blurrier lens. But they were constructed, the system made those people. While they make the problem worse, they are symptom not a cause.

I think the problem is the hierarchy.

A development organization is an amplifier that brings a new capability into existence. Currently, organizations have to get big to amplify what their qualities. But to get big to achieve its goals it needs to be hierarchical, and because the hierarchy and the practitioners are the same folks, the org structure becomes the product.

The goal of the organization is to maintain its structure. Innovation happens when you have less structure. How do we scale, and maximize the organizational power while enabling create autonomy?

20% of the former, 80% of the latter.

> And how much money should go into one before you move on?

3% of the available funds each year.

Hope this helps!

So after years without results you'll continue propping up the one long shot you picked?

My larger point is that you're treating this like there are just a couple wild conjectures that need just a bit of money. There are vast amounts of alternative ideas, and often the necessary experiments will not be cheap. While ridiculing them isn't right, the idea that obviously we should fund them is ridiculous.

Ridiculous like feeding people mold to see if they get sick less, or injecting people with the pus of other people to inoculate them?

The discovery of antibiotics alone has paid for all the moonshots you can fund, even if none of them work out.

And you severely underestimate the number of moonshots there are. Imagine trying to find penicillin by the method you describe. There are thousands of species of mold, many of which are harmful to humans. The genus penicillium alone has over 300 species. Such a study would take decades while costing a fortune before reaching any results.

And they all feed back on each other. Then some other idea might enable us to discover penicillin by some entirely other serendipitous route. There isn't a single path to the future.

You need basic research to move science and technology forward. And you need to accept that the majority of the research will have no direct result for a long time or ever.

The history of flight spans back 2000 years.

Semi conductors date back to the late 1800s. And don’t forget that to even get to the beginnings of understanding semi conductors, a bunch of basic stuff needed to be figured out first.

Darwin took 2 decades collecting evidence and writing On the Origin Of Species.

And at some point we stopped trying to make fake birds wings to flap our way to flight, as our understanding grew to the point where we knew it was incredibly unlikely to work.

Yes, basic research is necessary and developments sometimes take a long time. That doesn't mean you should keep following a route that repeatedly leads to a dead end. And every hypothesis isn't equally deserving of funding.

Also, engineering leads science at time: this works but we don't know why.

No it would not. The money necessary to find a lab is orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable UBI.

In my case it's both, so instead of teaching I take half-time IT consulting gigs here and there, which pay enough for me to be able to do science even if I had no funding at all. I still get some grants, mostly because you're looked at funny if you don't, but I'm done losing sleep over them, plus if I finally decide to give up academia I'll have an easy transition.

While teaching helps consolidate your own understanding, and is useful and satisfying, it's a matter of degree.

What is really expensive and complicated for now is “wet” data collections: it is a finicky process stuffed to the brim with very expensive machinery, consumables, lab space and manual workers. Computing power is not really a limitation nowadays, you can comparably get a whole lot of bangs for your bucks.

Concerning the sharing part, equipment pooling is definitely already happening, at least at the local scale. And what is getting more and more developed is the “platform” concept, where some labs/teams slowly transition from doing research to producing data according to a standardized protocol (genome sequencing, genotyping, ChIP-seq, etc.) for other teams doing the research.

I noticed companies moving into the space, like 23andme, and wondered if they might work in combination to keep consumer prices high...

23andme is not doing sequencing, they're doing genotyping. And they are doing so using relatively old and well-established method; so I highly doubt they will be a force of innovation in the sector for the coming times.

The problem with homeopathy is not that it's a crazy idea. It's that it's been extensively shown not to work and is still being pushed as a good idea.

This is going off-topic, but I really think it depends on your definition of "not to work".

If people essentially throw in low-cost placebos to cure themselves of headaches and other minor ailments, while believing that this is exactly what they need, I consider this a net-positive for society compared to giving them actual medication that costs more with potential side-effects/harms.

Obviously, the fun ends when quacks prescribe homeopathy for serious stuff that needs actual treatment (in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). But for minor things that aren't too big of an issue even if left untreated, letting people use homeopathy if they're into that - why not.

It is also known, that placebos work better, if people believe; they are medicine.

Thats why Homeopathy "works"

"in Germany, there was a case a few years ago where such a quack tried to treat his wife's breast cancer - obviously, this is beyond what should be legal). "

But this, I see actually different. People of clear mind, should have any right to choose their treatment of choice. So informing them on the best options, yes! Telling them of the mechanism of fraudsters who prey on peoples hopes, yes! But in the end maybe not forbidding them if they choose - for whatever reason - less standard methods.

Maybe the placebo works in their case. Maybe the alternative treatment with the roots of plant X had by chance an actual unknown effective drug in it. Who knows. But I know that telling people to follow standards is not allways the best way.

Btw. because if a recent case I know there are homeophatic cancer clinics in germany. So it seems to be legal?

I know of other alternative cancer treatment by the very weird "Dr. Hamer" who cannot be practised in germany if the patient actually has cancer. And I think this is not helping to disprove scams. (because I know people who are into it)

In theory, I agree with you. People should be clearly told "there is evidence that X works, and there is no evidence that Y works, however you are free to try Y at your own risk". And then they would make their choice.

But I am afraid that it wouldn't work so well in practice. First, there is the problem of who is this authoritative voice that tells people "X works, Y does not". Is it government? (Will it not become subject of political fighting? Like, depending on who wins the election, evolution either exists or does not exist, masks either help or do not help against COVID, etc.) Or is it some professional organization of experts? Then the fraudsters will make their own alternative organizations, that for a layman will look exactly the same. -- At the end, the layman has no idea whom to trust.

Second, the fraudster talking to you can be more persuasive than a website you read, simply because they can adapt their argument to your knowledge. Even if the website says "X works, Y does not", the fraudster can explain like "by 'Y does not work' they actually refer to Y1, but what I am selling is Y2 which is not the same thing", and there will be no one there to say "actually, Y refers to both Y1 and Y2" or "Y2 is just Y1 under a new name". For a layman it is difficult to evaluate when two things are or are not the same.

So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal. "Legal, but you have been warned, so use your best judgment" does not work for people with average intelligence and average expertise.

Isn't that a problem with your solution?

"So at the end, either fraud is legal, or illegal"

(In my scenario common doctors tell people of the treatments.)

Also, people offering alternative treatment are often very convinced that they are offering indeed the superior solution and the others are commiting fraud.

In the ideal world, everything would be replicated and retested at least a few times. Practically, we do not have the resources, and sometimes other interests come into play. For example, those of some industry to fund studies that refute some wild idea that threatens their business. How many studies on safety of sugar are paid by Coca Cola?

That was not my intention. My intention was to say that a single study might not be good enough as a refutation. BTW one of the largest proponents of re-checking studies that were once considered reliable is a medical doctor, John Ioannidis. It is not just soft science that suffers from the problem.

Given that we are really short on money (and, with regard to ideas, always will be - it is cheaper to produce ideas than to test them even cursorily, much less thoroughly), every proposed mechanism will have large downsides. I do not have a proposal.

And it would be wildly unethical to use prayer which by any reasonable understanding of cancer biology would not work.

This is one of those instances where judgement is a good thing. Don’t run such a silly trial. Spend the money on something that actually has a chance to work.