rivp931

Pay for it in taxes, let the government set up an agency providing assistance. Would require big changes in the system you have in the US though, ugly bureaucracy, and whispering some forbidden words like "socialism".

But it's reality, not fantasy: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance-overview

A first problem is how to recognize these incredibly brilliant people. The current answer to this is the tournament to tenured professorship. If you select those who already succeed in this system, you are not really doing anything new, so something different should be done but it is not clear what.

A second difficulty is the "rest of their lives" part. It's quite hard to believe ROI would not be required when rich people are involved in some way or other. Charity is PR, and so the system will optimize for PR.

Not really workable in practice. Are you going to lie in the project schedule section of the application? Nowadays the grant agencies expect to have Gantt charts and other crap. It also would require delaying publishing a work when it's finished, which then raises the chances of perishing...

What people however do is to smuggle more risky ideas into proposals for less risky ones. But that in the end means they'll be spending time also on low-risk things.

Not really --- in some languages these sayings actually are already in metric units. The SI system is by now over hundred years old, so just by waiting probably will upgrade unit system also there.

Going down this rabbit hole eventually leads you to nonparametric statistical tests, e.g. Mann-Whitney-U and so on.