My colleague Kevin Gross and I have a new preprint up on the arXiv.
Just for fun, rather than a simple text explainer, a thread with some slides for a talk I'm giving at https://www.icssi.org/ tomorrow.
Here's the paper itself: Rationalizing risk aversion in science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13816
International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation
The basic issue at hand is high-risk, high-return science. There is widespread sentiment, and even some scattered empirical evidence, that scientific research within academia is too cautious and that higher-risk, higher-return research would yield more progress more quickly.
If you ask people why we don't see more high-risk science, you get different answers. Researchers tell you that granting agencies won't fund it. Funders tell you that researchers won't propose it.
Carl T. Bergstrom
Tom von Alten