Carl T. BergstromJun 27, 2023

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

International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation
Show threadCarl T. BergstromJun 27, 2023
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.
Show threadSteven

@ct_bergstrom I did some work with Thomas Sinkjær when he was at the Villum Foundation to try and address the funding side of this with the ‘Villum Experiment' grant scheme.

https://veluxfoundations.dk/en/technical-and-scientific-research/villum-experiment

Short anonymous applications, ‘golden ticket' for reviewing panel members so you don't need consensus. We talked a lot about the problem of researcher incentives - but didn't come up with a way to fix it.

Villum Experiment

THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS
Jun 27, 2023 at 3:54pmWeb