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Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science
Bruce G Charlton writes "A new paper in Medical Hypotheses suggests that very big cash prizes could specifically be targeted to stimulate 'revolutionary' science.
Usually, prizes tend to stimulate 'applied' science — as in the most famous example of Harrison's improved clock solving the 'longitude' problem. But for prizes successfully to stimulate revolutionary science the prizes need to be:
1. Very large (and we are talking seven figure 'pop star' earnings, here) to compensate for the high risk of failure when tackling major scientific problems,
2. Awarded to scientists at a young enough age that it influences their behavior in (about) their mid-late twenties — when they are deciding on their career path, and:
3. Include objective and transparent scientometric criteria, to prevent the prize award process being corrupted by 'political' incentives.
Such mega-cash prizes, in sufficient numbers, might incentivize some of the very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term — but high-risk — career choices.
The real winner of this would be society as a whole; since ordinary science can successfully be done by second-raters — but only first-rate scientists can tackle the toughest scientific problems."
A lottery for people who ARE good at math!
Restricting mega-prizes to the young may eliminate groundbreaking work by mid-career and early-second-career scientists.
Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The prize system works fairly well for engineering because at the end you have the prize, a product you can sell, and a whole bunch of publicity. Corporations are interested in investing in that.
Science, particularly basic science, is different. Corporations are not nearly as interested in investing in something that won't develop into a product in the foreseeable future. For basic science you need money to replace the corporate sponsors: money up front. There are plenty of young scientists who will happily do great research, they just need some funding to get started. The granting agencies are the ones who have to be trained to take more (intelligent) risks.
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
This may or may not be a good idea, but don't make the mistake of taking "Medical Hypotheses" seriously. It is a hilarious journal in which any kook with a nutty idea can get published - a fact that somewhat takes the shine off the more sensible papers therein. I'll offer a purely conceptual prize of 10 karma points to the /. contributor who points out the most hilarious paper published in MH in the last ten years. The contents list alone makes fascinating reading.
http://itotd.com/articles/532/the-longitude-problem/
- link has background on the invention of a better watch to solve the longitude problem.
I recently finally read Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, where there's a plot line involving
the creation of the longitude prize. It took about 50 years longer than expected to be claimed.
Firstly, science is a gradual process. The "great man" theory of scientific progress has no more merit than the "great man" theory of history. It is in fact *not* true that those who make the very most important discoveries are better than other scientists (The fools! They mocked my research!), and their advances, even when seemingly revolutionary, are predicated on the gradual accumulation of knowledge through careful, thoughtful and reproducible work. This does not mean that all scientists are equally competent, or that financial or political concerns do not sometimes promote inferior scientists.
Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.
Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Just make sure the prize doesn't absolutely have to be awarded each and every year, like the Nobel Prize. Just reward the stuff that's actually revolutionary. Those thing don't come along that often.
That's not Picasso, that's Kandinsky!
Well the Clay Mathematics Institute is currently offering seven figure sums for seven different math problems. I can't say that much of a dent has been made on most of those problems. In fact the only solved problem had the solver (Perelman) turn down the cash. Perhaps $1 million isn't enough -- compared to the prize for solving the longitude problem, adjusted for inflation, it's pretty small. Perhaps we should be talking about 8 figure sums? If we can pay an actor $20 million dollars to appear in a film, is it really that bad to pay a researcher (or team of researchers) $20 million for solving the Hodge conjecture, or proving P!=NP?
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I did "STFA" (S = Skim) but didn't really see a nice list of what kind of topics are suggested. Or are they saying, "come up with something mega awesome and we will give you money" perhaps? If so that's like a perpetual motion "designer" dream isn't it? :^)
Seems to be that younger scientists are by nature full of interesting and "outside the box" ideas. Money won't push them to do cool stuff unless it's to get them free of some of the limitations of academia.
This is a really stupid proposal. It is like the lottery, which promises big payoffs but is really a tax on people who are bad at math. Most people lose. If there were mega-prizes for science, then people would have to decide whether to go for the big prize, knowing that there's a >99% chance of getting zilch, or doing something more likely to pay the bills. Do we want to turn science, normally a cooperative exercise, into a casino game?
On the other hand this idea will go over well among the flat earth crowd. They don't do science, but they think high-stakes prizes are the only way to get out of the trailer park.
It usually costs more to win such prizes than it's worth.
If you are trying to make a revolutionary genocide device, it makes sense to restrict it to Jews. Think of the genocide the Jews have perpetrated against Muslims for the last 30 years. Jews are the new Nazis.
Having already stolen (in traditional Jewish style) all of the water from their surrounding Muslims who previously owned their land, Jews are likely to now turn their attention to the air.
That's right, Jews will exterminate the Muslims by stealing their air and suffocating them with their greed and wealth.
I think an important argument that can be made to support the 'cash prize theory' can be directly seen with the Netflix Prize project. For those unfamiliar, they are offering a $1,000,000 cash reward for the best third-party team/individual that can develop the best algorithm for predicting movie preferences for their users.
Of course, to a company like Netflix, this may be more of a cost/benefit issue as hiring a team of bright researchers still won't guarantee that even a million in R&D will lead to their objectives. But, what it does illustrate here is that there is quite a heavy incentive for other researchers to pool their resources and attack a problem together. If you've read the specs for the project (100 million ratings, 480,000 users, 18,000 movies), you'll see that this isn't just some standard run-of-the-mill data set. This is academic level huge and is obviously attracting some top talent.
The term 'revolutionary science' from the article is going to be one up for debate in terms of actual definition, but one can assume that it entails research on the edge of existing science. Anyone in the research field knows that the NSF provides a huge bulk of the research funds for universities and institutions, but much of that money is ear-marked to science buzz or politically intertwined subjects. Case in point, global warming is the big issue right now so solar cells are getting the funding. Nothing of course against solar cells, but if we are talking about funding for studying a high-risk or not-so-popular field like cold-fusion, then suddenly things dry up.
In short, smart people will often do things for free because they enjoy it. But perhaps, the really smart people are waiting to get paid.
Seems to me Robert Heinlein came up with a somewhat similar idea in "Methusala's Children". If both your grandparents lived past a certain age, and you married somebody whose grandparents were similarly long-lived, the Methusala Foundation would pay you.
In either case, it comes down to forking out cash to improve the chances of getting desired results. Certainly not the worst idea I've ever heard.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Scientists are motivated by discovery. Fund their -projects- and they will happily work away. I don't believe it will be possible to keep such suggested prizes free from political correctness and Survivor-style political corruption. Who is a first-rater? Who is a second-rater? Edison was a failure. So was Einstein. Especially at the young ages described. One simply never knows who might discover something. DARPA and X-prizes are -far- more effective uses of the money, and models for applying the money.
For short/intermediate term research on things that are easily patentable, that is an easy question. The most valuable research is almost always that which makes the most money to the firm that "owns" the discovery, and rational scientists will work toward discovering the most valuable things that they can(Public heath and environmental technology are notable exceptions, at least without regulations and/or taxes). A more rigorous proof could be derived from Coase's Theorem and the General Welfare Theorem.
But patents hold a cost to society too, both in the transaction costs they create, and in that people who hold them work less because they can coast off of previous earnings. Because of this, we cannot extend this toward longer term research.
Worse, we don't really know what fields are valuable, so it's impossible to set effective prices for a lot of this stuff.
But altogether, we do a pretty good job of allocation, there are no large numbers of idle scientists, and our economy has tended to grow consistently over the last 50 years.
My concern, is that large government prizes will distort the economy, by pushing scientists and VC funding into "sexy" research that ultimately produces little(Lunar landers for example), at the expense of mundane yet important stuff(Capital market prediction, material science, etc).
And because the incentive effects of prizes are still not very well understood, I'm afraid of corporations doing the same thing.
I have plenty of awsome ideas, which would make billions. The average potential backer is way to stupid to understand the simple science that explains how these ideas work. Anyway, in my considerable experience. the powers that be would rather not have any new ideas, and especially not "awesome" ones.
If anyone is interested in real energy saving systems/machines, I have plenty. I can provide one technology alone which will enable your country to meet its Kyoto treaty obligations.
Cars that do 100MPG (UK Gallons) - no problem.
If you want medical breakthroughs that will have thousands of lives, post a reply.
But in each case, you will need to have control of at least $100M to get the ideas to market. (100 fold return of investment no problem - over 10 years). That is the problem. The financial world wants a return next quarter, not in five years.
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I propose finding a way to do away with such crap as "scientometrics".
Do we need to raise the stakes any higher in the pursuit of basic science?
What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.
If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform
The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.
The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.
Government funding politicizes science, there are good examples in every field of good ideas that can't get funding because they are counter to some special interest group, often with the scientific community itself.
This would be a way of allowing individuals to contribute to directions they personally want or need.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
As the Negative Nancy, I feel a need to point out that the competition for this prize may doom whatever project that doesn't make it to the million dollar prize. A lot of very big theoretical breakthroughs have occured in the past 100 years and many of them were scoffed at by the scientific community. (Big Bang Theory comes to mind, if I am incorrect) I probably don't know what I'm talking about, again, but I could see financial competition taking a field that is mostly rooted in the whole for the sake of science idea and turning it into something for profit. Besides, nobody becomes a astrophysicist for the monies. I do like the idea to be honest, but that's my two cents.
Personally, I can support myself and throw the Red Cross a few bucks every now and then, but not much more. When the lotteries get big around here I buy a few tickets. Then before my dreams are shattered I think not only about the nice house, car and computer I will buy, but how much I will be able to hand over to my high school, my college, and something akin to the Ansari X Prize. I can think of nothing more fun to read about than a major scientific breakthrough or great progress made in part because of the money I put up as a motivation. (And the Red Cross would get a sizable donation, of course.) I don't have that kind of money at my disposal unfortunately, and probably never will, so we need to keep begging those who have it.
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-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Unless the prizes change the way researchers are taught, throwing money at the problem isn't going to help. Scientists are taught how to make small incremental advances as students. It's a whole different ballgame when you're trying to solve something big.
It is called the Nobel price. It is as easy as that. Do some revolutionary science and win a non-neglectable cash price. According to wikipedia last years price was about 1,500,000 USD.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
Most such prizes would probably end up going overseas because of the cheaper labor rates. $100,000 in say India is almost enough to retire for the rest of your life with maids, etc. Thus, the incentive will be much greater for them.
Table-ized A.I.
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
The problem with this type of hypothesis is that it fails to recognize the difference that "real" molecular nanotechnology will create. I'm not talking about the "playtime" nanotechnology that the NIH started promoting several years ago. I'm talking the real thing that Drexler, Merkle, Freitas, etc. envision.
Educating any scientist with a five or ten year horizon without a clear perspective about how much things will shift when MNT arrives is pointless.
Scientists at IBM recently calculated the force of moving single atoms around. This is on top of their accomplishments a decade or more ago of actually moving the atoms around. Duh! We are slowly, arguably too slowly, moving down the road to MNT.
So unless we move at the pace of sub-snails, all future projection scenarios, particularly those involving decade or longer time frames have to include nanotechnology.
If you are not calculating monetary expectation of win vs loss, but actual usefulness of win. For very big win which could change quality of life considerably, especially for poor player, expectation of payoff for player in term of usefulness can outweigh expectation of loss.
I haven't read the article since it has dropped off the web at the moment. But there are apparently several characteristics that seem to make it largely irrelevant. First, it isn't targeted. I see no indication of a specific goal or accomplishment, just some vague "they gotta do well". IMHO the best prizes have a particular goal (like getting an hour of video from the moon or the oldest mouse) in mind. That is, what someone here calls "engineering" prizes.
Second, it seems far too small. I gather from the comments that they're probably talking in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Given that there apparently are over 2 million scientists and engineers each living in the US, that's no more than around $40 per person per year. It improves somewhat if you restrict your money to smaller groups (like young scientists which I have a problem with for other reasons). My take is that to be useful, the prize must be much larger. For example, ten billion dollars a year for a generic prize with no restrictions on subject or scientist.
Third, the restriction to age is silly. Young scientists are already take the risks and a few dollars expected payout really doesn't help that much. They need to take risks if they want to get anywhere. The scientists who actually need to be encouraged to take risk are the old scientists.
If you wanted to provide multi-million dollar prizes for 20-something scientists working on revolutionary research, sign me up. I've obviously been under-paid. But if that money was really available, I would rather it be used to fund revolutionary research, not reward it. Prizes work in a corporate environment, where debt is acceptable. In academic and national lab research, you can't have debt; you can't fund research using loans or investments.
It is extraordinarily expensive to tackle the big problems, and the vast majority of scientists are not independently wealthy. Do they expect scientists to run up multi-million dollar personal debts on the off chance they get a prize? At my institution, we're trying to get a $20 million grant right now. That's not going to pad our pockets, but it will pay for lots of new equipment and materials. We need large amounts of money to do revolutionary research. Without funding, it doesn't matter it there's a prize out there, we simply can not do what we need to do.
Why would I, as a scientist, NOT work on the biggest problem I can find, award or no award? These guys suggest that the best scientists choose to work on lesser problems because of greater payoff. They say easier science leads to more papers, more citations and ultimately more peer-reviewed grant funding. They then suggest that we can use the same process to determine if revolutionary research has been done. So is the problem that grant giving institutions are not interested in hard research? That's not been my experience, but I'm in a different field than the authors.
I think they're complaining more about a culture specific to their specialty (medicine and biology) and less about the culture of science in general. A side effect of the doubling of biomedical research funding a decade ago is that a whole bunch of uncreative people were able to have success. Now that funding has decreased, those people (who perhaps should not be in leadership positions) are a drain on resources. Not having gone through recent turbulence in funding, other areas lack this problem.
Harrison's clocks were engineering achievements, not scientific. In fact, the scientific work was done by the astronomers who came up with the competing solution. The way the story is told by Dava Sobel is quite biased (it began badly with an unfair attack on Cloudesley Shovel, and after that I wasn't too surprised.) The scientific solution - star and planet tables and the method of using them - had the advantage that it relied on relatively cheap technology - paper and sextant/telescope - while the chronometer solution relied on hugely expensive technology which most of the merchant marine and many naval captains could not afford. Rather than turn the whole thing into a competition, it might have been better to identify the most promising routes and fund them independently, so that the agonists did not waste time trying to prove that the competition was wrong.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The requirement for a certain age on a prize is misguided to me. If you want a specific feat of science accomplished, you would have better chances at widening your pool of candidates. An age requirement can only work in math where one's work can be divorced from physical reality. Much discovery in the sciences is made by persistence--so, to limit the age of a prize winner in science selects for people who have good luck at a tender age. It is a lottery in this sense. Prize benefactors: remove age requirements.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Even worse we often have no idea whether work done by young scientists really is ground breaking until long after the work is published. For example Peter Higgs published his Higgs mechanism in 1964. It is now 2008 and we still do not know whether it is how the universe works or just a very beautiful, but misleading, distraction.
With a scheme like this Higgs would miss out on what is, potentially, one of the most important breakthroughs of the 20th century. If it is an international prize there will also be trouble administering it in Europe where there are ageism laws. Rather than worry about when people make a tremendous breakthrough we should fund them well once they have in the hope that this will lead to further discoveries.
I once read that the richest people aren't the most intelligent, intelligent people simply don't find the risks needed to become so rich worth it. On average they'd come out worse off and they're intelligent enough that their normal average is still very well off.
I find it absurd that anyone really intelligent would depend on essentially a lottery for anything. It's absurd because 99% of the time you will simply be wasting your time and could make a lot more money by doing something else.
Logically the prizes would be pointless like they are now, a company is formed and it's engineers are paid by sponsors/rich people. It's essentially like venture capitalists, they take on the risk and get a decent large chunk of the payoff.
This may work in disciplines where a singular achievement is key. So prizes for proving a math theorem that stood for a century are quite reasonable and are already done. They do not serve as incentives for scientific effort because the effort is prohibitive intellectually rather than financially. Putting up a prize is just a way of saying: this problem is really important. So if you've got a vision and lots of money but no mad intellectual skillz then by all means, put up a prize.
However this will not work for basic research in natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc). The reason is that there are no singular achievements. Experimental measurements are often not trusted until they are repeated by several groups and usually these other groups add key details to the original measurement. Likewise, theories are often explaining the same phenomena from different angles (schrodinger and heisenberg versions of quantum mechanics, Landau and BCS explanations of superconductivity, etc). So large prizes are only likely to sow discord in those communities not foster more productivity.
The real losers are the people who would have benefited from any other research those scientists would have done instead.
A proof on why we should expect the world has a high probability of being WORSE off with these rewards will come soon. Right now I gotta pay some bills.
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human powered flight-you got me, maybe sometime in the future with even better materials there might be some money in making joyride airplanes. Hobby flight in various forms is a good enough industry,normal piston engine planes at the low end, cessnas, etc., hang gliding, regular gliders, sport ballooning, sport parachuting, etc, Pedal powered planes would sell or lease OK I think...
x-prize-they are going to be making billions with a B on selling space tourism, they already announced they are constructing a small fleet
darpa grand challenge-multi billions possible just in the defense industries there, self navigating machines-land, sea and air and space obviously- are a *huge* part of projected forward expenditures in robotics, team oshkosh (TerraMax) actually enters working prototypes of military cargo trucks that they want to sell in big quantities as soon as they work good enough. And it is applicable in other areas, for example, it is already well established in agriculture, we buy a lot of corn from a farming family that uses sophisticated self steering tractors, and hospitals and warehouses are using a lot of robotic delivery bots now. Roomba is another example and that robot lawn mower, forget the name now.
Ya, the initial prize money might not cover everything, but certainly enough to get the competition heated up, and the whole idea of selecting prize goals is that they *will* be useful, therefore valuable in terms of business money later on.
As to the "losing" teams, I bet if you asked them if it was worth is so far, even at a monetary loss, they would mostly say "yes".
But seriously, there's actually quite a history of prizes in fundamental science such as physics and mathematics. For example, Fourier's work on the series which bear his name was part of a submission for a prize on understanding the propagation of heat. Many other great mathematicians of the 19th century were first noticed by the essays they wrote for various prizes.
This paper is not the result of a big prize.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
"If you are over 30 and no breakthroughs has surfaced so far then likely they never will."
I have heard that argument before, and indeed it does seem that revolutionary ideas usually come at an early age, still there are plenty of exceptions such as Newton who wrote the principa at ~40.
I really don't think money aimed at 'picking winners' will have any effect on the rate of revolutionary ideas, they are 'once in a lifetime' bursts of inspiration. That's not to say that spending a bit of cash to encourage 'out of the box' thinking is a complete waste, but the money could also be spent helping the older 'second rate' scientists investigate the intersesting ideas that already pop up from unpredictable and diverse sources.
IIRC Maxwell's equations were largely ignored for ~80yrs, so if the aim is to distinguish revolutionary ideas from trivia and crackpots then spend the bulk of the money collecting and collating data and give it away to everyone.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Science has always been a collaborative grind, and is becoming more and more that. In the past, we had a bunch of geniuses that single-handedly took their fields forward, but even those weren't motivated by money to be made, and even they stood on the shoulders of giants... do you really think Newton or Darwin would have been "better" if there had been a huge prize waiting for them? I think not.
:-)
Even those who do get the new major insights in science just... get them -- after a lot of work of course. Sure they deserve accolades and recognition and even money, but I have this strange feeling that just making them win the lottery is somewhat oddly unfair towards those who partake in the noble pursuit but don't get similarly "blessed".
In the meantime, in order to actually have those flashes occurring in the heads of some young scientists, they need to eat. THAT lures people into science, not taking huge personal risks -- and the intense pressure that comes with it -- with their life. For example I quit thinking about staying in academia when I realized that I would perform poorly if my life really depended on getting great ideas from grant to grant. So science needs to be funded as a whole... you toss a whole lot of them at the wall and see which ones stick.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
That might not be the best scheme. How about some sort of payout whare the top N finishers split the award. Maybe with a descending payout schedule.
The single winner scheme may not be the best way to motivate someone who might not be pursuing 'the best' solution, but might contribute something of value nevertheless.
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't that the catch 22 everyone faces? If I had money I could start a successful business, create awesome new software that would easily be marketable, pay for grad school so I could get a good job, etc. People act like young (and poor) people don't want to do things but really it's usually more a limitation of what we have to work for. Unfortunately just being bright and hard working won't get you far very quickly.
To me, it seems to be a major problem with our society. We don't take advantage of all our resources because there is no appropriate way to identify people that have great potential and put them to work doing something useful. Most of us geeks end up working on minor improvements to commercial products that won't really have any positive benefit to society because that's what we have to do to live. Most corporations don't have much vision and since the Cold War ended the government doesn't really seem to care much at all either. All the people that could be curing cancer are working as grunts.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Big money at the end of the long ride for the lucky few is a good way to screw the whole race up. We should not all be running the same race.
Small prizes for small steps.
Better yet, just get rid of the stupid overtime psychology and let us have enough time after hours to pursue the hard problems for the reasons that are most likely to bring real success:
Solving a problem is a reward in and of itself.
And a solution that helps others gives something even better than warm fuzzies. (Linux, anyone? BSD?)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Maybe we should just quit assuming that money isn't the only medium for communicating value and reward.
Money this. Money that. Money the other.
I'd just like people to let me do my job right.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.