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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."
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.
And the real losers, presumably, would be the scientists who took the gamble and failed.
"The granting agencies are the ones who have to be trained to take more (intelligent) risks."
Exactly. Look at the requirements for preliminary data when applying for grants. NIH and NSF fund the past, not the future. And when the climate is as bad as it is now, they only fund established labs that need to stay afloat.
The author suggests that cash prizes will provide incentive for young scientists to tackle high-risk high-reward projects with the promise of a big payoff on a 10 year timeframe. How exactly is this going to happen if they can't even get an RO1 and have to shut down well before there's a chance to witness a payoff?
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.
Such is the reality of life anywhere.
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?
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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.
As a young scientist myself, there's no way I'm going to do research for ten years (in between shifts at McDonalds) to MAYBE win a big prize sometime in the future. I'll go work on applied stuff for industry long before that.
The preliminary data thing is a catch 22 that I've already gotten caught in. In order to have a shot at a grant you've got to have data showing your technique works. But in order to get that data you pretty much have to perfect your technique. But if your technique already works, why do you need funding to develop it?
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.
No, in order to get grants you need to show/prove
(1) that your technique will very likely work, say with probability of 60%+
(2) that your technique will be either
(i) cheaper;
(ii) safer;
(iii) faster;
(iv) more efficient; etc.
compared to grantor's current methods.
(3) you are committed to achieve what you claim and that you have high rate of success in R&D.
The bigger the grant, the bigger the risk for the grantor and hence stricter requirements.
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.
No, trying is a valid and valuable effort, even if you're not the best, the first, the greatest, but to realize that, you have to have evolved into a social being. It is not only immoral but also deeply uneconomic to make gigantic rewards dependent on chance, as is the case whenever the winner is only marginally better than the closest competitors, but only he is rewarded. The idea behind giving people more money when they achieve great things is twofold: Attract more people, thus increasing the chances that one of them succeeds, and giving the money to those who are more likely to succeed again. Our culture is increasingly focussed on the first aspect and these lotteries make us lose sight of the fact that "the winner takes it all", especially in rare but grand competitions, fails to distribute money to people who might also likely succeed in the future, if they had the resources. In the end these schemes have too many negative effects: A few people amass riches by chance, money is diverted from research into consumption (personal jumbo jets, houses everywhere, etc), and the majority of people become discouraged because the correlation between merit and success is too low when being second gets you nothing.