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February 11, 2010
Grants
The Department of Energy is giving out grants. Research grants. DOE Secretary Steven Chu recently announced recipients from across the nation will receive about $85 million in total funding for five-year research grants.This is excellent news. We may actually get something useful out of this. But compare it to the cost. On average each project costs $250,000 with a minimum of $150,000 per project. It will cost $17 million a year to fund 69 projects out of a possible 1,750. That is 4% of the proposals. Which is pitiful. I'd like to know which projects didn't make the cut. Let us look at the social dynamics of that. Every one who didn't make the cut is obviously in the top five percent since only the top four percent made the cut. So what would I do about all this? I'd cover 90% of the reasonable proposals. That could be done for $400 million a year plus the usual graft and corruption overhead. And what about the sociology of picking so many? If you don't make the cut you are in the bottom ten percent. Perhaps that is too harsh. Maybe covering only 80% of the proposals would be better if we didn't want to totally demoralize the losers. That leaves all the losers in the bottom 20 percent. That would make them decide if science is for them, and if only just barely, do they want to put more effort into the hard part: thinking. Here is a book I liked a lot on a related subject: Managing the Design Factory : The Product Developer's Toolkit The writer's thesis is that if half your research money doesn't end in failure you are not getting the most bang for the buck. You get the best return when you get a yes-no answer. The maybes can kill you. And let me add that I got some good ideas from MirariNefas at Talk Polywell. Cross Posted at Power and Control posted by Simon on 02.11.10 at 04:03 PM |
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90% is correct. Remember Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The only real question is whether or not the estimate is too low.
My own prejudice, based on a long-ago conversation with a venture capitalist, is that there are details -- strata within the ninety percent, you might say. That is,
10% actively anti-useful, of no value and tending to destroy value elsewhere
50% is total crap, worth nothing either way
30% is fairly crappy, but might contain useful bits.
The problem is that going in, there is no way to determine which is which. The only way to find out is to try it and see, and even that isn't totally reliable, because it's recursive -- any given set of ten may be one of ten such sets that fall into the "total crap" category. The only thing you can guarantee is that if you don't try all ten, the one you want will not be included.
Regards,
Ric