The government is the largest and most important funder of science, but the grants tend to be very spread out across a lot of people. They’re not typically put into big infrastructure projects. That’s the niche that we, through CZI, felt that we can help fill. Instead of investing a million dollars in a lab, put $100 million or a couple hundred million into a lab to help build up really important scientific assets for the community…
The goal is — if you look at the history of science at least — most major scientific breakthroughs have been preceded by new scientific tools that help people look at things in new ways.
That was Mark Zuckerberg on his podcast, Tech & Society, speaking with the excellent Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen. Listen to the whole thing on progress studies.
Indeed, a century ago rationalists decided that the “scientific” way to fund breakthroughs was to focus funding on outputs. What will be accomplished in the end and then work a specific plan to get there. In other words, scientific determinism. It derives from the Enlightenment belief that the sum of all knowledge is that which relates given facts using explicit rules. No room exists for the visionary. Enabling tools get lost along the way because they do not represent an end in of themselves.
In the prior method, funding focused on inputs like human capital, organizations, and enabling tools. The old method left ends more open-ended. And that’s a good thing, because we cannot predict the course of technology. If we could — as was presumed by many in the 20th century — then the whole enterprise is one of rational planning.
In a sense, we had to try out the rationalist method. But it has become obvious that such output-oriented planning does not work. Technology pushes on because the market selects for what works. That is found in the concepts used by Zuckerberg, Collison, and others in Silicon Valley. In government, no self-correcting mechanism seems to exist.
Zuckerberg continues:
What I try to push the teams to do is make sure that the work that we’re doing are things that clearly could not have happened otherwise… I’m quite confident that the work that we’re doing, if we weren’t trying it, it’s not clear that anyone else would be doing an effort like this at scale. I feel really good about that…
It’s like you wanna bet on the best individuals in different spaces and give them room to run. In managing complex projects, you need to know when something needs to be a little more directive versus when you want it to just be an open thing that can make progress in a more chaotic way. And that might be more art than science–or at least until your field gets–fully solves all these questions
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