Here's an example that's worth considering more often when it comes to doling out the cash:
Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge
The Vesuvius Challenge is a million+ dollar contest to read 2,000 year old text from charcoal-papyri using particle accelerators and machine learning. The scrolls come from the ancient villa town of Herculaneum, nearby Pompeii, which was similarly buried and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The prize fund comes from tech entrepreneurs and investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and several other donors.
In the 9 months after the prize was announced, thousands of researchers and students worked on the problem, decades-long technical challenges were solved, and the amount of recovered text increased from one or two splotchy characters to 15 columns of clear text with more than 2000 characters.
The success of the Vesuvius Challenge validates the motivating insight of metascience: It’s not about how much we spend, it’s about how we spend it.
Most debate over science funding concerns a topline dollar amount. Should we double the budget of the NIH? Do we spend too much on Alzheimer’s and too little on mRNA? Are we winning the R&D spending race with China? All of these questions implicitly assume a constant exchange rate between spending on science and scientific progress.
The Vesuvius Challenge is an illustration of exactly the opposite. The prize pool for this challenge was a little more than a million dollars. Nat Friedman and friends probably spent more on top of that hiring organizers, building the website etc. But still this is pretty small in the context academic grants. A million dollars donated to the NSF or NIH would have been forgotten if it was noticed at all. Even a direct grant to Brent Seales, the computer science professor whose research laid the ground work for reading the scrolls, probably wouldn’t have induced a tenth as much progress as the prize pool did, at least not within 9 months.
More here: https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/metascience-of-the-vesuvius-challenge?
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