Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions.
To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the institution.
An indictment, or just an admission that we're not generally willing to make?
What would happen, for example, if we handed the entire education budget to teachers directly. No controls, reporting requirements... just a stack of cash? Teacher decides how to spend it. My guess is that we would see some amazingly positive things. We would also see some awful things. Fraud, failure, scandal... Perhaps, probably even, the average result would be good. Could we stomach the price though? Would year 10 be better or worse than year 1?
We tend to be scandalised by bad things, and take good things for granted. Hence controls.
"Let’s do it” was then the basic attitude and we were much more worried about missing out on supporting important work than looking silly"
Fine attitude, given the circumstances. Outside of seed funding and research though... is it viable? Is it viable after 10 years of repetition? Can it survive scandalous articles highlighting blatant abuses, face up to scrutinies year after year?
There are differences between early and late stage "games." Run this as a long term program, and scams might flood in. More insidious perhaps, proposals that are not quite scams. Observers are also less forgiving of repetitive "failures." Would the director of such a fund be willing to say "we will do nothing" to questions about fraud, scandal or whatnot? Would they want to?
Google once had 20% time, for similar reasons. Let smart people do what they do on their own. It devolved. They tried to fix it with controls. It sucked and then they killed it. The attempt was earnest, but the destination was precisely what G we're trying to avoid.
I'm not disagreeing with this author or the general sentiment on this thread. Getting past or around institutional mindsets is high potential. This project sounds great. We need these to exist.
I am saying that it's unwise to underestimate something this prevalent.
I'm reminded of a Dan Ariely quote about why daughters want bad boys on proverbial motorcycles, but parents hate them. Mothers don't get to ride the motorcycle, but they do get to deal with the consequences.
A lot of this relates to high risk, high reward stuff. Research, startups, etc. Employees, even CEOs are never compensated (including non money incentives) in a way that reflects true risk/reward.
I would differentiate between non CEO founders and founders CEOs. Non-founder CEOs are subject to the whims and fancies of the board (institutions).
I am disappointed that Yale with 30 BILLION USD ! in endowments did not have the same impact a hastily put together fund filled mostly with volunteers did.
To weed out the poor capital allocators, you need skin in the game.
Not saying it is perfect, but it probably would be way better than what we saw during the pandemic (and still see).
It’s growing the pie versus fighting over it. Most large firms have economies of scale that allow the managers to fight over the surplus. Hard to restrain this without moral authority of founders.
You set up institutions to protect the status quo. Individuals can go ahead with risks and experiments, but you don't want to risk an entire society with someone's wild idea. For every wild idea that works out, there's many more that didn't.
Of course we should mitigate risks before potentially destroying society.
Part of the trick is determining what the baseline risk levels are and what safeguards should be dispensed with. It's not binary "peace-time" vs. "war-time". It's about the baseline risk factors.
Aside from societal risk, there's individual risk too. When a society's mortality rate drops, it is appropriate to have more safeguards, and when it increases, it is appropriate to have fewer safeguards.
...and then there's also the systemic effects of a broader, more relaxed approach to funding. While distributing $50 million means you're getting high quality leads, if you're in charge of a $5 billion funding program (which the NIH did manage: https://covid19.nih.gov/funding), the net effect of opening up the flood gates is going to be very different. Even if you do a good job of distributing that money (and that is, in itself a HUGE challenge), you're going to be dealing with law suits and political challenges that you'd not deal with for a $50 million fund.
It may suck, but it's the reality of large systems.
> Individuals are more ready to take risks than institutions.
> To me this was the most damning indictment of all.
Why?
One company in Texas geared up and started emergency mask production back when the original SARS/MERS hit. And it almost killed his company. He refused to wind up production for masks during Covid without cash and a contract. That's just smart business.
In the US, the Trump administration and a Republican Senate had absolutely demonstrated that it would absolutely leave people in the lurch who didn't kowtow appropriately.
That is NOT an atmosphere where you are going to bet the company on the fact that the government will do the sane thing.
On the flip side, there are basically no institutions that campaigned against vaccine adoption, whereas there are many prominent celebrities and politicians who did.
To me this was the most damning indictment of all. Once founders leave a compnay (or an institution), as BalajiS says, they become a shell of their former selves,with the individuals mostly in for self-preservation rather than set out fulfill the purpose of the institution.