"What we can do is work to incentivize sustained effort."
I love the article, but I don't think this putative takeaway is terribly useful. Our collective sustained effort isn't under "our" "control" any more than is the mold flying through the window.
What happened was the onset of WWII solved the coordination problems involved in scaling penicillin production. But you can't just "decide" to solve coordination problems! Coordination problems are real features of the world, just like the growth conditions for penicillin, and you have to actually do the work of trying to solve them.
I agree! The point of the article was to 1) illustrate what is possible when the conditions amalgamate and 2) to serve as a push to really think through where the institutional frictions in scientific progress (and coordination) exist.
Also by saying we should incentivize sustained effort, I meant to say that our funding bodies should recognize that some problems are hard to solve and require prolonged work - short term project specific grants just don’t serve ambitious science.
Yes I didn't mean to sound too negative; I think these historical essays you write are very valuable! At least, I certainly enjoy them.
But I worry there's a tendency in them, and in The Good Science Project and its fellow travelers, to focus too much on retrospective successes, where it's very easy to look back and say "obviously if only we had done such-and-such...". It's a bit like saying, "look, this person won the lottery, so obviously we should invest lots of money in buying lottery tickets". Well, apparently sometimes! But probably not always. So how do you know?
Personally, what I'd love to read is something about what a program officer should actually do. Everyone would love to fund long-term transformational science, but what does that actually look like? And how do you convince your bosses, and their bosses, and the voters, that you know what it looks like?
Totally – and thank you for taking the time to read and engage with my work!
My personal reason for writing these historical retrospectives is that I find these stories quite interesting and frankly not well known enough – there is merit in being inspired by the (recent!) past. Here I am reminded of Vannevar Bush in Pieces of the Action, where he delineates his purpose for writing the book: "In discussing it [the OSRD], I have no thought of prescribing an ideal organization for the future, since later organizations, if we need them for war, will certainly be far different, nor of writing history, since that has already been well written. I want merely to fill in a few gaps and to develop further the theme that, in war, military and civilian partnership is possible and essential." Such writing remains essential.
But you are right in that we do need to go beyond and be more prescriptive on what science today should look like. There are people working towards that too and the work of those at the Astera Institute, Institute for Progress et al. comes to mind (and I do want to similar writing in the near future too).
"What we can do is work to incentivize sustained effort."
I love the article, but I don't think this putative takeaway is terribly useful. Our collective sustained effort isn't under "our" "control" any more than is the mold flying through the window.
What happened was the onset of WWII solved the coordination problems involved in scaling penicillin production. But you can't just "decide" to solve coordination problems! Coordination problems are real features of the world, just like the growth conditions for penicillin, and you have to actually do the work of trying to solve them.
I agree! The point of the article was to 1) illustrate what is possible when the conditions amalgamate and 2) to serve as a push to really think through where the institutional frictions in scientific progress (and coordination) exist.
Also by saying we should incentivize sustained effort, I meant to say that our funding bodies should recognize that some problems are hard to solve and require prolonged work - short term project specific grants just don’t serve ambitious science.
Yes I didn't mean to sound too negative; I think these historical essays you write are very valuable! At least, I certainly enjoy them.
But I worry there's a tendency in them, and in The Good Science Project and its fellow travelers, to focus too much on retrospective successes, where it's very easy to look back and say "obviously if only we had done such-and-such...". It's a bit like saying, "look, this person won the lottery, so obviously we should invest lots of money in buying lottery tickets". Well, apparently sometimes! But probably not always. So how do you know?
Personally, what I'd love to read is something about what a program officer should actually do. Everyone would love to fund long-term transformational science, but what does that actually look like? And how do you convince your bosses, and their bosses, and the voters, that you know what it looks like?
Totally – and thank you for taking the time to read and engage with my work!
My personal reason for writing these historical retrospectives is that I find these stories quite interesting and frankly not well known enough – there is merit in being inspired by the (recent!) past. Here I am reminded of Vannevar Bush in Pieces of the Action, where he delineates his purpose for writing the book: "In discussing it [the OSRD], I have no thought of prescribing an ideal organization for the future, since later organizations, if we need them for war, will certainly be far different, nor of writing history, since that has already been well written. I want merely to fill in a few gaps and to develop further the theme that, in war, military and civilian partnership is possible and essential." Such writing remains essential.
But you are right in that we do need to go beyond and be more prescriptive on what science today should look like. There are people working towards that too and the work of those at the Astera Institute, Institute for Progress et al. comes to mind (and I do want to similar writing in the near future too).
Maybe interesting for you - New guidance for researchers engaging with the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/routes-for-academic-engagement-with-government/routes-for-academic-engagement-with-government
Fucking great post, y'all. Truly an inspiration.
She’s a keeper!