DIEing Academic Research Budgets
What would happen to science if the government just stopped funding academic research, and scientists had to go directly to the people?
I had a lot to say (I always have a lot to say), and this thing turned into a beast (it always turns into a beast, but this is beastier than usual), so I’ve broken it up into sections. The first, short section deals with funding cuts to federal support for scientific research. The next three parts discuss at some length the myriad systemic pathologies that the existing national grant system has induced within the scientific community. The final section – which readers who are already thoroughly familiar with the problems in institutional science, and don’t want to be entertained by my rendition of them, may wish to skip to – concerns the effects that a crowdsourced neopatronage funding model, which I think is a plausible successor to the bureaucratic grant-based system, is likely to have upon the culture of science.
Table of Contents
I. Nuking Science Funding and Nixing Institutional Hostage-taking
II. The Sclerotic Scientific Soviet
III. The False Promise of Peer Review
V. Neopatronage and Popular Science
I. Nuking Science Funding and Nixing Institutional Hostage-taking
Shortly after taking power, the Trump administration announced a freeze on academic grants at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health. New grant proposal reviews were halted, locking up billions in research funding. Naturally, the courts pushed back, with progressive judges issuing injunctions demanding the funding be reinstated. Judicial activism has so far met with only mixed success: the NSF has resumed the flow of money to existing grants, but the NIH has continued to resist. While the grant review process has been restarted at the NSF, the pause created a huge backlog, resulting in considerable uncertainty for applicants.
The NIH has instituted a 15% cap to indirect costs, commonly referred to as overheads. This has universities squealing. Overheads are meant to offset the budgetary strain research groups place on universities, covering the costs of the facilities they work in – maintenance, power and heating, paper for the departmental printer, that kind of thing. Universities have been sticking a blood funnel into this superficially reasonable line item for decades, gulping down additional surcharges up to 50% of the value of research grants, a bounty which largely goes towards inflating the salaries of the little armies of self-aggrandizing political commissars with titles like Associate Vice Assistant Deanlet of Advancing Excellence who infest the flesh of the modern campus like deer ticks swarming on the neck of a sick dog. Easily startled readers may wish to close their eyes and scroll past the next few images btw, but I really want to make this point here. When you look at this:
The image you should have in your mind is this:
A 15% overhead cap, if applied across the board, has an effect on the parasitic university administration class similar to a diversity truck finding parking at a German Christmas market. Thoughts and prayers, everyone.
Meanwhile at the NSF, massive layoffs are ongoing, and there are apparently plans to slash the research budget by up to 50%. While specific overhead caps haven’t been announced at the NSF yet, there’s every reason to expect that these will be imposed as well, compounding the effect of budget cuts.
There is no attempt to hide the motivation behind the funding freeze, which is obvious to both the appalled and the cuts’ cheerleaders. Just as overheads serve as a blood meal for the administrative caste, scientific research funding has been getting brazenly appropriated by political activists at obscene scales. A recent Senate Commerce Committee report found that $2 billion in NSF funding had been diverted towards DEI promotion under the Biden administration. In reaction to this travesty, as this recent Nature article notes, there are apparently plans to outright cancel ongoing grants funding ‘research’ into gay race communism . DEI programs, formerly ubiquitous across Federal agencies, have already been scrubbed both from departmental budgets and web pages. Indeed, killing those programs was one of the first actions of the MAGA administration.
The outlook for universities has become dire, and academics have been sweating bullets all over social media. Postdocs aren’t being hired, faculty offers are being rescinded, careers are on hold, research programs are in limbo. This comes at the same time that budgets are being hit by declining enrolment due to the demographic impact of an extended period of below-replacement fertility along with rapidly declining confidence in the value of university degrees, with young men in particular checking out at increasing rates as universities become tacitly understood as hostile feminine environments. They’re hitting a financial cliff at the same point that they’ve burned through the sympathy of the general public.
The entire sector is in grave danger.
Politically, going after research funding is astute. Academia is well known to be a Blue America power centre, used to indoctrinate the young with the antivalues of race Marxism, provide a halo of scholarly legitimacy to the left’s ideological pronouncements, and hand out comfortable sinecures to left-wing activists. The overwhelming left-wing bias of university faculties is proverbial. The Trump administration is using the budgetary crisis as a handy excuse to sic its attack DOGE on the unclean beast – starting with cutting off funding to the most ideological research projects, but apparently also intending to ruin the financial viability of the progressives’ academic spoils system as a whole.
Cutting the NSF budget by half may seem at first glance like punitive overkill, and no doubt the left is screeching that Orange Hitler is throwing a destructive tantrum like a vindictive child and thereby endangering American leadership in scientific research. After all, for all the attention that NASA diversity programs have received, the bulk of research funding still goes to legitimate scientific inquiry, surely? However, the problems in academic research go much deeper than its relentless production of partisan activist slop. Strip out all of the DEI funding, fire every equitied commissar and inclusioned diversity hire, and you’re still left with a sclerotic academic research landscape that has spent decades doing little of use – or interest – to anyone, and doing this great nothing at great expense.
II. The Sclerotic Scientific Soviet
Recently the independent physicist and YouTube star Sabine Hossenfelder managed to whack the hornet’s test of her erstwhile colleagues with a short address bearing the bluntly provocative title Should We Defund Academia?
Hossenfelder’s argument is essentially that scientific research funding in the United States – and in the Western world more broadly, as the same model has been adopted everywhere – is essentially a centrally planned, Soviet-style economy, which has inevitably produced all of the same pathological outcomes that one would expect, namely overinvestment and thus overproduction in some areas, at the expense of underinvestment and underproduction in others. This has resulted in science becoming unbalanced. Too much research has been done in some fields – she calls out particle physics as her favoured whipping boy – while other fields languish. As time goes on, the low-hanging fruit gets stripped within the over-invested fields, while in the underinvested ripe fruit rots unharvested on the branches of the wilting tree of knowledge. Human understanding becomes over-extended in certain areas, and without the supporting infrastructure of complementary knowledge in adjacent fields to stabilize it, further advance becomes prohibitively expensive; apparent advances often collapse under the weight of their own accumulated errors; and what genuine advances are made turn out to be of little or no practical use, because without comparably advanced adjacent fields, there’s no possibility for the kind of cross-fertilization that tends to generate creative breakthroughs. Meanwhile the over-invested fields produce nothing of value comparable to their investment. Tell me – what exactly is the Higgs boson good for? Okay, we’ve confirmed its existence ... what can we actually do with that?
Academia has become a latifundium planted with overbred genetically engineered monocrops, dependent on ever-increasing industrial inputs in the form of chemical fertilizer (federal research funding) and herbicides (campus speech controls), producing high-calorie/low-nutrient yields (bullshit papers) from its mineral-stripped soil (diversity hire faculty and diversity admit student bodies), and liable to poison those who consume it (rot their minds and souls with ideological infohazards).
Hossenfelder’s model of diminishing returns through malinvestment neatly explains the declining breakthrough rate, in which disruptive scientific papers – works that change the paradigms of their fields so thoroughly that citations to the new works entirely eclipse citations to the previously foundational papers that they supplant – have all but disappeared from the contemporary academic landscape.
Scientific breakthroughs tend to come from the creative application of novel insights from one field of science to another; they tend to require an extended period of quiet contemplation on the part of the researcher who makes them; and they tend to be intensely resisted by established authorities. The current centralized national grant system for research funding inhibits all three of these.
Cross-fertilization is made more difficult by the aforementioned malinvestment: you can’t draw on new insights from other fields if those other fields aren’t advancing because no one is spending money on them.
Quiet contemplation is prevented by the vast amount of busywork that the grant process involves: scientists spend inordinate amounts of time preparing dense, detailed grant proposals that will be read only by small committees, the success of any one of which is a crapshoot, thereby necessitating continuous investment of one’s precious time into repeatedly jerking the slot machine lever. If a grant lasts for three years, and any given proposal has a 10% chance of getting funded, then you need to be submitting at least 3 of them every year – including the years in which you have a grant – in order to ensure continuous funding.
Then there’s the peer review process itself, which relies on volunteer labour from other scientists, who may spend weeks carefully reading and debating various grant proposals and deciding behind closed doors which proposal is meritorious enough to award money to. Naturally, the answer to that question is always: the proposals that show the greatest likelihood of success, meaning in practice, the proposals that operate firmly within the bounds of established paradigms. Bold, exploratory proposals tend not to make it.
III. The False Promise of Peer Review
The peer review system is worth dwelling on for a while, because it is a direct consequence of the grant system, and it is a source of many evils. Not only are grants awarded on the basis of peer review, but grantees are expected to publish in peer-reviewed journals. It was this financial pressure from the NSF that turned peer review into a universal, mandatory practice after WWII. Previously, publication in a journal was at the sole discretion of the journal’s editor, as in any other periodical. Scientific disputes were fought entirely in the open, with refutations and counter-refutations being published for anyone who cared to read them, sometimes even debated on stage in front of live audiences. Public debates don’t happen any more; as they like to say, the science is settled. Now, disputes take place behind closed doors, with one of the parties – the anonymous referees – wielding the power to prevent publication or funding of the other.
The stated purpose of peer review is to prevent both malinvestment of the public treasury in lunatic ideas, and to serve as an error correction system to ensure that the scientific literature remains relatively pristine. These intentions are noble, but misguided; moreover, the system has utterly failed to achieve its nominal purpose. Don’t just take my word for it – I’m not the only one to recognize that the vast parallel experiment of peer review has been stupendously expensive in time and money, demonstrably unsuccessful, and indeed hideously counterproductive. This article sums up the problems and failings admirably:
Critics of peer review sometimes paint a picture of mendacious scholars throwing scientific ethics to the wind and abusing their positions as anonymous referees to prevent funding or publication of research that upsets their personal applecart, or even just to punish their personal enemies, and while that happens more often than people like to think, in general the problem is much more subtle than conscious malevolence. The reviewer is naturally cast into the role of critic. This is an intensely conservative frame of mind, in which one becomes pedantically alert for even the most trivial error. Since scientists themselves understand this dynamic quite well, it incentivizes them to be as careful as possible when submitting a document; the result is that most reviewers find little to complain about beyond typos, missing references, undersized fonts in figure labels, or insufficiently detailed explanations of standard methodologies. It is quite rare to be asked to review a paper that is entirely wrong ... and it is far more rare to be asked to review a paper that could change the basis of one’s entire field.
Paradigmatic breakthroughs, when they first emerge, are frequently somewhat underdeveloped. The kind of creative genius that tends to give birth to such works is also a type who is liable to overlook little details, focused as they are on the broad outlines of a shiny new big picture. Sometimes those details really do kill the idea – not every eureka is genuine – but it also happens that the genius gets the gestalt entirely correct, despite being embarrassingly wrong in many of the details, or having gaps in the model that are initially unfilled, or are even flatly contradicted by established science.
Consider Galileo and his effort to shift astronomy from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the solar system. Yes, I know, Galileo is rather overdone as an icon of scientific iconoclasm, but bear with me. The pop history version of this story casts Galileo in the role of brave heretic defying the backwards religious bigotry of the Catholic church, and while there’s some very small amount of truth in that depiction (his mistake was really that he annoyed the Pope by calling him a simpleton), the actual dynamics at play were far more nuanced and interesting than a simple morality tale brought to you by r/atheism.
Galileo based his advocacy for the heliocentric model primarily on observations that he’d made with his telescope – the phases of Venus, which can only be explained if it orbits the Sun and not the Earth; the landscape of the Moon, which displays geographical features similar to the mountains, plains, and oceans of the Earth, thus demonstrating that the heavenly bodies are similar to the Earth, and suggesting that the Earth itself might be a heavenly; the moons of Jupiter, which demonstrated that other heavenly bodies than the Earth are themselves orbited by heretofore undiscovered heavenly bodies.
Reasoning from these observations, Galileo insisted that the old Ptolemaic model be abandoned in favour of the new Copernican model, the advantage of the latter being not only that it was compatible with the Venusian phases, but that it neatly explained the retrograde motions of the planets without resort to the complicated series of nested epicycles – circles inside of circles – that the geocentric Ptolemaic cosmology required.
In retrospect we know that Galileo was entirely correct, but at the time learned men had every reason to object. First, they might say (and did say), that while the Copernican model might strike the naive mind as superior on the basis of its simpler explanation of retrograde motion, careful comparison of its predictions to the observed trajectories of the planets showed that the model did not work at all: the Ptolemaic model predicted the motions of the heavenly bodies with superior precision and accuracy (so long as enough epicycles were added in), whereas the Copernican model did not (unless you added epicycles to it, in which case, what’s the point?). We now know that this is because Copernicus used exact circles for the orbits, whereas they are in fact ellipses, but Kepler would not come along until much later.
Second, the learned men would point out, the heliocentric model was simply physically impossible. The physics of the day was Aristotelian, in which system it was believed that to keep a body in motion required a continual application of force. By what impulse could so massive a body as the Earth be kept in motion about the Sun? Again, we know this to be wrong now – a body in motion will tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an exterior force – but Newton would not write his Principia for some time, and Galileo’s own attempts to argue for an early form of inertia were widely rejected.
Finally, as to Galileo’s observations: these simply could not be trusted. Telescopes were still a novelty, their operation poorly understood, and their reliability dubious at best. They were severely afflicted by chromatic and spherical aberrations. Many who looked through Galileo’s devices did not see the crisp images that he reported, but blurry smudges smudges. Indeed, there are real questions as to how much Galileo really saw, and how much he imagined: his maps of the Moon are wild fancies on par with Percival Lowell’s Martian canals.
Galileo was essentially proposing that the scientific community abandon a complete cosmology, one which: was perfectly consistent with known physics; included a working and high-precision model which, while complex1, provided excellent predictions; and was moreover harmoniously integrated with prevailing philosophy and theology. In its place, he proposed a new cosmology which: violated known physics, with no new mature physics to replace it; demanded a model of the solar system which was demonstrably inferior in its quantitative predictions; and was entirely incoherent with the philosophy and theology of the age. To motivate all of this he offered up the suspect observations he’d made with a novel device that tortured God’s radiant light in ways that no one really understood, and which many considered to be more likely to produce optical illusions than reliable magnification.
The scientific community had every reason to reject Galileo, so they did.
And yet, he was entirely correct in the big picture.
Were Galileo alive today and operating in a similarly cavalier fashion, there’s no question that he’d find himself unable to publish in peer-reviewed journals, unable to get funding from peer-reviewed grant agencies, and as a result very unlikely to find employment at anywhere so prestigious as the University of Pisa. He would be considered a crank.
How many unfunded, unpublished cranks are there, who are actually Galileos? There surely aren’t that many – most schizos really are just schizos – but there are probably a few, and those few could have a dramatic impact when their ideas work out. They don’t, because the peer review system lays like a soggy smothering blanket across the whole of every field, extinguishing the creative fire by dissuading scientists from colouring outside the lines and boldly going where no mind has gone before2.
But what about the error correction function of peer review? Surely it’s important to ensure that the literature doesn’t fill up with bullshit? Shouldn’t we want our journals to publish only the most reliable, correct information – data analysis you can set your clock by, conclusions as solid as the Earth under your feet, uncertainties quantified to within the nearest fraction of a covariant Markov Chain Monte Carlo-delineated sigma contour?
Well, about that.
The replication crisis has been festering throughout the academic community for the better part of a decade, now. It turns out that a huge part of the scientific literature simply can’t be reproduced. In many cases the works in question are high-impact papers, the sort of work that careers are based on, that lead to million-dollar grants being handed out to laboratories across the world. Indeed, it seems that the most-cited works are also the least likely to be reproduced (there’s a running joke that if something was published in Nature or Science, you know it’s probably wrong.). Awkward.
The scientific community has completely failed to draw the obvious conclusion from the replication crisis, which is that peer review doesn’t work at all. Indeed, it may well play a causal role in the replication crisis.
The replication crisis, I should emphasize, is probably not mostly due to deliberate fraud, although there’s certainly some of that. There was a recent scandal involving the connection of amyloid plaques to Alzheimer’s disease which seems to have been entirely fraudulent, and which led to many millions – perhaps billions – of dollars in biomedical research programs being pissed away, to say nothing of the uncountable number of wasted man-hours. There have been many other such scandals, in almost every field you can name, and God alone knows how many are still buried like undiscovered time bombs in the foundations of various sub-fields. Most scientists, however, are not deliberately, consciously deceptive. They try to be honest. But the different models, assumptions, and methods they adopt can lead to wildly divergent results, even when analyzing the same data and testing the same hypothesis. Beyond that, they can also be sloppy. And the sloppiness, compounded across interlinked citation chains in the knowledge network, builds up.
Scientists know quite well that just because something has received the imprimatur of publication in a peer-reviewed journal with a high impact factor doesn’t mean that it’s correct. But while they know this intellectually, it’s very difficult to avoid the operating assumption that if something has passed peer review it’s probably mostly okay, and they’re not inclined to spend valuable time checking everything themselves. After all, they need to publish their own papers – in order to finish their PhD, get that faculty position, or get that next grant – and papers that are just trying to reproduce the results of other papers, that aren’t doing something novel, aren’t very interesting on their own, hence unlikely to be published. So instead of checking carefully yourself, you assume a work is probably reliable, and you use it as an element of your own work, maybe in a small way – taking a number from a table to populate an empty field in your dataset – or maybe in an important way, as a key supporting measurement or fundamental theoretical interpretative framework.
But some of those papers, despite having been peer reviewed, will be wrong, in small ways and large, and those erroneous results will propagate through your own results, possibly leading to your own paper being irretrievably flawed. But then your paper passes peer review, and gets used as the basis for subsequent work. Over time the entire scientific literature comes to resemble a house of cards.
Peer review gives scientists – and the lay public – a false sense of security regarding the soundness of scientific results. It also imposes an additional, and quite unnecessary, barrier to publication. It frequently takes months for a paper to work its way through the review process. A year or more is not unheard of, particularly if a paper is rejected, and the authors must start the whole process anew at a different journal, submitting their work as a grindstone for whatever rusty old axe the new referee is looking to sharpen. Far from ensuring errors are corrected, peer review slows down the error correction process. A bad paper can persist in the literature – being cited by other scientists – for some time, for years, before the refutation finally makes it to print ... at which point some (not all) will consider the original paper deboonked, and stop citing it (others, not being aware of the debooking, will continue to cite it). But what if the refutation is itself tendentious? The original authors may wish to reply, but their refutation of the refutation must now go through the peer review process as well, and on and on it interminably drags...
As to what is happening behind the scenes, no one – not the public, not other scientists – has any idea. The correspondence between referees and authors is rarely published along with the paper. Whether the review was meticulous or sloppy, whether the referee’s critiques warranted or absurd, is entirely opaque.
In essence, the peer review process slows down the publication duty cycle, thereby slowing down scientific debate, while taking much of that debate behind closed doors, where its quality cannot be evaluated by anyone but the participants.
One of the things I love the most about writing for you is that I don’t have to endure the insipid peer review process. After many years toiling in the crumbling ivory tower, the liberty to write what I want to write, the way I want to write it, about whatever subject I want to write about, without having to worry about anything but whether my readers will find it entertaining and thought-provoking, was like ascending to the fresh air of the cold mountain peaks after being buried in the cloying sulphur dioxide fumes of a third world city undergoing its first wave of industrialization. That freedom is very nearly it’s own form of payment.
But only nearly. It doesn’t actually pay the bills, and while my needs are modest – several eggs for breakfast, an abundant supply of coffee and liquor, a warm bed to sleep on – those needs exist. All of this is available for anyone to read, free of charge. You’re under no obligation to pay. You can just keep reading, if you like. But those who do pay have my deepest gratitude, and the knowledge that it is they, as the noble patrons of the arts, who make it possible for the masses to enjoy the occasional Postcard from Barsoom.
And now on with the show.
IV. Bullshit or Perish
Complaining about publication being too slow probably strikes some readers as being perverse, given that one of the signature features of the contemporary scientific literature is the incontinent profusion, the mind-numbing, unmanageable flood, of scientific papers that it produces.
But this is, in fact, a related problem.
Most of those papers are garbage. They are garbage for many reasons: some are simply wrong, some are irrelevant to anything that actually matters, some are at best quite marginal extensions of existing work.
This is also, at root, a consequence of the grant system.
In order to get a job, one must get grants. In order to get grants, one must publish. If one is not regularly publishing, one does not get grants, and therefore does not get a job (or, if one is at a soft money position, one loses one’s job). The system is designed to maximize a certain metric – the quantity of published papers. The system’s chosen method of quality control – peer review of grant proposals and scientific papers – incentivizes work that is relatively easy to publish, which is to say work that does not threaten existing paradigms, which is to say marginal advances. There is no particular incentive for work that is actually useful, or true, or broadly interesting; so long as the work can be published, that is all that actually matters.
This has lead to a sort of pathological neurosis in the scientific community, debasing what was once a spirited exploration of the nature of reality by iconoclastic Renaissance men into a careerist parlour game for oversocialized nerds. You see symptoms of this in all sorts of ways. There’s the broad popularity of statistical pettifoggery, in which researchers discover incredible results by hacking at their pees until they are sufficiently wee to achieve the transitive state of Model totally Falsified (or MtF, as they say in the business).
has been hammering away at this silly game for some time, as has the epidemiologist John Ioannidis3, whose seminal Why Most Published Biomedical Research is Wrong first brought the replication crisis to public attention, by pointing out that papers were drawing conclusions from such low levels of statistical significance that even a couple more datapoints can invert the results. This is why you get the breathless yo-yo headlines of ‘Vitamin E causes cancer’/’Vitamin E cures cancer’ in the popular scientific press every other year. There’s a good chance both of those papers got someone a job or a grant, by the way.In physics, there’s the obscene game of mathematical thought experiments, in which fantastical cosmological scenarios or particle physics models are proposed on the basis of more or less nothing but the whimsy of the authors, who are careful to ensure that their fabulism is entirely impossible to test using any conceivable experiment or observation, and therefore offers no possibility of actually advancing human understanding or yielding any useful technological development. Is the universe a holographic magnetic monopole on the inside of a rotating charged Kerr black hole internally characterized by an upside down reverse deSitter metric? Or is it a reversibly expanding superstring M-brane manifold with an exact twin made of antimatter that goes back in time from the Big Bang? Who knows? Who cares? Can any of this be tested without building a particle collider the size of the Hubble volume? No! Of course not! The untestability is the point!
In every field you can name there’s an absurd degree of bandwagon hopping. Climate change is the new government priority – better find a way to tie your research to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission, bonus points for discovering dire new developments in carbon dioxide doom porn. Oops, now everyone’s worried about COVID-19 – looks like you need to find a way to tie your research to mutation pathways from pangolin animal reservoirs (it did not come from a lab!), vaccine hesitancy, mask efficacy, online disinformation, or the beneficial epidemiological impacts of lockdowns, curfews, social distancing, one-way signs in supermarket aisles, or whatever other lunatic non-pharmaceutical intervention you can come up with. Ooohhh, now it’s systemic racism – quick, see what forms of esoteric invisible implicit bias witchcraft you can detect in the saccades of newborn babies watching YouTube cartoons featuring characters of different colours!
Then there’s paradigm lock. Again, you see this everywhere. All of the funding goes to research within a given paradigm; all of the new researchers are trained in that paradigm; alternatives are starved of funding, and do not develop; an entire community grows up around the hegemonic paradigm; that community captures the funding anew; and the cycle repeats. Greenhouse gases in climatology; dark matter in astronomy; the Big Bang in cosmology; the neo-Darwinian synthesis in biology; race-is-a-social-construct in anthropology4; the hostility of the archaeological community to the concept of a megalithic civilization during the Ice Age; and so on and so forth.
Bandwagons and paradigm-lock are of course related: you can think of the locked-in paradigms as fossilized bandwagons, what happens after a bandwagon reaches escape velocity, leaves behind the solid ground of sanity for the high luminiferous aether of pure theory, and grows into its final, terrifying form. Many of these bandwagons are launched due to the policy priorities of the state, which is always hungry for excuses to stick its micromanagerial tendrils ever deeper into the social fabric; climate change is an obvious example. However, the state putting its fingers on the scales probably isn’t necessary. In most cases it’s just social dynamics.
Considering all of these interrelated issues – the replication crisis, paradigm lock, bandwagon-hopping, the decline in scientific breakthroughs, the endless time wasted by scientists in bureaucratic compliance, the resources squandered on administration, the perverse incentives of the publish or perish system that lead to the generation of vast numbers of papers that primarily fall into the ontological categories of ‘trivial’, ‘wrong’, ‘not even wrong’, and ‘malicious fucking lies’ – one can see why, quite apart from the strategic political goal of owning the libs by goring their big dumb DEI ox, one might conclude that the clunky scientific research funding system we’ve been using to such demonstrably ill effect might be better off being stripped for parts and sold for scrap metal.
Now, if you’re a scientist happily ensconced in an established institution, you’re probably having one of two reactions to all of this. One is that you’re tearing your hair out and thinking that I’ve got this all wrong, that I’m wildly exaggerating the problems5, that it isn’t so bad as all that, and that tossing the national scientific research funding system in the trash is a wild overcorrection that throws out a very pretty baby with some only slightly polluted bathwater. The other reaction is that you’re nodding your head and agreeing, because you’ve seen it all up close yourself during your own nauseating stint in the sausage factory. Either way, the thought of the NSF, NIH, NASA, et al. being defunded is probably causing you to soil yourself, because after all you are human, and you need to eat.
If so, relax. There’s every possibility that it will be fine. In fact, there’s every possibility that what comes next will be a massive improvement, in every way. Given the severity of the problems, it’s hard to see how it could be worse...
V. Neopatronage and Popular Science
If the government is to take a much smaller role in funding scientific research, this does not mean that funding will be impossible to obtain. It only means that funding will need to be found in other ways.
To get an idea of how, we might look to history.
In past ages science was paid for primarily via one of two mechanisms.
One is self-funding. Those with sinecures – landed gentry, monks, country vicars – which left them with abundant free time would sometimes choose to spend their idle moments investigating the natural world, as a hobby. Such gentlemen scientists played a very significant role in the development of natural philosophy. Their work might often be amateurish – though sometimes the amateur’s eye is an advantage – but their independent sources of income meant that they were free to work on whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and to reach whatever conclusions their own logical reasoning and intuitive intellect guided them to. The institution of tenure at universities is meant to replicate this freedom and leisure by securing the positions and incomes of professors; in practice, as we’ve seen it, it has done so very imperfectly ... in large part because the grant and peer review system did an end run around this job security.
The other institution commonly used to fund scientific inquiry was patronage. A wealthy house, for example the Medicis, might keep learned men around in order to be known as patrons of the arts and sciences. Occasionally they would be expected to work on problems of immediate interest to their patrons – helping to design the city’s defences, or producing propagandistic artworks glorifying the patron – but in general they were given the freedom to work on whatever they liked, with the understanding that whatever renown they won within intellectual circles would reflect upon the glory of the great house that supported their work.
In a modern context it is not hard to see how these examples will express themselves.
The gentlemen scientist needs almost no modification, indeed self-funded scientific amateurs already exist in some abundance. Retired engineers or lucky men who made their fortune on the stock market sometimes use their free time and whatever resources they have to pursue scientific research, often with a conspicuous lack of concern for norms of academic respectability. Amateur astronomers, for example, are much more happy to speculate about alternative cosmological models such as the electric universe of Peratt, Scott, and Thornhill, or the semi-steady state cosmology of Arp and Doyle. The Tedesco brothers, retired engineers, have set up a mobile laboratory by tricking out an RV with all manner of sensors, which they drive around the shores of Long Island, tracking UAPs and orbs. Bryan ‘Moonbrah’ Johnson self-experiments with caloric restriction, supplements, and blood transfusions in his quest for super-longevity, gradually transforming himself into Morbius the Living Vampire. The mad wizard
probably falls into this archetype: he spent most of his career as a freelance computer programmer, but his web bot predictions enabled him to get into Bitcoin very early, as a result of which it seems he’s independently wealthy (at any rate, he seems utterly unconcerned with finances).
If you’re a career scientist, however, ‘be independently wealthy’ isn’t helpful advice. That leaves patronage.
Patronage can be obtained either from billionaires, or from crowdfunding platforms. As an example of the former, the Russian oligarch Yuri Milner has been dispensing incredible sums of money through his various Breakthrough Initiatives, with the over-arching goal of discovering life – ideally intelligent, technological life – elsewhere in the universe. Breakthrough funds everything from conventional SETI programs, via Breakthrough Listen; to the ambitious Breakthrough Starshot which aims to send a fleet of space probes to do a flyby of the nearest exoplanet, Proxima Centauri B; to UAP research, in which a growing number of scientists are attempting to bring professional rigour to the investigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Crowdfunded patronage for the sciences is still very much in its infancy – the majority of crowdfunding goes towards projects in the creative arts, this being, quite frankly, what most people are interested in. There are many additional reasons that this model hasn’t been widely applied in the sciences. Both scientists and the general public assume that scientific funding will come from tax dollars; the general public concludes – quite correctly – that they’ve already paid, while scientists conclude – again quite correctly – that writing a grant proposal is a better investment of their time than maintaining a Patreon page. Most scientific research is of vanishingly small general interest: it is designed to appeal to scientific bureaucracies, not to the lay public ... by no accident, state funding for the arts has a similar effect on the arts that bureaucratic committees fund. Scientific research tends to be extremely slow, and its results uncertain; a researcher cannot guarantee that he will find anything interesting in a given amount of time, especially within the boundaries of short public attention spans. Finally, much scientific research is very expensive, particularly relative to the degree of public interest that it can generate: a facility such as CERN runs easily into the billions of dollars, but does the general public care enough about what colour quarks are for a billion people to agree to pay a dollar each to keep the charged particles colliding?
Many of these problems are not really problems with a crowdfunding model, but problems with the modern scientific culture, which has been warped by the imperatives of scientific bureaucracy. If a research team wants to conduct an extraordinarily expensive series of experiments, but cannot generate enough public interest to convince some fraction of the public to pay for those experiments, are those experiments actually worth doing? Is it ethically permissible to use the tax dollars confiscated from the public to fund a small number of people to develop what is essentially a hobby that no one really cares about? Conversely, if scientists had to obtain their own funding from an interested public, would this not realign scientific inquiry towards questions that people actually care about, as supposed to questions that provide bureaucrats with a cozy feeling of job security?
The question of expense connects back to the central planning problem that Hossenfelder identified. Extremely expensive research programs are almost invariably a result of over-investment in fields that are yielding diminishing returns. In a crowdfunding system, research directions that push beyond their limits will simply be unable to obtain funding, because the public will lose interest when the point of diminishing returns is reached. The attention market will then naturally redirect funding towards other promising fields, in which interesting things can be learned more cheaply, with the mature fields lying fallow for some amount of time ... until, that is, advances in the other fields catch up with the state of knowledge in the fallow field, the potential for (affordable) cross-fertilized breakthroughs accumulates, and public interest can once again be ignited.
A crowdfunding model will have a dramatic impact on scientific culture – much of it salutary, although there are certainly potential pitfalls.
Crowdfunded science will not only need to prioritize research that is generally interesting; it will need to communicate itself in an interesting fashion. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. Bureaucratic science speaks with the wooden tongue of bureaucracy, laden down with impenetrable jargon and acronyms, written in the ponderous third-person-passive voice from nowhere, deliberately flat and dull. Sandblasting away every identifying characteristic of the authorial voice is meant to make scientific writing more objective and rational, but the effect is simply to make scientific papers both extremely boring, and due to this egregious tedium, unnecessarily difficult to understand ... including for other scientists. There is a sharp delineation in the style of scientific writing before and after the imposition of the peer review system: documents from the early twentieth century and before are frequently lively, sprinkled with wit, jokes, and clever analogies; those from the post-war period are the leaden products of bland and impersonal committees. This is an unnecessary barrier to understanding – which is the entire purpose of bureaucratic language, which seeks security through soporific obscurity – and undoubtedly contributes to both the public’s generally dismal level of scientific understanding, and the increasing isolation of different scientific subfields from one another.
For crowdfunded scientists, bureaucratic writing styles will be a handicap they cannot afford. To the contrary, communicating well – which is to say clearly and entertainingly, using analogies, metaphors, vivid imagery, and humour – will be absolutely essential. This will only help to improve the general public’s scientific literacy, but it will also, crucially, increase the mutual legibility of different scientific domains, encouraging greater connectivity of humanity’s fragmenting knowledge base, and very probably accelerating the rate of scientific development.
Scientific education is closely related to scientific communication. As it stands, education in the sciences proceeds primarily in the classroom, and at a very distant second by way of public outreach (e.g. giving public lectures, making YouTube videos, writing articles for the popular scientific press). Within the academy, lecturing is often seen as something of a hateful chore, a duty imposed as a condition of employment, while outreach is at best an occasional diversion (outreach being almost wholly irrelevant to hiring or tenure committees). For independent crowdfunded researchers these distinctions collapse entirely: the educational materials they publish are also outreach materials, which are also the primary service they provide to their patrons, while also being the bait, as it were, by which new patrons can be attracted.
There is furthermore no reason why the publication of new scientific results – distinct from educational materials – cannot be performed in a similar style. Just as the peer-reviewed grant committee created the peer-reviewed journal, crowdfunded science will spell its death. This should be greeted with nothing other than jubilation. The privately owned peer-reviewed journals are an absolute scam. They soak researchers for thousands of dollars in page charges to publish; upon publication, the work (which was paid for by the tax-payer) is locked up behind a paywall, accessible only to those with academic affiliations, or to those willing to cough up $30 for a ten-page pdf. The journals themselves provide no services to justify this outrageous copyright trolling. The peer review is provided free of charge, via volunteer labour from the scientific community; the editing performed by the journal is usually perfunctory at best, with many published papers – particularly those written by authors for whom English is a second language – being littered with grammatical and spelling mistakes; in many cases (particularly in fields in which LaTeX remains the standard) the authors have already performed the typesetting. The result is that the profit margins of these journals are frequently on the order of a piratical 40%. Oh and while we’re at it, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert was one of the major players in getting the entire sordid industry rolling.
In place of peer-reviewed journals, crowdfunded science will simply publish results as they are ready, probably on existing blogging platforms. There will be no peer review. Critiques can be made in the open, and debated in comments sections, on social media, on podcasts and livestreams; other researchers will be quite free to publish their own critiques, on their own platforms, as soon as they are written. There will certainly still be a place for the venerable LaTeX-generated pdf – which in almost all respects is a superior format for the preservation of textual information – but these can simply be uploaded to servers such as ArXiV, as has been standard in the exact sciences now for a couple of decades.
For scientists more worried about their social status than their paychecks, crowdfunded scientific patronage may actually act to increase the prestige associated with science. Historically, patronage was primarily engaged in because wealthy, powerful, high-status people thought it made them look good. That’s still the main reason billionaires engage in patronage, to the small degree they do. This is also to a large degree why governments fund science today: there is not a government on the planet that thinks astronomy or archaeology are particularly germane to national security, for example. In practice such fields are funded as a means of aggrandizing the managerial state. If the state gets out of the game, it opens the door to the lay public to get into it, who will no longer have the excuse that their tax dollars are already paying for such investigations. Bragging at dinner parties about the research projects one supports could easily become a sort of competitive game for the educated middle class, who not only get to look generous, but intelligent, sophisticated, and knowledgeable as well. People are more invested in the things they personally decide to support with their own money; they feel less like spectators, and more like participants. Imagine a world where it is considered higher status to donate a few hundred dollars a month to scientific research programs – and to understand those programs – than it is to spend a comparable amount on sportsball tickets.
Not every researcher will be able to make the shift from government bureaucrat to independent crowd-funded public intellectual. Indeed, it is likely that most will not be able to: some will lack the charisma required for effective communication, others will be too specialized within a sub-sub-sub-field to engage in research that is of enough interest to anyone for them to obtain funding. This is for the best. There’s far too much ‘science’ happening as it is, almost all of it of low quality, much of it of frankly negative value – wrong, or ‘not even wrong’, simply tangential to anything resembling reality. Meanwhile, a decade of DEI policies have filled the institutions with mediocre diversity hires who almost certainly cannot survive the competitive pressures of the open attention market. If so, there’s every reason to cull them from the professional herd.
Of course, there are research programs that probably are valuable enough to pursue, but aren’t flashy enough to attract public interest. Much of the applied sciences fits into this. Here, the private sector should play a much larger role than it currently is. It was not long ago that corporate laboratories such as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC were a primary place of employment for scientists, absorbing much of the excess talent generated by graduate school programs, and developing world-changing technologies. This has largely attenuated, as corporations have realized they can just let the government pay for basic research and reap the profits themselves by privatizing anything commercializable, while focusing their own efforts on such noble pursuits as stock buybacks. Nevertheless, it is worth noting quite a large amount of transformative research is still taking place in corporate laboratories: SpaceX has made incredible strides in launch technology; virtually the entirety of artificial intelligence developments have happened in the private sector. Between those high-profile examples and the venture capital ecosystem, incredible things are starting to happen in the private sector again. Boom Supersonic is developing a supersonic civilian airliner; Monumental Labs is developing AI-controlled robots to carve marble sculptures to beautify our architecture again; companies like NuScale, Westinghouse, and Rolls Royce are developing nuclear microreactors and small modular reactors to power remote communities, military bases, small cities, and data centres; Palmer Luckey is looking to revolutionize manufacturing with the $1.5 billion Arsenel-1, a fully software-controlled, reconfigurable hyperscale manufacturing facility meant for building advanced defence robotics at scale. These are all more along the lines of engineering than ‘pure science’, but historically a great deal of science has been fostered in such environments.
A crowdfunded scientific community will be forced to become far more tolerant of heresy, which is to say ‘pseudoscience’: research in fields not currently considered scientific, or research using theoretical paradigms not currently considered socially acceptable. This is because the general public is, as a rule, fascinated by novelty. This means that there will be a certain amount, probably a large amount, of bullshit that gets funded ... though such a strategy will be a dangerous one, as a scientist’s ability to attract funding will depend to a large degree on the reputation they accrue, and if the public decides that they are a peddler of bullshit, they may find that their funding dries up. On the other hand, this means that paradigm lock becomes much more difficult: peer review committees will no longer be able to starve competing paradigms of funding , and researchers coming forward with a novel interpretation will have an easier time attracting an audience, purely on the basis of novelty, particularly if their early work is cheap to fund. The result will likely be a pervasive paradigm agnosticism, in which, rather than individual fields being dominated for extended periods of time by hegemomic theoretical frameworks, multiple paradigms coexist and overlap, with their irreconcilable aspects serving as a source of creative tension.
Crowdfunded science is still barely in its infancy, but there are already some pioneering examples one can point to. I’ve already mentioned the excellent
, statistician to the stars. The Jolly Heretic does brilliant original work in evolutionary biology and human population genetics, while also making important contributions to the humanities such as compiling his new biography of Jonathan Bowden, Shaman of the Radical Right. performs careful statistical investigations of population genetics and human biodiversity. There’s also friend of the blog , who’s been thoroughly re-examining the basis of contemporary physics at his Fields and Energy blog, and who recently launched the Society for Post-Quantum Research.
Christopher Langan, the world’s smartest man and father of the only fully self-consistent cosmology, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, has been essentially crowd-funding his work for some time, though he keeps getting chased off of platforms like Patreon due to his disdain for politically correct pieties. Then there’s Mike McCulloch, whose theory of quantized inertia is either batshit insane or a transformative theory of everything that might unlock faster-than-light travel; at any rate, his refreshing insistence that physics should be testable has made him no friends in academia, and he’s had a rough time trying to get a job, but you can find his Patreon here.
It’s worth noting that, different as their fields of research are, all of these men have a few things in common. They’re all extremely intelligent. They’re outspoken right-wingers, happily and unashamedly thumbing their noses at the pieties of the liberal establishment (that isn’t to say there aren’t a few liberals trying this mode as well, but for the obvious reason that rightists have been forced into this direction more often that leftists, there are more of the former). They are also openly critical of the theoretical paradigms dominating their diverse fields, while boldly advancing their own alternatives. Finally, all of these men are pioneers, forced by circumstance into finding creative ways of funding their work, and though they are currently bizarre outliers in the general context of the scientific community, in time I suspect the model they are developing – in which support is obtained, not from anonymous bureaucratic committees, but from passionate audiences – will come to be play a far more prominent role in scientific career paths.
And I think both science and society will be much stronger for it.
For the most part, I don’t do crowdfunded science myself – Postcards From Barsoom is more of a creative writing project. Frankly, after spending so long writing nothing but computer code and scientific papers, the last thing I wanted to do was more science! But maybe I will start such a project, I have been considering this for some time... But for now, my time, my mind, my soul is dedicated to sending Postcards from Barsoom, an endeavour maintained entirely by the generosity of a very small, and very distinguished fraction of my readers. Just imagine: you, too, could brag to your friends that you are one of the few, the proud, the aristocratic, the men and women of refined taste and distinction, whose support enables an alcoholic essayist to opine at length on diverse topics in whichever deranged fashion his perverse imagination can devise. You can stand in the balcony, looking down with haughty disdain at the unbathed masses, secure in the knowledge of your impeccable breeding. Yes, this can be you:
All you need to do is
And those who had invested great time and effort in mastering the complexities of the model will be naturally disinclined to abandon it.
Except for Greek minds. They went everywhere. If you think you had an original idea, you probably just haven’t read enough Greek philosophy.
It’s worth mentioning, and no accident, that both of these fine gentlemen were on the right side of the COVID debacle.
Why does no one ever point out that anthropology is a social construct?
Out of personal bitterness, you may well think, though I assure you I’ve been saying these things privately for many years now, including while I too was happily ensconced in established institutions.
Charlatanry is definitely a hazard. But there's already a whole lot of that in the existing system. IMO the most effective way of mitigating this is to make debate as open as possible.
As to transformative breakthroughs coming from the study of obscure subjects, well yes this does happen, but this argument is also used to justify the funding of a great amount of obscure trivia which doesn't lead anywhere.
This begs the question - what real scientific breakthroughs have been made at universities over the past few decades?