I pretty strongly disagree with the thrust of this post. As other commenters have pointed out, public outreach projects are inevitably heavy-tailed ex-ante, and if we think that public outreach projects are worth funding then most outputs will be duds. One could make the argument that public outreach projects aren’t worth it in expectation, or that there’s some good reason to think that it’s silly to fund video games for public outreach, but generically picking on grants that look bad ex-post seems like a very bad way to evaluate funding strategies to me.
I pretty strongly disagree with the thrust of this post. As other commenters have pointed out, public outreach projects are inevitably heavy-tailed ex-ante, and if we think that public outreach projects are worth funding then most outputs will be duds. One could make the argument that public outreach projects aren’t worth it in expectation, or that there’s some good reason to think that it’s silly to fund video games for public outreach, but generically picking on grants that look bad ex-post seems like a very bad way to evaluate funding strategies to me.