My answer would be to split up the donation money into 2 parts—maybe 1⁄2, 1⁄2, or 1/3rd, 2/3rds—and give 1⁄2 or 2/3rds to established people or projects in universities/institutions which have a high probability of having an ‘impact’., and allocate the remaining funds to several smaller ‘startup’ or ‘incubator’ type projects or people who are not in universities/institutions which are riskier but are neglected and may pay off. (the smaller donations should not be too small—e.g. not 1$ for each grantee—but rather should have some ‘threshold level’ sufficient to get the project up and running in ‘1.0’ form. I could also see requiring or asking the ‘startup’ to find ‘donation matching funds’ as a form of peer review for some risky proposal—ie if you will give them say 5G$ or 10G $ , ask them to find the same amount from other sources (who think they have a good idea, and then you will match it.)
I’m biased to the view I see an overcontration of funding towards big and established institutions—‘preferential attachement’ as they say in network theory—rich get richer, poor get poorer, although the ‘rich’ sometimes say their research is devoted to helping the poor. To use an analogy (which may be offensive to vegans, but it can be phrased in vegan terms as well) , too often some well funded research is too weighted to figuring out how to give fish to starving people, rather than giving them a fishing line and hook so they can get their own fish. )
My answer would be to split up the donation money into 2 parts—maybe 1⁄2, 1⁄2, or 1/3rd, 2/3rds—and give 1⁄2 or 2/3rds to established people or projects in universities/institutions which have a high probability of having an ‘impact’., and allocate the remaining funds to several smaller ‘startup’ or ‘incubator’ type projects or people who are not in universities/institutions which are riskier but are neglected and may pay off. (the smaller donations should not be too small—e.g. not 1$ for each grantee—but rather should have some ‘threshold level’ sufficient to get the project up and running in ‘1.0’ form. I could also see requiring or asking the ‘startup’ to find ‘donation matching funds’ as a form of peer review for some risky proposal—ie if you will give them say 5G$ or 10G $ , ask them to find the same amount from other sources (who think they have a good idea, and then you will match it.)
I’m biased to the view I see an overcontration of funding towards big and established institutions—‘preferential attachement’ as they say in network theory—rich get richer, poor get poorer, although the ‘rich’ sometimes say their research is devoted to helping the poor. To use an analogy (which may be offensive to vegans, but it can be phrased in vegan terms as well) , too often some well funded research is too weighted to figuring out how to give fish to starving people, rather than giving them a fishing line and hook so they can get their own fish. )