(A) Call this “Request For Researchers” (RFR). OpenPhil has tried a more general version of this in the form of the Century Fellowship, but they discontinued this. That in turn is a Thiel Fellowship clone, like several other programs (e.g. Magnificent Grants). The early years of the Thiel Fellowship show that this can work, but I think it’s hard to do well, and it does not seem like OpenPhil wants to keep trying.
(B) I think it would be great for some people to get support for multiple years. PhDs work like this, and good research can be hard to do over a series of short few-month grants. But also the long durations just do make them pretty high-stakes bets, and you need to select hard not just on research skill but also the character traits that mean people don’t need external incentives.
(C) I think “agenda-agnostic” and “high quality” might be hard to combine. It seems like there are three main ways to select good people: rely on competence signals (e.g. lots of cited papers, works at a selective organisation), rely on more-or-less standardised tests (e.g. a typical programming interview, SATs), or rely on inside-view judgements of what’s good in some domain. New researchers are hard to assess by the first, I don’t think there’s a cheap programming-interview-but-for-research-in-general that spots research talent at high rates, and therefore it seems you have to rely a bunch on the third. And this is very correlated with agendas; a researcher in domain X will be good at judging ideas in that domain, but less so in others.
The style of this that I’d find most promising is:
Someone with a good overview of the field (e.g. at OpenPhil) picks a few “department chairs”, each with some agenda/topic.
Each department chair picks a few research leads who they think have promising work/ideas in the direction of their expertise.
These research leads then get collaborators/money/ops/compute through the department.
I think this would be better than a grab-bag of people selected according to credentials and generic competence, because I think an important part of the research talent selection process is the part where someone with good research taste endorses the agenda takes of someone else on agenda-specific inside-view grounds.
(A) Call this “Request For Researchers” (RFR). OpenPhil has tried a more general version of this in the form of the Century Fellowship, but they discontinued this. That in turn is a Thiel Fellowship clone, like several other programs (e.g. Magnificent Grants). The early years of the Thiel Fellowship show that this can work, but I think it’s hard to do well, and it does not seem like OpenPhil wants to keep trying.
(B) I think it would be great for some people to get support for multiple years. PhDs work like this, and good research can be hard to do over a series of short few-month grants. But also the long durations just do make them pretty high-stakes bets, and you need to select hard not just on research skill but also the character traits that mean people don’t need external incentives.
(C) I think “agenda-agnostic” and “high quality” might be hard to combine. It seems like there are three main ways to select good people: rely on competence signals (e.g. lots of cited papers, works at a selective organisation), rely on more-or-less standardised tests (e.g. a typical programming interview, SATs), or rely on inside-view judgements of what’s good in some domain. New researchers are hard to assess by the first, I don’t think there’s a cheap programming-interview-but-for-research-in-general that spots research talent at high rates, and therefore it seems you have to rely a bunch on the third. And this is very correlated with agendas; a researcher in domain X will be good at judging ideas in that domain, but less so in others.
The style of this that I’d find most promising is:
Someone with a good overview of the field (e.g. at OpenPhil) picks a few “department chairs”, each with some agenda/topic.
Each department chair picks a few research leads who they think have promising work/ideas in the direction of their expertise.
These research leads then get collaborators/money/ops/compute through the department.
I think this would be better than a grab-bag of people selected according to credentials and generic competence, because I think an important part of the research talent selection process is the part where someone with good research taste endorses the agenda takes of someone else on agenda-specific inside-view grounds.