I’m a bit curious to hear more about the points you raise in the conclusion, and in particular
My own success as a metascience VC would have been far less if I had been forced to project a high expected-value for each grant. Indeed, such a requirement would have literally ruled out many of the highest-impact grants that I made (or else I would have been forced to produce bullshit projections)
In my mind, they don’t quite follow from the rest of the post? For example, you could frame the donations you directed to meta-science as a) in a cause area, meta-science, that you expected to be impactful, and b) to teams that you expected would do great work (and then maybe c) targetting meta-science at academic fields who are impactful/affect decisions/etc.). So it’s not clear to me why you wouldn’t expect them to have high expected value ex-ante.
Anyways, great post, and I imagine that the conclusion tries distills your intuition rather than trying to provide justification for your takeaways. But I was curious.
Fair point. I’m just thinking of grants like the Reproducibility Project in Psychology. At the time I asked for funding for this (late 2012-early 2013), I absolutely did not foresee that it would be published in Science in 2015, that Science would ask me to write an accompanying editorial, or that it would become one of the standard citations (with nearly 8,000 citations on Google Scholar). At the time, I would only have predicted a much more normal-size impact, and mostly I was just relying on gut intuition that “this seems really promising.”
Great post, thanks for sharing.
I’m a bit curious to hear more about the points you raise in the conclusion, and in particular
In my mind, they don’t quite follow from the rest of the post? For example, you could frame the donations you directed to meta-science as a) in a cause area, meta-science, that you expected to be impactful, and b) to teams that you expected would do great work (and then maybe c) targetting meta-science at academic fields who are impactful/affect decisions/etc.). So it’s not clear to me why you wouldn’t expect them to have high expected value ex-ante.
Anyways, great post, and I imagine that the conclusion tries distills your intuition rather than trying to provide justification for your takeaways. But I was curious.
Fair point. I’m just thinking of grants like the Reproducibility Project in Psychology. At the time I asked for funding for this (late 2012-early 2013), I absolutely did not foresee that it would be published in Science in 2015, that Science would ask me to write an accompanying editorial, or that it would become one of the standard citations (with nearly 8,000 citations on Google Scholar). At the time, I would only have predicted a much more normal-size impact, and mostly I was just relying on gut intuition that “this seems really promising.”