As someone who has been working on academic projects as a software engineer, one aspect that will be hard to replicate is that as a founder and VC, Nat already had the respect of many software engineers, and thus he could make this a high status thing to work on. A great way for a smart programmer early in their career to get some success and reputation.
Most academic projects, if you do some brilliant software engineering to achieve some research goal, no other software engineers will be able to evaluate your work, and few will pay any attention. And the pay is typically bad. So it’s just really hard to recruit smart software engineers to work on these academic projects.
I've actually been fairly well paid to write academic software. If you're a contractor then they can put your work writing software down as 'equipment' rather than as staffing costs. Lots of projects have big equipment budgets but are constrained to pay low salaries.
I love this "distributed model" of problem solving! So you get all kinds of individuals interested in outcomes, and much more creativity is invested over the course of the project rather than with a traditional NIH project model. Just this "distributed model" plus the creative leadership that determined they needed to resource full-time coders to effectively get the job done was not lost on me. This is the very pinnacle of innovation that should be emulated by NIH grant recipients et al.
Where is the accounting for negative externalities of the prize?
While this is a great success for the funder's brand, the winners, and the specific problem area, a government ought to account the thousands of people working on this niche problem as a tremendous cost, possibly a massive waste. (A compelling counterpoint is that perhaps this project was made "fun" in a way that drew in primarily non-scientists, or counterfactually ineffective scientists, or drew time that they would not have spent on valuable projects.)
Still: if the primary function of these prizes is as a form of advertisement, then we must regard them as good policy if and only if we strongly wish to draw efforts into a subfield. Mathematically, this cannot be the case for all science funding.
As someone who has been working on academic projects as a software engineer, one aspect that will be hard to replicate is that as a founder and VC, Nat already had the respect of many software engineers, and thus he could make this a high status thing to work on. A great way for a smart programmer early in their career to get some success and reputation.
Most academic projects, if you do some brilliant software engineering to achieve some research goal, no other software engineers will be able to evaluate your work, and few will pay any attention. And the pay is typically bad. So it’s just really hard to recruit smart software engineers to work on these academic projects.
I’m not sure what to advocate as a solution
I've actually been fairly well paid to write academic software. If you're a contractor then they can put your work writing software down as 'equipment' rather than as staffing costs. Lots of projects have big equipment budgets but are constrained to pay low salaries.
I love this "distributed model" of problem solving! So you get all kinds of individuals interested in outcomes, and much more creativity is invested over the course of the project rather than with a traditional NIH project model. Just this "distributed model" plus the creative leadership that determined they needed to resource full-time coders to effectively get the job done was not lost on me. This is the very pinnacle of innovation that should be emulated by NIH grant recipients et al.
Where is the accounting for negative externalities of the prize?
While this is a great success for the funder's brand, the winners, and the specific problem area, a government ought to account the thousands of people working on this niche problem as a tremendous cost, possibly a massive waste. (A compelling counterpoint is that perhaps this project was made "fun" in a way that drew in primarily non-scientists, or counterfactually ineffective scientists, or drew time that they would not have spent on valuable projects.)
Still: if the primary function of these prizes is as a form of advertisement, then we must regard them as good policy if and only if we strongly wish to draw efforts into a subfield. Mathematically, this cannot be the case for all science funding.