Braben - Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization

1 - The Damocles Zone

Talks about how the zone is irreversible, requires broad solutions to major problems

Richard Hamming - Everything starts with fluids or dyanmics
Brett Victor - Work on problems that people don’t realize as problems
How to tackle science
- valid modes for the future?
  - spin many plates
  - centrally directed
    - khnuzian dynamics of science
What does braben view on scientific production?
- Finding the projects and finding the applications of the results
What is the root cause of the inability to fund these?
- BP defunded the venture research program, now no one is willing to fund
Commitment is what transforms ordinary research into transformative research
What works on your problem? Why is a problem yours?

Inprecision of what is transformative research
- This may be actually deliberate, so not to exclude things you can’t solve
Can you separate the scientist from the problem?
Do solutions have to be structured?
- How do scientists see themselves?
Are the hard problems the important problems?
- How do we select for ideas?
- Are good ideas expected to bubble up ot the top?
Should we select for problems that can’t be separated? Some problems are hard, but they can be separated, but this is orthongal to being hard
Braben conflates the difficult & the interesting
Expand/exploit for problems?
- When are you expanding into new fields?
Why is freedom important
- Monte Carlo methods
  - random walks
- Generates higher variance, but not necessarily better results
- Freedom is actually a constratining factor because now you no longer need to worry about scale
- success attracts other people, and that in turn becomes ossification
- localism
  - each field must define what their freedom is
VC funding
- inputs/outputs are both money
  - “do things that don’t scale”?

objectification
- adoption of math where it does not apply?
  - economics, sociology, etc
aligns with china’s “china is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers”
enormous expenditures -> viruses are still killers -> isn’t this objectification
grants are not mentored
“eastern medicine” -> orientalist approaches here
federal funding and freedom do not necessarily generate better approaches
- middle east studies had freedom for quite a while
reshaping of capital markets post-2008
is the post-WWII euphoria Braben identifies real? Or is it just because of cheap money?
no investor seeking long term gains expects decisive short term returns

Freedom/secrecy are at conflict
open science vs open source?
secrecy for whom?
can we enable younger scientists?
consensus
- popularity
- age increases
china? empowering younger researchers? chinese science statistics
need for harmonization capping discoveries? Everything is made by consensus?
- peer review, collaborators
universities as a force for social change?
- are we just admitting too many people?
Are the measurements bad? Should we stop measuring output? Or at least limit time-forward metrics?
Up or out promotion paths?
Calling out a focus on efficiency?
- Mitchel: Economentality?
- Redudancy is valuable -> gives replication
- Legibility of research
- measure outcomes -> is this reading the arrow backwards from assessing invidiual people?
the shift in the 70’s seems to be a mentality shift:
- science is no longer generically good
- science needs to illuminate the future
metrics result in consensus because everyone aims towards the same thing
make scientists as early as possible?
- stop treating scientific freedom as a reward?
popular media -> science has become homogenized
Lenin was a mushroom
What is consensus good for?

Threat Fatigue -> losing signals in all the noise
Adventure fund attempted to fund “risky” research in the UK in 2002
Braben suggests that peer review and consensus are the problem
- scientist reputations are slowly earned and quickly damaged - 108
- responsbility shared is responsbility denied
searching for the “best value for money” is what’s leading to the reduction of risk
- can this be harnessed? Can we capitalize on the risk somehow?
Braben suggests that confidence in your research leads to significant and transformative research
TR must select for “visionaries”, not just glory-seekers
- measure devotion/hunger
  - how? signals for these are quite bad
Musical chairs with the rules are what’s being attempted with the smaller fixes on the grant cycle, we need to rethink all of it
langlands program and TR, how did this come about?
The Medical Research Council in the UK as an example