LW - Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution by Abhishaike Mahajan

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Things I learned talking to the new breed of scientific institution, published by Abhishaike Mahajan on August 30, 2024 on LessWrong.
Note: this article is sponsored by and cross-posted to the
Good Science Project. They also write a fair bit, and
their articles were essential reading for writing this essay!
Also, this article would not be possible without the hours of discussion/editing help I've had with several people from these institutions, and a few outside of them. Huge shout-out to all of them!
Introduction
Arcadia Science,
Speculative Technologies,
FutureHouse,
Arc, and
Convergent.
All of these are a new form of scientific institute.
Most are funded entirely by a few billionaires. Most are non-profits. Most of them focus on the life-sciences. Most of them have sprung up in just the last few years.
They do all also have one common thread: a grand statement. We are an experiment in a new way to do science.
And they are! Traditionally, research is conducted in academic or private industry labs - dependent on NIH grants in the former and markets in the latter. Given the (often singular) sources of no-strings-attached funding, these new institutions need not satisfy either the NIH or the markets, allowing them to conduct research in a unique fashion.
In one sense, the experimental aspect of these institutions revolves around the focus of the research itself, addressing fields or using methods that the founders - correctly or not - view as underserved/underutilized. But, on a more subtle level, the experimental aspect could be more closely tied to the culture of these organizations.
Institutions like Arcadia, FutureHouse, and the rest could be viewed as the production of auteurs - a term from filmmaking for films with such a heavy sense of the director's personal taste that the film is inseparable from the director.
This is where the novelty within these institutions primarily lie, in how the founders of the institute wish science was conducted. And wielding billions of dollars, thousands of hours of work, and hundreds of scientists as a means to test whether their theories are correct.
Of course, nothing under the sun is truly new. There is an age-old history of scientist dissatisfaction with how 'things are traditionally done', and confidently building new institutions to solve the problems they've seen. Many of these are now household names amongst researchers:
Broad Institute,
Whitehead Institute,
Max Planck Society,
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and so on. Each of these were started with similar contrarian mentalities as the current era of institutions.
Some of these were more experimental than others, most notably HHMI,
which prized itself on its focus on interdisciplinary research above all else. But all were experiments, many of them extraordinarily successful. Yet, the current iteration of new research institutes is still arguably more experimental than its ancestors. While the last generation of institutes was typically tied directly to universities, the current era of ones (outside of Arc) are independent, allowing them a larger sense of opinionation on how science should be done.
But, despite this experimentation, there is relatively little information out there on what's going on inside them. Not in terms of science, but more-so the vibes. While aspects of these organizations have been written about previously, such as in articles in
The Atlantic and
Endpoints, they aren't assessing vibes! These other articles are, first and foremost, news-pieces; valuable, but lack any opinionated observations on the inner-workings of the institutions.
Nadia Asparouhova's essay on the subject comes closest to this regarding the history of these institutions, but still few details on how they practically function. This essay attempts to discuss that missing s...