Major foundations and mega-donors increasingly demand 'legible' impact, which steers money to elite universities and already-crowned scientists. This misses breakthrough ideas that sit outside the system and would benefit from direct patronage of individuals or new research orgs. Reviving 'crazy philanthropy' could seed entirely new fields rather than marginally boosting the status quo.
— If philanthropic norms shift, the frontier of science could move faster by bypassing institutional sclerosis and backing neglected, high-variance bets.
Alex Tabarrok
2025.09.23
56% relevant
Cowen and Tabarrok argue the NEA worked best in its early discretionary phase and that elite‑controlled French subsidies yield little‑seen films—both echo the case for small, flexible patronage of creators over bureaucratized institutions.
Stuart Buck
2025.08.22
100% relevant
Examples include HHMI’s Investigator model relying on university-validated stars, Ken Griffin’s $300M to Harvard, and proposed alternatives like Analogue Group and Convergent Research, with Katalin Karikó as a missed-by-bureaucracy case.
Curtis Yarvin
2025.08.22
65% relevant
Both critique conventional big‑donor habits and argue for strategy that alters the idea‑production pipeline; this piece emphasizes prestige engineering via elites rather than legibility metrics, complementing the call to back nontraditional pathways.
Santa Fe Institute
2025.07.29
55% relevant
By arguing that presentist metrics erase the lineage of ideas (prequels/sequels) and valorize a tiny set of 'classics,' the piece implicitly supports redirecting resources away from legibility-driven systems toward overlooked contributors that sustain the storyline of discovery.
2025.07.01
50% relevant
By arguing that only federal funding reliably backs basic science (post‑Bell Labs) and quantifying returns to public R&D, the piece implicitly counters the notion that philanthropy can substitute for institutional, large‑scale public support.