Forget the MacArthurs. Despite Rod MacArthur's intentions when he set up the foundation, to give to people missed by the other foundations, to people who really need the money, etc., the foundation gives money to the same people everyone else funds. Yes, the money comes without strings, which is nice, but for the last ten years (which I'…
Forget the MacArthurs. Despite Rod MacArthur's intentions when he set up the foundation, to give to people missed by the other foundations, to people who really need the money, etc., the foundation gives money to the same people everyone else funds. Yes, the money comes without strings, which is nice, but for the last ten years (which I've been tracking) the majority of the grants go to people who have secure gigs, mostly at universities. They don't need the grant money either to survive or to do good work.
The Mac Fellows program gets the foundation a LOT of press annually, more than any other program by the foundation, or any other foundation for that matter. But it's a relatively small percentage of their annual outlay. Think of it as overhead expense for PR. The "Genius Grant" moniker is worth a lot, and the foundation didn't even come up with it. So they can be coy about it.
I feel this is a scaling problem. If you can only give to 20 people everyone chases the same 20. Same as VCs in some ways - everyone goes for the hyped investments. Once you scale the offering to 200 or a 1000, this should hopefully get back to its original intentions !
And really indexing article too btw, thanks for sharing!
Maybe. But the MacArthur Foundation really does seem to be captured by the same conservative spirit that prevails in the foundation world. They almost have to be in order to maintain their standing.
Contrast them with Theil and Cowen. Those guys each has a vision of the world, a sense of things they want to see done. They make their funding decisions out of that vision. The MacArthur Foundation doesn't have anything like that. The mandate for the Fellows Program is simply to pick creative people. And it's done through an elaborate not-at-all-transparent process. But in the end it's a committee. And the committee just has that rather vague but noble-sounding mandate. Which is useless as a guide to selection.
If the MacArthur Foundation could pick 200 fellows a year, 110 of them would be at prestigious institutions. They simply don't know how to do anything else. When I started writing that material I had one simple idea, don't fund anyone who has a secure gig. That way at least the money is going to people who need it.
A final note. I got my degree in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s. It was a very experimental program - they allowed me to study computational linguistics, for example. That department thought of Harvard English as a bastion of high-class deadwood. There's a lot of that in the world, and some of them have Big Macs. I'm not saying that the Ivy League recipients of Macs aren't smart and creative, some of them no doubt are. The fact that they are at Ivys (or similar institutions) and even highly regarded is no guarantee. But they don't need the money. Take a risk and give it to someone who has to wait tables or do piecework for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah the conservative streak is definitely a problem, and one which iconoclasts like Thiel have a chance to change. The streak is what I meant is somewhat inevitable when you're in the public eye and with limited ability to the risk... In fact Thiel genius of choosing late teenagers is fantastic because it's much harder to find credentialed 19yos.
In theory it’s hard to find credentialed 19 year olds. In practice, the Thiel Fellows have all been very accomplished by the time they were chosen as Fellows (winning national science contests, publishing magazines, working in scientific labs, starting businesses, etc)
& you have Cowen's idea of a bunch of people like him giving out Emergent Venture type grants. Get a whole bunch of different people to do it for a year. Provide them with funds to disperse and have a quick and dirty application process like he set up for Emergent Ventures.
That site also requires a sign-up, which is very annoying. The second advantage of OSF/arxiv sites is that they provide you with a free DOI, and indexing in the academic search engines.
Forget the MacArthurs. Despite Rod MacArthur's intentions when he set up the foundation, to give to people missed by the other foundations, to people who really need the money, etc., the foundation gives money to the same people everyone else funds. Yes, the money comes without strings, which is nice, but for the last ten years (which I've been tracking) the majority of the grants go to people who have secure gigs, mostly at universities. They don't need the grant money either to survive or to do good work.
The Mac Fellows program gets the foundation a LOT of press annually, more than any other program by the foundation, or any other foundation for that matter. But it's a relatively small percentage of their annual outlay. Think of it as overhead expense for PR. The "Genius Grant" moniker is worth a lot, and the foundation didn't even come up with it. So they can be coy about it.
I did a bit of research on the "Big Macs" (my term) a decade ago and wrote it up as <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7974651/The_Genius_Chronicles_Going_Boldly_Where_None_Have_Gone_Before">The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before?</a> That includes annual updates through 2018, when I stopped doing updates because they were so predictable.
I feel this is a scaling problem. If you can only give to 20 people everyone chases the same 20. Same as VCs in some ways - everyone goes for the hyped investments. Once you scale the offering to 200 or a 1000, this should hopefully get back to its original intentions !
And really indexing article too btw, thanks for sharing!
Maybe. But the MacArthur Foundation really does seem to be captured by the same conservative spirit that prevails in the foundation world. They almost have to be in order to maintain their standing.
Contrast them with Theil and Cowen. Those guys each has a vision of the world, a sense of things they want to see done. They make their funding decisions out of that vision. The MacArthur Foundation doesn't have anything like that. The mandate for the Fellows Program is simply to pick creative people. And it's done through an elaborate not-at-all-transparent process. But in the end it's a committee. And the committee just has that rather vague but noble-sounding mandate. Which is useless as a guide to selection.
If the MacArthur Foundation could pick 200 fellows a year, 110 of them would be at prestigious institutions. They simply don't know how to do anything else. When I started writing that material I had one simple idea, don't fund anyone who has a secure gig. That way at least the money is going to people who need it.
A final note. I got my degree in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s. It was a very experimental program - they allowed me to study computational linguistics, for example. That department thought of Harvard English as a bastion of high-class deadwood. There's a lot of that in the world, and some of them have Big Macs. I'm not saying that the Ivy League recipients of Macs aren't smart and creative, some of them no doubt are. The fact that they are at Ivys (or similar institutions) and even highly regarded is no guarantee. But they don't need the money. Take a risk and give it to someone who has to wait tables or do piecework for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah the conservative streak is definitely a problem, and one which iconoclasts like Thiel have a chance to change. The streak is what I meant is somewhat inevitable when you're in the public eye and with limited ability to the risk... In fact Thiel genius of choosing late teenagers is fantastic because it's much harder to find credentialed 19yos.
In theory it’s hard to find credentialed 19 year olds. In practice, the Thiel Fellows have all been very accomplished by the time they were chosen as Fellows (winning national science contests, publishing magazines, working in scientific labs, starting businesses, etc)
& you have Cowen's idea of a bunch of people like him giving out Emergent Venture type grants. Get a whole bunch of different people to do it for a year. Provide them with funds to disperse and have a quick and dirty application process like he set up for Emergent Ventures.
UBI would ensure nobody gets missed.
Interesting. Could you post this somewhere else than academia.edu? Horrible website. I suggest https://osf.io/preprints/
I'm already posting to 3 or 4 sites. I have no intention of adding another to the list. If you don't like academia, try this: https://www.scribd.com/document/182675705/The-Genius-Chronicles-Going-Boldly-Where-None-Have-Gone-Before
That site also requires a sign-up, which is very annoying. The second advantage of OSF/arxiv sites is that they provide you with a free DOI, and indexing in the academic search engines.
Anyway, here's a mirror for those who also dislike forced sign-up websites: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/ilide.info-the-genius-chronicles-going-boldly-where-none-have-gone-before-pr_4f5a5d747da4505903c3dffc1548531d.pdf