Who Funds Misfit Research?

andyjsong 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For those who want a live example:

MakeSunsets has raised ~$1.8M from angels + VCs and another ~$133K in Cooling Credit sales over the past 12 months from individuals [1]. These purchases directly fund stratospheric aerosol injection — bringing awareness and cooling the Earth.

We’ve applied to SBIRs, explored DAOs, crowdfunding platforms, and are in conversations with family offices and UHNWI.

Most of our closed deals? They’ve come from Twitter and Substack. The key: talking directly to decision-makers — not committees.

[1] Climate dads: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0685/0042/2976/files/Make_...

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munchlax 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I actually thought MSFT was pronouned "misfit" and they just spelled it out. Oops.

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jonathanstrange 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've worked more than 15 years as a full-time researcher in a philosophy research institute. At least in my area, I highly doubt that any noteworthy amount of "misfit research" should get funding and is worth pursuing. Research is embedded into and needs to be part of the international research culture where many people and many different institutions work on the same topic. In philosophy, this is and has always been mostly within academia. "misfits" are unfortunately often close to "crackpots." There is a myriad of funding opportunities, some of them rather obscure and based on personal projects with a wide range of application conditions and requirements. For example, I know a colleague who once did research in philosophy for the Volkswagen Stiftung, and another one obtained funding from NATO.

Of course, there is research outside of academia in many more practical disciplines like STEM and medical research. But I doubt the situation is very different there. If you're too much of a "misfit" chances are high that your research proposals just aren't good enough. If you have many publications in top journals, you will get funding.

What's more concerning is that for lack of career prospects and job security, mostly those postdocs seem to prevail who are very adapted to the system and those who are extremely persistent and willing to relocate indefinitely. There is too much talent wasted in the second category. I've seen too many good and talented people drop out of the "publish or perish rat race" because they got children or wanted to settle down. These were the opposite of misfits, though.

	▲	lemonwaterlime 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is the exact mindset that when used at the level of the grant awarding body causes incremental research to prevail while pushing out outsider thoughts. Things requiring unorthodox (but not incorrect) combinations of knowledge are met with the kind of skepticism that forgets to be skeptical of its own skepticism. Things on longer horizons than the short term, corporatized ROI of our research institutions—who are themselves supposed to be less beholden to quick wins at the expense of knowledge generation—leads to a chilling effect on trying anything revolutionary at all. The outcome is echo chambers, local maxima/minima in research, and promising avenues of research that are underfunded simply because they aren’t popular. Inevitably it also leads to the kind of institutional stagnation that results in p-hacking, and so on.

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searine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most 'misfit research' is funded by the government through broad training grants or broad departmental level support. Parts of those grants get used to fund early career researchers and students. Most often it is funding mainstream science but sometimes it is used just to keep these people on board. So it isn't about funding any one weird thing, but instead giving people the freedom to explore ideas and develop skills. Even when supported by specific grants, PI will use that money to let students / fellows explore more broadly.

The idea that VCs or DAOs would give a penny for R&D is a sick joke.

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throwawaymaths 5 hours ago | parent [-]

definitionally, no:

> work that is a poor fit for academia

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searine 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Academia is already a sandbox. What kind of research would fit poorly?

In the article most of the examples of funding sources give their funding to academic labs already.

Discussion about non-governmental sources of funding is fine, but they still almost always funnel back into a lab at a university.

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throwawaymaths 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

anything that is unlikely to produce papers. anything that is unpalatable to the science status quo (so you could produce papers but you'll get extremely critical reviewers or be relegated to low tier journals). research in any field in which you yourself are not established but you have good reason to believe you can make a mark

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btrettel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Here's an example of research that I found to be hard to do in academia with details about why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154799

Note that I don't think VCs or DAOs would care about this research either as it's not flashy enough.

	▲	growingkittens 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have found that many areas of human knowledge are massively disorganized. Everything is also siloed; knowledge that could easily apply to other domains is hidden by things like specialized terminology. I think it is because science is systematic, or step-by-step, and not systemic - lacking a "whole system" point of view. Both perspectives are needed to understand a reality made of systems.