This piece argues that philanthropists are in a unique position: They don’t have to answer to voters or to the public markets. They are therefore free to take greater risks by funding outside-the-box ideas, and they should do much more often.
I did a podcast episode on this piece with The Orthogonal Bet (a podcast from Lux Capital). It is available here.
In this piece, Ben Reinhardt and I point to a common paradox: The people who know the worst about any situation are often afraid to be whistleblowers, whereas the people who publicly trash-talk that situation are probably acting out of malice, misunderstanding, or some personal grievance. In science and elsewhere, this paradox prevents us from figuring out which efforts have failed and how to move forward.
In this piece for the Heterodox Academy magazine Inquisitive, I argue that federal science funding tends to create groupthink across many areas. We need a system that is more willing to take a gamble on outlier views.
This piece at the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s blog argues that strategic philanthropy relies too much on bureaucratic measures like lengthy proposals and reports. Instead, more philanthropists should trust their grantees to find the best ways to move forward.
This piece at Works in Progress argues that innovation and reproducibility aren’t at odds with each other, and in fact science could improve in both respects by being more tolerant of null results and by engaging in more “red teaming” of scientific findings.
This piece in Inside Philanthropy contends that philanthropy is too drawn to safe and incremental projects, and offer suggestions for how philanthropists and foundations could make room for higher-reward opportunities.
This piece argues that corporations and other organizations that rely on research and evidence need to make sure that they are getting reliable information.
This piece argues that while replications have historically been disfavored by publications due to their low citation count, large-scale replication projects are attracting so much attention that they are more publishable.
In this piece — which arose out of a workshop sponsored by NIH and NSF — numerous co-authors and I present a vision for a university system that is organized around principles of openness and transparency.
In this piece in the journal eLife, numerous co-authors and I argue that open and transparent research practices can help researchers through citations and other opportunities for collaboration.
This piece argues that mice studies are so flawed and so unlikely to lead to benefits in humans that they shouldn’t be reported in newspapers. One of the John Oliver show’s writers saw this piece, and had me advise them extensively on the script for an episode on scientific reproducibility.
In this piece for Scientific American, I point out the flaws in how death statistics are collected and reported, and argue that “big data” can’t provide us with reliable answers if the underlying data points are misrecorded.
In this piece for Science, numerous co-authors and I introduced a new set of guidelines for scientific journals, which we called the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP). The TOP Guidelines have since been adopted by thousands of journals.
In this editorial in Science, I argue that philanthropy should help support scientific infrastructure as a public good that enables greater openness and rigor.
