Klein and Thompson argue in Abundance that scientific funding can penalize highly novel ideas, while acknowledging uncertainty about the scale of missed discoveries.

Evidence 2 passages

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  said Azoulay. When I asked him how we know for sure that the current system isn't doing a perfect job balancing high-risk bets with important incremental projects, he offered a charmingly humble answer. We don't know. Not for sure, at least. This is one of the most important things that I'm working on, and it's hard to make progress because the data is crap. He said it's hard to know for sure if there are a few Catalan Caracos in the world, or thousands, because the NIH makes it hard for outside researchers to compare the proposals that it funds against the ones it rejects. The NIH still largely relies on its decades-old peer review system. A small team of independent scientists rates a project's merit, methodology, and significance before offering funding. Without full access to NIH decision-making, a scientist who wanted to study the agency's peer review system might have to do something a little strange, like build a dummy peer review system in a lab setting. In 2014, a team of researchers from Harvard University did just this. They recruited 142 star medical researchers to act as evaluators in a makeshift

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  grant review process. They took 150 proposals and gave each one a novelty score and randomly assigned multiple proposals to each reviewer. In the final analysis of 2,130 evaluations, highly familiar proposals did all right, and slightly novel proposals did the best, but highly novel ideas received the worst scores by far. We find that evaluators uniformly and systematically give lower scores to proposals with increasing novelty, the team concluded. New ideas are no longer fuel American science the way they once did, the economists Mikko Pakkeland and Jay Bhattacharya write. In a 2020 paper, They showed that NIH funding used to support fresh questions. In the 1990s, for example, the NIH consistently funded medical papers whose keywords first appeared in the literature in the previous seven years. But since the 2000s, NIH funding for the youngest vintage of science has declined by more than 25%. Once again, either the new ideas in science are getting worse, or we're getting worse at looking for them and funding them. Bias against novelty, risk, and edgy thinking is a tragedy because the most important breakthroughs in scientific history are often wild surprises that emerge from bizarre obsessions. Too many projects get funding because they are probable,

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