Rather than asking for “inventors and donors” or the Government to do this (not that it shouldn’t do it) a few rich people can have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
>it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue;
Not only that, with some efforts a lifetime is not even enough unless you beat the odds plus get lucky early too.
Rich people are also humans. Marketing can influence their behavior just as well as it influences everyone else.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.