Daniel Whiteson

Like why is science conservative?

Why do we have a consensus?

Why do we not explore more ideas?

Because frankly, funding is shrinking.

and research budgets are going down, down, down, down, down.

What happens when you shrink research budgets is people get more conservative.

You have less money that's like, hey, let's invest in Professor X's crazy idea, as well as the mainstream ideas we've been working on for the last 50 years.

We should definitely balance existing ideas and crazy new explorations.

Absolutely, we should do both.

But when research budgets shrink, it's awkward to know how to manage those things.

And that's what we're seeing.

And so people tend to fund things they know are gonna produce something useful on shorter and shorter timescales.

And I think that's a mistake.

I think we should fund more crazy ideas, more people trying weird things, more people saying, look, I don't know what this is gonna do, but I have a hunch I wanna go in this direction.

I think a lot of historical great discoveries come out of that just like blue sky craziness, give the nerds some cash and let them play.

I love, absolutely.

And if you polled Americans, overwhelmingly, they would fund the sciences over defense.

But you reminded me of something.

So you're not getting a lot of grants, but there is one you got that's pretty cool.

And you are a guy who likes crazy ideas.