Matt Kaplan

Who wrote this?

Is this from Harvard?

Or is this from the University of Witwatersand in South Africa?

Or is this an application written with a vague accent in English that makes it obvious that the person is an English second language speaker?

You're not even aware of these kinds of biases, but we know that when people are trying to separate from great and excellent, those biases start to impact.

We also know that if the idea isn't all that well-established, still well thought out, but not well-established, that's a strike against you too, which makes our research less creative.

less innovative.

And we continue to do more of the same rather than coming up with new ideas.

So a way to solve that problem is to create a lottery.

You take those 300 or 350 good, great and excellent applications, and rather than try to select the top 50, say, you know what, we're putting these all into a fishbowl, and we're going to select them at random.

Or select 25 that you think are all outstanding and the remaining 25 will be selected from the fishbowl.

And the cost to this is you got to buy a fishbowl.

You probably need to get some blindfolds and then you're going to pull them out at random.

But there's very little cost to this and it would start to spread out the creativity in our science a fair bit more.

I like that idea.

That's a great idea.

It is.

So the Willem Foundation is doing it.

The Austrian government is supporting it.

I think British Medical is starting to consider it.