
Microryza - Grow the next generation of ideas - duck
https://www.microryza.com/
======
tansey
I was just speaking with a friend about effectively this same idea the other
day. He was super excited and thought it could revolutionize the way research
funding works.

It won't. I'm sorry, but it just won't. There are several reasons why a
kickstarter for academic/scientific research is doomed:

1) People underestimate the amount of money required to fund research.
Starting this Fall, I'll be receiving a grant from the NSF for one year of
funding. That funding pays me approx. $1800/mo, plus covers my health
insurance ($800/mo), tuition ($5k/semester), and travel ($7000/yr). The
university also provides me with facilities and access to faculty and thus
have overhead that need to be covered. This grant is shared among 3 PhD
students and totals over $180,000.

2) Progress does not happen in leaps and bounds, it happens in inches.
Kickstarter projects go from conception or prototype to finished product.
Research does not work that way. You go from previous algorithm to slightly
updated algorithm. It's a marathon, not a sprint to production.

3) You get nothing. Kickstarter projects give you a cool gadget or game or
piece of art or whatever. When you fund a Kickstarter project, you get to see
a video of some prototype or sketches that look like they'll be awesome. By
the end of it, it's finished and you have this cool new thing that you can
enjoy. You will not get any cool new thing from researchers, because they
don't even know what it is they're trying to make yet. At best they will
produce a conference or journal paper, maybe with a neat little demo of low
production quality, and then they're on to the next problem. Scientists are
not interested in building production-ready toys, they are searching purely
for knowledge. So you as the funder get nothing tangible.

4) Most science is boring to the average person. Researchers live on the edge
of human knowledge. They are tackling problems for which there is no known
answer. Odds are, if you're in a sexy area like neuroscience, robotics, etc.,
then the problems you want to solve have been looked at for decades by people
much smarter than you. Thus, you are not going to make some gigantic
breakthrough that leads to strong AI-- you're hopefully going to develop a new
learning algorithm that performs 3% better than the state of the art on a
handful of benchmark datasets. Exciting, right?

Overall, it'd be great if we had democratized funding that worked.
Unfortunately, due to the costly, slow, intangible, esoteric nature of
scientific research, it's unlikely that will happen. Most academics have a
hard enough time convincing experts, who have dedicated their lives to the
area, that their work is worth funding. I just don't see how it could possibly
work.

~~~
tjr
There is truth in what you say, but I don't think it's the end of the story.
We don't have to assume that all research is conducted by full-time
students/university research assistants. Just as folks can start software
businesses on five hours a week after their day-job, it should be entirely
possible to make progress in research as a part-time effort, such that: you
already have a salary, you already have insurance, you aren't paying tuition,
and you aren't paying overhead costs to a university. You may need to travel,
you may need resources and equipment, but it should be plausible to get some
financial help with that on Kickstarter-like levels.

What if you don't see any interesting results in your research? That's an
inherent risk of research. People giving you money should be aware of that.

What if you don't produce anything tangible to give away? Depending on your
goals, that's a real possibility. People giving you money should be aware of
that.

What if people don't want to give you money? People giving you money should be
aware of... well, okay, that doesn't make sense. If you managed to convince
people to give you money, then we're okay on that point.

An example: what tangible benefit do people get out of donating to
universities? A tax write-off? I guess, but is that really the reason why
people donate? What about to the Salvation Army? Or to whatever non-profit
org? People donate because they want to help and support the mission. I don't
see why it couldn't be the same with scientific research.

~~~
planetguy
The thing about part-time citizen scientists is that they _could_ exist, but
don't. Or rather, they do exist, but nearly one hundred percent of them are
crackpots. I don't think this kind of project can change that, because I don't
think lack of funding is what's holding these people back.

What's the problem? Well, doing real scientific research is _hard_ and time-
consuming. Just trying to catch up with what's already known in your field of
choice takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you're unplugged from the
community, and then taking it to the next level by actually discovering
something new is far harder. The average PhD student works for several years,
full time, before they do their first piece of truly worthwhile work, and in
99 percent of cases we're still not talking about anything significant enough
to satisfy your average hobbyist with dreams of scientific glory. Also the
average PhD student has access to a zillion things which a hobbyist doesn't,
most importantly an advisor who understands the field and knows what
approaches are likely to be worthwhile. So for a hobbyist-scientist, we're
talking four to five years of _all your spare time_ spent trying to produce
one or two papers that probably won't make a big impact. Doesn't sound
enticing.

Crackpots, of course, get to take a short cut. Crackpots get the thrill of
being a Great Scientist Who Discovered Something Important without the tedious
mess involved with actually learning the field and doing science. Crackpots
occur when you take the desire for scientific glory and subtract scientific
understanding and self-awareness. They're inevitably extremely satisfied with
their work, even if they're angry that nobody will take them seriously.

In short, though, anyone with the brains, the commitment and the love of
science that you'd need to be a legitimate part-time citizen-scientist in this
day and age has probably already found a way to be a full-time scientist
instead.

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rfrey
This looks fun, I hope it catches on.

I wish more projects told me what they intended to do with the money, though.
For example, why does the mathematician need $2200 to investigate neural
network stability? Is it to buy a bunch of GPUs? Or to pay an intern? Or to
buy ramen for himself? I found the projects that gave that detail ($1200 to go
to Costa Rica and collect tissue samples from 5 butterflies, $1100 for
components for an analogue computer plus an intern) more compelling because it
feels like I'm enabling something concrete.

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pradocchia
FYI, Microryza is a pun on mycorrhiza, "a symbiotic association between a
fungus and the roots of a vascular plant":

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza>

<http://mycorrhizas.info/>

~~~
jamesrcole
It's a bit of a shame that it's a hard to remember name. I'm not even sure how
to pronounce it.

~~~
irollboozers
Micro - rye - zah

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law
I love the concept: crowd-sourced research can provide an enormous amount of
help to research groups barely clinging onto life (financially). However,
there's an enormous issue that _also_ needs to be addressed: the impact of
university affiliations on the results obtained. In an ideal world, crowd-
funded research would lead to public domain research papers (no copyright) and
inventions (no patents). Clearly, that's not the real world... More often than
not, universities have air-tight intellectual property agreements with all
professors and graduate students that grant all right, title, and interest in
any inventions or discoveries back to that university. Effectively, it's this
that enables major publishers to maintain their choke-hold on the industry.

~~~
tjr
I would like to think a lot of interesting research could be done by educated
individuals who view it more as a side-project than as a full-time endeavor.
In those cases, having an extra couple thousand dollars to help pay for
something or other could be very nice, and would not necessarily put the
results under the jurisdiction of a university.

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kanamekun
Congrats on an exciting site!

How are you guys differentiating your site from Petridish.org?
<http://www.petridish.org/>

