Scientific Freedom & Central Planning

A Short Review of "Scientific Freedom - The Elixir of Civilization" by Donald Braben (Stripe Press)

The book itself is beautiful and reminiscent of old, collectible scientific volumes. High quality. It is high signal and low noise. You can read it in a weekend and learn something new.

The author, Donald Braben, ran "Venture Research" at BP for a decade. Venture Research is deliberately investing in avenues of investigation that sound slightly fringe but, if true, will fundamentally change our understanding of the universe.

The fruits of Braben's work are impressive and cost BP only about $40 million over a decade.

But BP's Venture Research harvest is only a small piece of Braben's argument. He fears for the future of scientific progress in general, which he argues has stalled. Interestingly, he dates the decline of fundamental scientific discovery to the early 1970's, which coincides with other observers (Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation, wtfhappenedin1971.com/)

It seems hard to believe that the digital age does not represent new scientific discovery. But Braben's point is that much of digital technology elaborates on discoveries from before 1971 (semiconductors, ARPA Net). We have better engineering now, but not more fundamental understanding.

Braben argues that the bureaucratization of research and peer review are to blame. No longer do researchers enjoy the free-wheeling days of "here's some money, go give it a try" that allowed luminaries like Vannevar Bush and JCR Licklider to finance the pioneers of computing.

Today, research must align with top-down "national goals", must adhere to a prescribed timeline, and justify itself with a practical use case. In effect, funding agencies and government hope to "plan" the anarchic process of fundamental discovery.

Braben is no fan of peer review and believes it's a grave mistake to treat it as the gold standard for evaluating research proposals. Fundamental discoveries are almost always seen as crazy, fringe ideas at first.

So If we rely on "peers" to evaluate these avenues of research, we risk a stifling orthodoxy on the ideas that receive funds. Plus, all the compliance measures waste the time of researchers who should be focused on science.

"One does not even know which haystack hides the needle. It's been forgotten that we did not need special arrangements for finding the Einsteins in the past. There was enough flexibility in the system to allow them to emerge, but that's been removed in the quest for efficiency", says Braben.

To be clear, the results of Venture Research are peer reviewed for accuracy, but the proposals are not. Venture Research also proposes no timeline or milestones. Money is not particularly conditional on any outcome.

Venture Research cultivates an informal, horizontal, high-trust and low-supervision environment of loose collaboration. The goal of Venture Research is to mint a new generation of pioneer-scientists, which Braben calls the "Planck Club."

For Braben, the stakes are high: "My conjecture is that at the highest social levels creativity provides the vital feedback that keeps societies and civilizations healthy." A lack of creativity prevents civilization from adapting to new challenges.

This makes civilization more and more fragile — pushing it into the darkly-named "Damocles Zone", where a single major stressor could cause a decline and fall. A wonderful and inspiring book that speaks to the adventure of scientific discovery and the creative powers of a free civilization.