I included lots of pointed commentary throughout, on issues like how to identify talent, how government funding should work, and how private philanthropy can be more effective. The conclusion is particularly critical of current grantmaking practices, so keep reading or else skip ahead.
Those who did were often criticized for ruffling too many feathers. The situation seems far different today. Preregistration has become much more common across many fields; the American Economic Association now employs a whole team of people to rerun the data and code from every published article; national policymakers at NIH and the White House have launched numerous initiatives on reproducibility and open science ; and just recently, the National Academies hosted the Metascience conference.
How did we get from there to here? But if there were metascience entrepreneurs, I played a significant part as a metascience venture capitalist βnot the only one, but the most active.
While I worked at what was initially known as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation now publicly known as Arnold Ventures , I funded some of the most prominent metascience entrepreneurs of the past 11 years, and often was an active participant in their work. In the past few months, two people in the metascience world independently asked if I had ever written up my perspective on being a metascience VC. This essay was the result. I have run this essay by many people including John Arnold to make sure my memory was correct.
Any errors or matters of opinion are mine alone. John Arnold and I had a conference call with Jim Manzi , the author of a widely-heralded book on evidence-based policy.
