Can Science Organizations be "Default Alive?"
The problem is that science is rarely a product or service.
Most science organizations are “default dead.” The term comes from the classic Paul Graham essay that divides startups into two categories: those who, at current revenue growth rates, will run out of money (default dead) and those that will become revenue positive (default alive).
Default alive organizations “sell” enough of something that people want or need to cover their costs. Default dead organizations constantly seek funding from non-customer sources (eg. VCs, grants, etc.). Being default alive makes it so that an organization can be ambitious and experiment. The work to maintain a default alive organization is much more aligned with its core activities. For these, among other reasons, it would be great if we had many default-alive science organizations.
The problem is that science, in-and-of itself, is rarely a product or service. In some cases it is – say the analysis of a product failure or optimizing a system’s output. But that doesn’t describe most science today. Science can create many products or services, from entertainment to patents to education, but those are second-order effects of the science itself.
A few science organizations are default alive: There are a few high-status labs with a queue of donors longer than all the projects in the PIs career. National labs are written into congressional budgets. Corporate research might seem alive but it is one market shift from being defunded. While Universities themselves are not default dead, most individual university labs are. Most company sponsorships come out of marketing budgets – the first things to get cut. Both governments and philanthropists are fickle.
Science-y organizations sometimes become default alive by, say, consulting or selling equipment – Thorlabs does some photonics research, for example. The problem is that science is almost always orthogonal to the goods or services being sold. Playing these dynamics out over time means that without leadership acting against the gravity of incentives, research will become a vestigial organizational organ.
Can we create new kinds of “default alive” science organizations? The honest answer is “we don’t know.”
Some very speculative ways that a science organization might become default alive
Selling truly new science-based data or tokens to the AIs
Operating on Mars or another frontier where, without new discoveries, everybody is actually dead
Providing training to individuals who incidentally do research along the way in fields where the training is valuable, like AI in 2025.
But perhaps being default alive is the wrong goal for science organizations. The nature of science is to change constantly – both in ideas and how we do it. Perhaps the way to embrace that is to create more explicitly temporary science organizations and instead to think about default-alive careers or lines of research. These organizations could also intentionally do science for a period of time with a planned transition to a more permanent form.