Debottleneck Science
The consequences could get weird, fast.
It’s a mathematical fact that every production process must have at least one bottleneck that limits its throughput. Speed up the bottleneck and you speed up the process. Generations of management students have learned this and the rest of the Theory of Constraints from Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novel The Goal. What if we applied this theory to science and tried to speed up the bottlenecks?
The consequences could get weird, fast.
Consider the following corollaries:
Speeding up any step that isn’t a bottleneck doesn’t help.
Slowing down steps that aren’t bottlenecks is fine as long they don’t become bottlenecks.
In fact, slowing down steps that aren’t bottlenecks can be good if doing them too fast ties up resources by letting work-in-process or other inventory accumulate.
Now apply this thinking to any of the outputs we want from science. The counterintuitive point here is that if we neglect supposedly important things in favor of focusing only on true bottlenecks, things we think are “important” in science could turn into raging dumpster fires while the overall enterprise becomes more productive. For example, if the time and attention of our best scientists is a bottleneck, then we could eliminate all of the administrative work that they do. Imagine getting rid of all reporting and auditing without any replacement and then accepting the consequences. Waste and fraud would go up, possibly to an embarrassing degree (cf. raging dumpster fire), but, if scientist time were indeed the bottleneck, the speed of scientific progress would increase as well. The optimal amount of fraud is not zero, but the optimal amount of fraud in science could actually be pretty large. One of ARPA-E’s first 37 funding awards in its inaugural OPEN program was to Craig Grimes, who went to federal prison for grant fraud. Nevertheless, that initial OPEN program is generally hailed as being refreshingly ambitious for government scientific funding1 and delivered a solid return on ARPA-E’s $175M investment.
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Fun fact: the US Government Accountability Office actually tried to check in 2012 and concluded from a few interviews that most ARPA-E projects could not have been funded by venture capital.
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