Intra-lab Capitalism

Labs could buy equity in each other.

One of the great things about capitalism and markets is that they incentivize people with specific on-the-ground knowledge to act on it and bubble that information up to everyone else. If I know that a company’s upcoming product is going to be great, I can buy their stock. If I know that there’s unmet demand, I can start a company. Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of how much of science works today – there are few established mechanisms for scientists to act on their local knowledge. Instead, almost everything goes through low-information gatekeepers, whether it is a granting body or a prestigious journal.

We’ve already hinted at the possibilities here with the idea of labs giving each other “payday loans” but that is just one of many possibilities that would enable scientists to trade on their knowledge of things like who does good work or what hyped-up research is actually bullshit. Here are two others to get your imagination going.

Labs could “buy equity” in each other. A PI who is particularly good at predicting which up-and-coming professors are going to do well could give them some extra funds in exchange for some ownership in their lab. A 5% stake would mean that the investing scientist automatically gets to be a coauthor on one in every 20 papers that the lab publishes. Of course there are important questions like “which papers?”, “where did that money come from in the first place?”, and “isn’t it a bad thing if coauthorships remain the main currency of science?”

Another possibility is prediction markets for science. As part of a startup package or just a carve-out in every grant, scientists could have funds to bet on prediction markets about research. Instead of arguing back and forth about the validity of things, scientists literally can just bet on it. These prediction markets would also serve some of the purpose of citations as well – if a market doesn’t have much volume, nobody really cares and you shouldn’t put much weight in the work either as a positive or negative signal. Of course there are many flaws to be figured out: the markets will inevitably be pretty low-volume and there are tricky questions about who can participate.

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