Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Welcome to @pinged, founder of Gauntlet! He's kindly agreed to do an AMA—starts in 30 minutes. Reply with your questions!
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ted (not lasso)
@ted
what parts of DeSci movement do you think are worth pushing forward? which do you think should be left behind?
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Tarun Chitra
@pinged
Great question; I recorded an ep of @rehash yesterday about DeSci and tried to argue the following: 1. Privately-funded Science (PfS) that has been successful (e.g. DeepMind winning the Nobel Prize last year) has been very directed and goal-oriented; there is a clear problem statement when $$ is invested 2. If your two alternatives are PfS and the NSF, then there is a lot that is going to be avoided in 2025. The fact that GLP-1s were discovered via the venom of Heloderma suspectum (which was studied purely non-pharmaceutically) is exactly the type of research that neither PfS nor the NSF would fund today 3. DeSci (today) correctly sees this funding gap; however the action taken so far has been, "instead of being goal-oriented, let's just launch a token and fund anything the NSF/PsF don't fund without discretion or accountability"
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Tarun Chitra
@pinged
4. There has never been a better time for research to be funded in this manner given: a) Federal science cuts b) Industrial cuts to greenfield R&D (especially in biotech post 2022) 5. Yet, DeSci tokens like Bio protocol look more like poorly thought out exit scams than legitimate funding vehicles So I think the best path forward: 1. DeSci (today) has the right problem area for funding, absolutely wrong and idiotic execution 2. Mechanisms for accountability and milestones / goals need to be built first before raising money 3. Areas where incentives make a large difference (e.g. reproducibility of research, peer review) are much better places to start
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