Science Works

[Will Stone @willecstone]

New @sci_works essay 🧵

British innovation strategy is fixated on a simple story: unis generate ideas, start-ups commercialise them, government helps them scale.

This is legible, politically attractive, & wrong.

Policy built on it will deliver neither breakthroughs nor growth.

[Ben Johnson @ersatzben]

Good to speak to Research Professional about public trust in science and what may be coming down the tracks for the sector.

https://t.co/Ml96sNcdkh
@sci_works @ResProfNews

[Bia @BeatrizGietner]

i'm extremely excited for this
all my favourite physicists (Faraday, Maxwell, Newton, Rutherford, Dirac, Hawking, Penrose, Chadwick), science writers (Deutsch, Ball, Rutherford, Cox, Dawkins), and philosophers of science ARE BRITISH (or studied/worked in Britain, like Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend)

[James W. Phillips @AnEmergentI]

Excellent initiative. Finally UK has an org dedicated to applied metascience. @Lyan82, @ersatzben, and the rest of the team are fantastic.

We need a serious, ambitious, and 'radical but sensible' plan for the UK's technoscientific future. I encourage people to support them :)

[Jack Aspinall @jackaspi]

Really excited about this. Theres been cross-party consensus behind science funding, but very little attention into how to make that funding maximally effective.

UK can be the the most innovative nation.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

This is an exciting new project and I'm glad to be involved in a small way.

[Andrew Bennett @andrewjb_]

extremely excited about @sci_works, this new, much-needed institution dedicated to accelerating scientific dynamism here in the UK

particularly looking forward to their writing/analysis and building new software & institutions

congrats to @ersatzben, @Lyan82 & team!

[Charlie Harris @charlieharris01]

Super excited for @ersatzben and @Lyan82 announcing Science Works today!!

As an outsider who got pulled into UK science + AI policy in gov, I saw how much more was possible if we could get deep technical knowledge into the room. This is the answer

Delighted to be contributing

[Guy Ward Jackson @guywardjackson]

People should be very excited for this.

[Will Stone @willecstone]

Delighted to be part of Science Works, working to accelerate progress in British science and technology.

Get in touch to discuss how we can do that by reforming funding and government's institutional architecture.

https://t.co/7dLhdIOdUO

[Alex Chalmers @chalmermagne]

Big news. @ersatzben and @Lyan82 are some of the sharpest minds when it comes to metascience, R&D policy, and institution design. They bring a rare combination of deep expertise in research with hands-on experience of trying to make government work better.

Excited to be helping in a v small way.

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

There is no one better than Laura & Ben to tackle this problem! A very exciting project that I am delighted to be a little bit involved in helping out.

[Ben Johnson @ersatzben]

If that sounds appealing to you and you want to get involved, please visit us at https://t.co/2X8BloB9BD and give us a follow at @sci_works -- we'd love to hear from you.

[Ben Johnson @ersatzben]

Today @Lyan82 and I launch SCIENCE WORKS – a new policy and research studio for accelerating progress in British science and tech.

The UK is fundamentally a scientific nation. Our place in the world was built on our creativity and imagination.

[Will Stone @willecstone]

*New analysis*

Government claims that new stats show "progress" and a “strengthened” UK performance in Horizon.

But we’re still way below par (~18% in, 9% out). Only time will tell how far that gap will close.

But the stats pose three more immediate questions.

[Laura Ryan @Lyan82]

I love the idea of British AI for science missions.

But can they work? Are they even real? Could they be?

me and @ersatzben ponder

[Alvin Djajadikerta @adjajadikerta]

This is a great competition by @AsteraInstitute @seemaychou

I particularly like the public posting requirement to spark some real metascience dialogue!

[James W. Phillips @AnEmergentI]

Part 2 of the podcast is now live :)
Link in next tweet

[James W. Phillips @AnEmergentI]

Was great to do this podcast w/@Lyan82 and the Anglofuturist team!

We covered a lot of ground, part 1 is mostly on the need for new approaches to organising and funding science.

Link in next tweet.

[Aeron Laffere @aeronlaffere]

Frederick Sanger: 2 Nobel Prizes, 3 papers in 20 years.
Today he'd be fired for low productivity.

The academic system now demands papers every 6 months. Everything must show positive results. Take safe projects. Never fail publicly.

Peter Higgs couldn't discover the Higgs boson today.

Sydney Brenner's smartest colleagues? Left academia.

Not because they failed—because the system is fundamentally broken.

James Phillips and Laura Ryan's solution: Lovelace Labs. 15-year funding. No grant applications. No publish-or-perish. Just ambitious science.

Full episode out now.