The Macroscience Podcast

IN THIS EPISODE: Professor Heidi Williams, Professor Paul Niehaus, and Matt Clancy walk through academic, non-profit and private sector paths to research, the importance of your surroundings, and how you can find good use-inspired questions. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement...

IN THIS EPISODE: Journalist Derek Thompson and economist Eli Dourado investigate the bottlenecks standing in the way of the invention vs. the diffusion of ideas. They discuss whether new ideas are getting harder to find, how to get these new ideas to scale, and how a crisis can spur effective implementation. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in th...

IN THIS EPISODE: Journalist Dylan Matthews leads a conversation with Open Philanthropy CEO Alexander Berger , Professor Tyler Cowen , and IFP Co-CEO Caleb Watney . Together, they explore the relationship between effective, robust scientific institutions and notions of political legitimacy. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues,...

IN THIS EPISODE: Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with Professor Tyler Cowen , Matt Clancy , and Jacob Trefethen to discuss whether there are tensions between accelerating science and safety. With case studies where society has faced this tradeoff between progress in science and safety, they work through strategies we can use to accelerate science safely. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set...

IN THIS EPISODE: Professor Heidi Williams , Professor Paul Niehaus , Emily Oehlsen , and Jim Savage dive in on a practical “how-to” for experimentation and evaluation in metascience. They discuss how to keep metascience experimentation and evaluation relevant to policymakers. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driv...

IN THIS EPISODE: Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter talks through the broad range of scientific funding institutions with guests Professor Tyler Cowen , Arc Institute Co-Founder Professor Patrick Hsu , and Convergent Research CEO Adam Marblestone . They pay special attention to the renaissance in new, exploratory scientific funding models. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubl...

IN THIS EPISODE: Journalist Kelsey Piper interviews Convergent Research CEO Adam Marblestone and Professor Paul Niehaus on the inputs to scientific production. They talk through the funding ecosystem, labor force, the culture of scientific labs, and the search for important questions. “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and i...

IN THIS EPISODE : OpenPhil CEO Alexander Berger interviews economist Matt Clancy and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison to talk about whether science itself is slowing down, one of the key motivating concerns in metascience. They look at the challenges of measuring scientific progress, the reasons why progress might be slowing down, and what we might be able to do about it.  “Metascience 101” is a...

IN THIS EPISODE : Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with economist Heidi Williams and IFP co-founder Caleb Watney to set the scene. They talk about the current state of science in America, what metascience aims to achieve, and what empirical experimentation in metascience is revealing.  “Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, a...

This week on the Macroscience podcast: an interview with Jon Askonas , a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America . Inspired in part by “Technological Stagnation is a Choice” — Jon’s terrific review of Vaclav Smil’s Invention and Innovation — I wanted to have Jon on the show to think through the ideological...

This week on the Macroscience podcast we interview Matt Clancy , proprietor of the excellent living literature review New Things Under The Sun and a Research Fellow at Open Philanthropy . We discuss the attributes of systems that are able to adapt and improve with time, and how those attributes shape different facets of research productivity. Along the way, we discuss the philanthropic imitation g...

Good news: Macroscience is officially starting up a new podcast. We’ll be interviewing researchers, scientists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other good people working in and around this broad, shifting community that we call “metascience.” First up: Ben Reinhardt , who is CEO of Speculative Technologies , a non-profit research organization supporting a wide range of exploratory work in the sci...