Tim Hwang

United States

Writer, Researcher and General Counsel, Substack at Freelance

high politics, secret exploration, distant warfare / letter: https://t.co/Taapwkm4wM / editor: @defensecharts

Articles

Metascience 101 - EP8: "Invention vs. Diffusion"

Oct 29, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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 the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement.
Metascience 101 - EP7: “Science and Political Legitimacy"

Oct 23, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement.
Metascience 101 - EP6: “Safety and Science”

Oct 16, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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 - EP5: "“How and Why to Run an Experiment"

Oct 9, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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 driving the modern metascience movement.
Metascience 101 - EP4: "ARPAs, FROs, and Fast Grants, oh my!"

Oct 1, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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 doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement.
Metascience 101 - EP3: "The Scientific Production Function"

Sep 24, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

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 ideas driving the modern metascience movement.
Metascience 101 - EP1: "Introduction"

Sep 16, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. 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.
Field Essentialism, Field Realism, Field Pragmatism

Aug 12, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

Scholarly fields – economics, physics, computer science – are the basic units for thinking about metascience. Explorations into the determinants of successful research often structure the data by academic field. Proposals to improve the rate of progress often intervene at the level of a field. The field is to science as the nation-state is to geopolitics.
The Strong Researcher Hypothesis

Aug 1, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang

There’s a tension between two basic metascientific instincts. On the one hand, metascience promises that, although scientific and technological progress is wild, powerful, and mysterious, it can be understood deeply enough that we can craft interventions to effectively influence it. Through reforms to scientific publication, changes to granting, and other procedural tweaks, we may be able to accelerate and shape progress.
RFP on Negative Metascience

Jul 12, 2024 | macroscience.org | Tim Hwang |Santi Ruiz

A few weeks back, I wrote about negative metascience. While “traditional” metascience is about studying what makes science work well, or faster, negative metascience is the idea that there’s value in attempting to defend scientific processes and institutions against inhibitors of progress. While we need a traditional, positive metascience to improve our science, we also need a better understanding of science’s failure modes. That’s what negative metascience is for.