This essay is a personal history of the $60+ million I allocated to metascience starting in 2012 while working for the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures).
Metascience for whom? A question as old as science.
Before we fix science, we need to ask who built it!
Metaventory — the meta-science community
A comprehensive community of the people building meta-science and the tools they make — psychology and economics first, growing science-wide.
Metascience 2027
A global gathering for knowledge sharing, community building, and opportunities to define a roadmap of research and intervention priorities to improve science.
The Journal of Scientific Integrity
by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assi…
What Scientists Said: Results from Astera's First Essay Competition
Astera recently hosted its first essay competition, focused around metascience.
Life Lessons from a Lifestyle Business
An Interview with Matt Haughey, Founder of MetaFilter
Developing creative identity
I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.
A Vision of Metascience
How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.
Meta Research News | Meta Research
At Meta, research permeates everything we do. We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real world problems.
Meta-Research Symposium, 2026
Register for NYU's second annual Meta-Research Symposium, “Meta-Research in Action: Implementing Better Science"
52 things I learned in 2022
This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic, and learned many learnings.
metaBUS – explore science
52 things I learned in 2023
This year I worked on fascinating projects in food, media, storytelling, AI and health at Magnetic, and learned many learnings.
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
David shares 50 ideas that changed his life. Read here.
⚡ Metaventory: building better science ⚡ Had many discussions about the need for mapping out all that's meta-science: people, tools, events, jobs, simulations, etc. in one place. Metaventory aims to help connect those interested in meta-science & improving science. metaventory.vercel.app
