I'm not convinced this will work as well as you might hope. The ticking clock, and the high expectations, are still there.
The J.J. Thomson quote still seems applicable, even if the time horizon is slightly longer:
>>> “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate, different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.”
That points towards some plausible answers for supporting non-capital-intensive research (e.g. pay to teach instead). Supporting more capital-intensive research, I really don't know.
Maybe one key is to creating a culture evaluating people on effort, talent, process, boldness , etc without being straightly tied to the result - and people who sucseed in doing that well , should have some form of job security , and the knowledge they are doing what they are paid to do.
And if over the long period they fail to produce results, even though they try well, maybe let them work together with someone else who is more lucky with hypoetheses ?
It's an interesting idea, but I suspect that in practice evaluation of these things -- "process" in particular -- will favour the conservative in practice.
This is exactly what my proposal is designed to do. No reporting or progress needs to be given each year. The recipients would have total leisure to do what every they wanted with no pressure to produce results. Sure some of the recipients will do nothing, and some will try and fail, but what we are looking for are the 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 that produce an amazing breakthrough.
Sure. But I'm pretty sure that people on 10 year fellowships will still very much have their eye on what comes next.
10 year fellowships with a guaranteed pension at the end might just do it -- but funding those for youngish researchers, even in pretty small numbers, would be expensive indeed.
A fellowship of 10 years would give people enough time to take a risk, but still leave enough time to salvage a career if things didn't work out. People would devote the first 5 or 6 years doing high risk / high reward research that had a low chance of success. If things didn't pan out they could spend the last 4 or 5 years generating iterative results and publications.
These fellowships would not be a replacement for a normal academic position, but a way to give young scientists the breathing room to take a risk on high reward research. Given the chance many would - I certainly would have.
The J.J. Thomson quote still seems applicable, even if the time horizon is slightly longer:
>>> “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate, different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.”
That points towards some plausible answers for supporting non-capital-intensive research (e.g. pay to teach instead). Supporting more capital-intensive research, I really don't know.