Not <i>just</i> a lottery, but it feels like randomness should be part of the process. The mechanisms and people we have in place to make decisions are horribly imperfect, so there&#x27;s a lot of noise in the system as is. Many perfectly good grants don&#x27;t get funded, often for unclear reasons. Adding randomness past a certain minimum bar just makes that noise explicit and ensures that it&#x27;s not biased or spuriously correlated.<p>This would also deemphasize the importance of narrow skills specific to writing and getting grants. Right now, understanding the grant process and granting agency is probably just as important as, you know, coming up with good proposals. Not ideal!<p>Among other things, this could also help academics to spread out a bit—right now, research agendas are <i>extremely</i> fashion-driven, in large part because of how grants are awarded. Think about it like a search algorithm which, with some probability, randomly jumps out of its current state as a way to avoid getting stuck in local maxima.<p>Originally, I thought of this idea as applied to college admissions. Harvard likes to talk about how it could assemble a few classes of qualified students each year, but only has room for one. At that point, it&#x27;s distinctly non-obvious that the process they use to choose between similarly qualified candidates is any good; some actual randomness could have benefits. But this idea feels even more applicable to research grants.