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There are lessons to be learned here for your blog and podcast, not that you should try to turn it into something as addictive as crack or smartphones, but you actively push your audience away by not engaging in any way with comments or anyone who tries to write to you.

Also, your application and review process isn't selecting the best applicants or ideas. The application isn't the thing to be selecting on, but rather what it points to, the applicant and their ideas, plural. But your application only allows people to present one idea. It's worse than judging a restaurant by its menu, it's like judging by the text of just one item on the menu.

Further, by ghosting even the best applicants and selecting on criteria that, even, no /especially/ after reading all your grantees' pages, seem opaque if not likely ill-considered, for every friend you make you make many, many enemies.

Recently, I sent this reply to your guy who emailed me a rejection. I got no reply, so I'm posting it here.

Hi, I put in an application two months ago and haven't heard back after your submission acknowledgment email. [Correction – ran a search, got a rejection email on the 16th.] Because of the way your application is structured, I had to pitch just one idea, so I chose the one with the highest and most certain good: to market a proven and practical way to make anything permanently antiseptic, which would saves millions of lives. While I think the most effective way to get this solution widely used would be a for-profit company other forms of organization could work, such as non-profit or public-benefit corporation. There is presently no company to solicit VC funding nor means to create one, so I hope the application wasn't screened out on the basis that I should have applied to OSV instead of for a grant. I have spent my whole life searching for the best new technology, I read all your grant recipients' pages before applying – this project in my opinion has a dramatically higher prospective expected value of good accomplished than not only anything else you've funded, but higher than almost anything else in history – maybe less than the Harrison chronometer's enabling of world trade but more than any pharmaceutical. It's on a par with the invention of antiseptics in preventing infections. It can't be patented, so venture investors are unlikely to fund it. If you want to do good, I think this is your best bet.

Pitching just one idea is terrible for me. What about all the others? My detailed plan for how to make self-reproducing factories that can be programmed like computers to make nearly anything, how to make it work micro- and macro-economically throughout all phases of growth with internal markets, individual ownership and machine-use backed internal currency? (bigger but less certain impact) What about my other inventions such as tensile undersea mega-aqueducts, laminated electroformed metal 3D printed heat exchangers, infrared chroma-key for compositing in movies, the compressed-sensing hyperspectral video camera, direct wind-energy conversion through high-volume charged spray, or hundreds of other inventions? (I'd love to just invent stuff, but there is no way to make it work economically.)

What about my less techy ideas, how quantum thermodynamic information theory can give a unified theory of woo, how describing numbers as n-dimensional trees reveals a rich new field of fundamental math, how absolute measures of intelligence will revolutionize existing education and workplace practices for trillions per year increase in productivity, how time series compression allows computing the retrospective optimum strategy and thus opportunity costs, why semi-volatilities need to replace volatilities throughout financial math (until they do, everybody is calculating beta and thus alpha wrong, using the wrong performance metric (Sharpe vs. Sortino) and leaving money on the table), why GDP needs to be replaced with the sum of everyone's log consumption and change in log-wealth, applied Clifford algebras (a.k.a. Geometric Algebra or hypercomplex numbers in higher dimensions), the mysterious universal phase field discovered hidden in the Dirac equation, implications of universal “mindspace” for AI and spirituality...

How about other stuff, like my Ph.D. worth of research of Robert Anton Wilson's work? My publication in the first issue of RAW's Maybe Logic Quarterly? Being among the last few thousand old Quakers (think Barclays, not oatmeal), Merrow Machine Co. (est. 1838) and biggest Met. Museum donor Harris Brisbane Dick scion? The gallery of inherited Russian Impressionist paintings I need to sell, being homeless and worse than destitute? How that happened through exertional heatstroke in a sweatshop, and stunning abuse and corruption in court? (All of which was discoverable from the links I gave in my application.) My slight but friendly acquaintance with Rohit Krishnan and Julian Gough? The several long comments I left on the Infinite Loops blog before applying, in which I tried to be friendly and helpful, none of them acknowledged?

Not much of that would fit into the OSV application, not even most of the details regarding the permanent antiseptic would fit, so I put it in linked references. The technical references are behind a paywall, but there is a free trial. Not one person other than myself has ever bothered to read that page. (I can send that data to you directly if you prefer.)

If your candidates are so good in this cohort that I'm just not in the running, well, I'll just register my polite astonishment and congratulate you on your excellent fortune. I think you should reconsider.

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