Issue 25  May 22nd 2026

The theme of this newsletter is Ghosts.

When we analyze what went wrong within systems of science, we do a thorough job of cataloguing failure. We track retraction rates, measure citation decay, study the proportion of clinical trials that fail to replicate. We have become quite good at auditing what we attempted and fell short of. What we almost never do is audit the omissions: the cures that were never developed, the instruments never built, the cross-disciplinary connections that were never made, because the architecture of the system made them impossible to attempt in the first place.

These are the ghosts of innovation. And unlike failures, ghosts leave nothing behind.

A failed project leaves a paper trail. It leaves a funded grant, a research team, a set of negative results, perhaps a retraction, possibly a lesson. All of that is measurable, debatable, and can eventually enter the conversation about reform. But a question that was never asked because it couldn't survive the grant review process leaves nothing. A collaboration that was never formed because the funding structure rewarded individual labs over interdisciplinary teams leaves no record. A researcher who filed away her most ambitious idea "for later"—and later never came back—contributes her ghost to a ledger that nobody is keeping.

The mechanism responsible is not conspiracy or malice. It is what the literature calls paradigm lock: once a framework becomes dominant, it shapes not only how results are interpreted, but which questions are considered worth asking and which methods are considered legitimate. Researchers, responding rationally to the incentives, pursue work that is likely to be publishable, fundable, and recognizable to their peers. What this produces isn't the selection of ambitious exploration—it is the selection of what is testable within the existing frame. Progress within a constrained space is real progress. But it is not the same as progress across the full range of the possible.

Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Tsao (both subscribers to this newsletter!), in their work on the structure of technoscientific revolutions, offer a useful illustration of how this plays out in the adjacent possible. The multitouch display technology and the specialized glass that became Gorilla Glass® both existed as latent combinations before the iPhone. They could have remained forever in what they call the "shadowy and unrealized adjacent possible" (borrowed from the biologist Stuart Kauffman)—latent solutions that never found problems to solve. It took Steve Jobs, committing to pull specific latent combinations into contact with a specific problem, to make them actual. The ghosts are all the latent solutions in that adjacent possible that never found a Jobs. The ghost framing forces us to ask: how many of those latent solutions are there, undiscovered because it is impossible for anyone to go looking?

What distinguishes ghosts from every other “failure” of science funding is that they are truly unmeasurable—and unmeasurable costs tend to be politically weightless. They do not appear in appropriations hearings, reform proposals, or reports on research productivity. The ghost leaves nothing to complain about.

Here is what this means for anyone serious about science reform. Almost every conversation in the field is about what we funded and how well it worked. Very few conversations are about the topology of the attempted: which kinds of questions were structurally possible to pursue, and which were not. If you want to change what gets discovered, you have to first change what gets attempted. And that requires an audit not of outcomes but of architecture—asking not what failed, but what the current system makes impossible to try. The reform discourse that focuses only on waste and replication is working inside the paradigm. The more demanding question is whether the paradigm itself is selecting for a particular shape of future, and whether that shape is the one we would choose.