I’ve always thought ARIA deserved a chance and in the appointment of its programme directors it might have just given itself a decent chance of success.
The whole point of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency is not only that it has the space to research the bold, unpopular, and difficult (it has a legal framework that ensures it must do that for the next decade) but that the whole research community learns about an approach to funding science which is open-ended and explicitly rejects short-term accountability.
The programmes under the ARIA banner might achieve something between nothing but the knowledge about how to run a quasi-independent funding agency or at the other extreme they might genuinely discover things that the standard R&D ecosystem would never fund or nurture.
The nature of the type of research that ARIA is interested in is that it is specialist and unpredictable so rather than assessing ARIA on its intellectual merits it is much more interesting to consider what the new team tells us about the kind of organisation ARIA is going to be.
