My offspring

 I was president of Point Foundation. Point was started by Stewart Brand with the royalties from the printing of the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

The object of the foundation was to find and invent new forms of charitable giving that would be more productive and more useful than the pathetic world of charity that Stewart, and everyone else on the board of Point, knew to be a universal problem.

We tried every form of giving we could imagine. One was to make unsolicited grants to individuals of $25,000 with no strings or conditions attached. We selected our grantees carefully.

Many were failures and a few were successes. After evaluation we concluded that the successes would have been successes even without our grants.

Our unsolicited-no-conditions grants to individuals was copied a decade later by the MacArthur Foundation. The grants, popularly called 'genius awards' are rather strange, as we learned from our own experiments.

Only two of my friends have ever gotten a MacArthur, both were well deserved. But of the hundreds of people I've known or interviewed only 2 got a MacArthur.

Out of the 500+ MacArthur Awards, I suspect that the 2 I know indicate that the methodology is corrupt, in addition to being useless.

My experience suggests the MacArthur's are irrelevant. Anyone know otherwise?