Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
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Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#2References a Science article titled "With this new system, scientists never have to write a grant application again" ...
> In Bollen’s system, scientists no longer have to apply; instead, they all receive an equal share of the funding budget annually—some €30,000 in the Netherlands, and $100,000 in the United States—but they have to donate a fixed percentage to other scientists whose work they respect and find important. “Our system is not based on committees’ judgments, but on the wisdom of the crowd,” Scheffer told the meeting.
> Bollen and his colleagues have tested their idea in computer simulations. If scientists allocated 50% of their money to colleagues they cite in their papers, research funds would roughly be distributed the way funding agencies currently do, they showed in a paper last year—but at much lower overhead costs.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-system-scientists...
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#3>Allocating money on the condition that some must be given to other researchers would create several downstream benefits. Scientists who maximize the ability of other scientists to produce their own new and useful results would have a big advantage in this system. Jerks would be punished appropriately.
Feels too naive to me - jerks in powerful posts will be rewarded by this system. If I know you sit on the committee to decide on thing X I'm very interested in (let's say, access to a new computation cluster), I'll contact you and hint how favorable inclusion of myself will result in more of my 'share' towards yuo. Jerks tend to thrive in such a system since they look for opportunities where they can control the lever, any lever. It doesn't create a more friendly environment, it amps up science's political game, where people look friendly but stab you in the back, without your knowledge.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#4If you want to pull together a bunch of money for a large experiment, you're still going to have to write documentation to argue your case, and spend lots of time arguing that case.
Continued funding will require perennial marketing to your peers.
It democratizes science funding, but as in pure democracy, it forces each citizen to spend much of her day at the forum.
My related pet hack: Give researchers a shareholding ability for existing grants, letting them go long and short each project, should they choose to do so, perhaps in an imaginary currency. At the end of each cycle, allow researchers to re-allocate their "capital". The key difference from the article's proposal is that the researchers can retain their "capital" for future use.
It is the shorts I'm most interested in -- people who can accurately predict which experiments won't work in their proposed timelines are the people who I want evaluating grant applications.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#5This definitely seems like a rich get richer sort of situation and will lead to patronage machines.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#6This proposal is a simple, appealing way of solving the problem, but I doubt it would work well over time, because, like all efforts to control human behavior via a simple set of rules, it will end up being gamed by human beings.
Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."[0]
Ultimately, I believe, we'll need human moderators to (1) detect and prevent abuse of the rules, and (2) modify the rules when they stop working.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#7This proposal is a simple, appealing way of solving the problem, but I doubt it would work well over time, because, like all efforts to control human behavior via a simple set of rules, it will end up being gamed by human beings. Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and…
I wonder if there's not a way to make it more like a library type system. Ie a central pool of durable resources.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#8Crucial question whose answer I didn't catch while reading the articles: how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#9I think they would end up finding 8 or 9 dudes playing beer pong at a chalet all year with the money. They wouldnt actually "find" that, but it would be the internal outcome. And to of course a bunch of doctored papers with fake results.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#10This proposal is a simple, appealing way of solving the problem, but I doubt it would work well over time, because, like all efforts to control human behavior via a simple set of rules, it will end up being gamed by human beings. Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and…
I think it would have all the problems of lending money to or going into business with family or friends.