One quibble that I didn't see addressed but possibly overlooked: who chooses who is considered a scientist worthy of getting the initial block of $$ in the first place? There will still need to be an application for that status at some point.
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?
#12This 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…
Indeed. Especially in such a simple scheme, e.g. if they find people aren't giving away enough money and try to incentivize it, people will just form cycles. If you start doing triangle-detection on the graph (as a stand-in for some arbitrary regulatory measure), they'll just make longer ones.
And beyond pure greed and the political aspect, there are professors that also have pointless grudges.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#13Everything people object to in socialism would apply to science funding. It would be like giving everyone a percentage of the GNP and hoping their innate altruism would redistribute the money to worthy recipients based on individual judgments of merit.
Those who think scientists would act differently or that scientists aren't otherwise-ordinary human beings with specific areas of talent, should read the history of Nobel Prizewinner William Shockley (a very public racist). Or the ugly and public priority fight that Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin fought with respect to the Polio vaccine, which resulted in neither being considered for the Nobel Prize.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#14Sounds to me like they want to replace the current grant process with something that resembles Google's peer bonus system. Popular sorts will get the lion's share, renegades will get peanuts.
And this would compound existing problems in the tenure system wherein the decision to grant you tenure is in part determined by your competitors at other universities. Imagine, for example, if your promotion at Google were in part decided by Jeff Bezos.
In my own post-doc experience, I caught a National Academy of Sciences member at Johns Hopkins faking data 20 years ago this year, and he decided to threaten me over it. Since no one stood up for me at the time, I left for tech a month or so later. And it's a shame because the method that exposed him was an early form of adversarial search that's now all the rage with Deep Learning. I don't see how a grant system based on a Mean Girls(tm) model of funding allocation would have prevented this.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#15Crucial question whose answer I didn't catch while reading the articles: how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?
> ... how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?
In the same way we do now, using a system that would overlook people like Einstein, a patent clerk who hadn't finished his Ph.D., who published articles having no supporting empirical evidence. In fact, there was little concrete evidence supporting his ideas until 1919 (a solar eclipse), which would eliminate him from consideration for the "scientist" label in modern times.
Or Alfred Wegener, a mere meteorologist who had some crazy ideas about the continents floating around and who was shouted down by the real scientists during his lifetime (reliable evidence for plate tectonics only appeared long after his death).
Ironically enough, both stories support a foundational principle of science -- that evidence trumps eminence.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#16The challenge in research is to create variance.
New mechanisms that explicitly favor assumption breaking research will generate variance that a scientific community can sample from to generate progress. The impact his will have is to entrench the current paradigm.
New mechanisms should explicitly favor developing researchers rather than made researchers, to fund the research that is relatively valuable - underfunded research. Mechanisms that optimize for the largest return on the margin, instead of optimizing for name recognition / popularity, which is already pareto distributed.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#17>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…
Not to mention, being a "jerk" has precious little to do with your ability to do good research.
Some of the most earth shattering members of their fields were infamously unpopular with their peers. Kurt Gödel, George Cantor and Albert Einstein were all responsible for massive fundamental shifts in the understanding of there respective fields, but were all deeply unpopular outsiders, and would be much less likely to get funded under a system like this.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#18Sounds to me like they want to replace the current grant process with something that resembles Google's peer bonus system. Popular sorts will get the lion's share, renegades will get peanuts. And this would compound existing problems in the tenure system wherein the decision to grant you tenure is in part determined by your competitors at other universities. Imagine, for example, if your promotion at Google were in p…
> In my own post-doc experience, I caught a National Academy of Sciences member at Johns Hopkins faking data 20 years ago this year, and he decided to threaten me over it.
That's a bold claim.
Do you have evidence to support this claim? Or a name? Could you point us to the data set they faked? If others aren't able to reproduce their data (under the same circumstances), that's fraud.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#19"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"...assuming scientists didn't change their citing practices to exploit the new incentive structure.
Still think it's a pretty interesting idea, but they should probably team up with some game theorists.
Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
#20Why not have part of each grant be placed into a fund for replication studies, or even directly allocated to other independent teams to replicate the study. Might do some fields rather well.