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Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

johnhawks.net

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Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#21

Post by oneshot908 »

coherentpony wrote: post #18
oneshot908 wrote: post #14

Sounds 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.

There's no benefit to me in outing the professor at this point so I'm not going to do so. If you feel that undermines my credibility, I'm OK with that. I don't need a lawsuit.

But the reason my own research was never published was that my post-doc advisor demanded my work achieve the same Nobel-prize worthy result that this professor was claiming to have attained. To put that into perspective, imagine if the requirement to submit a machine learning paper to arxiv was building SkyNet. And this was a status quo requirement for publication so researchers tended to make bold claims about doing so, all of which eventually got debunked, and there still hasn't been a Nobel prize for the achievement yet 20+ years later. There has been significant progress though.

The professor went on to complete a long and successful career but the work in question was exposed as bogus shortly thereafter by a competition that was the equivalent of ImageNet for the field. It was yet another example of predicting the training set in an age when people didn't really understand yet why that would be a problem. And it wouldn't have amounted to data fakery except that said professor denied there was any issue whatsoever when I presented counterexamples to the model located by adversarial search and then proceeded to threaten me professionally, paraphrasing: "Your data could take me down, and if that happens, I'm taking you with me."

It's mostly behind me now, but I bring it up in this thread because I don't see how this new model of funding would have prevented this or a myriad of other issues with science funding.

Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#24

Post by MechEStudent »

They should require that who the fund get disbursed from, and to, and the amounts, be part of the public record. The quality of results, and year-after-year funding to the original researches (the ones who selected who the disbursement goes to) should be related to the success of the research. This would massively crowd-source successful grant creation, and make the market into a winners market.

The record would make things like gaming and collusion clearly visible after the fact.

Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#26

Post by jcoffland »

ISL wrote: post #4

If 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 shareholdin…

If you just shorted everything you'd come of pretty good on average.

Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#27

Post by jcoffland »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #11

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.

This is more than a quibble. It's a gaping hole in the idea.

Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#28

Post by xaa »

oneshot908 wrote: post #21
coherentpony wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's no benefit to me in outing the professor at this point so I'm not going to do so. If you feel that undermines my credibility, I'm OK with that. I don't need a lawsuit. But the reason my own research was never published was that my post-doc advisor demanded my work achieve the same Nobel-prize worthy result that this professor was claiming to have attained. To put that into perspective, imagine if the requirem…

Ugh, shiver. I've seen a variety of "problematic" data analysis behavior by very senior people, so I have no trouble believing this story. Nor do I blame you for not elaborating to random internet people. Although it is sad that his intimidation was not only rewarded, but apparently intimidated you right out of the field.

But IME, they usually try to cover their bases by (fake?) incompetence, rather than this kind of thing. That is, they claim to be unable to see severe problems even when the evidence is placed right in front of them. Plausible deniability, I guess.

In your example, it would be like "I don't see why we can't build Skynet. And if we claim to have built Skynet and have overstated our case, we can just fix it in future work. Anyway, who cares what we claim as long as we made a good-faith effort and get that next grant funded."

Personally though, I doubt whether most fabricated data is fabricated by PIs themselves, but by postdocs etc put exactly under the kind of impossible pressure you're describing. Then, of course, they can take credit for the successes and pretend to be shocked and outraged if the fabrication ever comes to light. The VW scandal probably happens somewhere in science daily.

I agree with your conclusion. Also, the distribution of "credit" or "popularity" is highly exponential in any field, so this proposal would just exacerbate the already rich-and-senior get more rich-and-senior phenomenon.

Re: Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

#29

Post by yeukhon »

oneshot908 wrote: post #21
coherentpony wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's no benefit to me in outing the professor at this point so I'm not going to do so. If you feel that undermines my credibility, I'm OK with that. I don't need a lawsuit. But the reason my own research was never published was that my post-doc advisor demanded my work achieve the same Nobel-prize worthy result that this professor was claiming to have attained. To put that into perspective, imagine if the requirem…

Whistleblower. Announce it annonymously, or just do it. Seriously, we can't get bullied like this. If we let this go, we will repeat the fraud research Harvard scientists did after getting paid by the sugar industry and hundreds of other scientists willingly to write paper with subjective evidences and conclusions because they were paid to write in certain way. We need to stand up. I am willing to support you if you have concrete evidences.
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