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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?

#31

Post by xaa »

yeukhon wrote: post #29
oneshot908 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're really underestimating how much this happens. One incident is a drop in the bucket, and there won't be a whistleblower every time.

IMO the only way to fix it, especially in CS type disciplines, is to make it a requirement for publication that all the code is available and easily reproducible.

For other disciplines, I don't know the answer. At its core, this is a problem of very high competition and of failures being unpublishable. Really, it's not a great thing to out highly respected scientists who fabricate -- even though they richly deserve it -- because it erodes public confidence in science. It would be better if we could find a way to prevent these things before they happen.

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

#32

Post by xaa »

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…

> Continued funding will require perennial marketing to your peers.

I'm not a fan of this proposal either, but how does this aspect differ from the current system, really? Who do you think reviews grant proposals?

If I had a nickel for every PI who came back from a study section saying "We gave high scores to project X, because I know the PI, Y. He does good stuff." (i.e., the decision was made apparently with little reference to what was in the actual proposal), I could afford at least a better parking spot.

I like your idea. One problem, though. It seems to require some kind of post-hoc evaluation of whether a proposal succeeded or not. In its simplest form, this would reward low-impact, sure-to-succeed types of projects which are already a scourge at least at the NIH. The worst kind of grant IMO is not the one that fails, but the one that, after it succeeds, nothing of value was learned.

I think post-hoc grant evaluation is a great idea and needs to be done much more, I just wanted to point out that "success" is multidimensional: successful at meeting its aims, or successful at improving our state of knowledge? The latter is what we want but very difficult to evaluate even qualitatively.

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

#33

Post by killjoywashere »

My limited experience tends to suggest there is a geographic mafia involved as well. If you are on the west coast and just need money, you are probably better off pitching local industry because the east coast PIs have a older, more established network system that effectively locks up a lot of government grant funding.

I have applied for grants that might as well have been written for my group, very niche, and been denied, multiple times. One of my advisors actually told me "Do you know how to deal with the mafia? You make your own mafia."

I consider an NIH R01 to be equivalent to a degree from Harvard: it's the imprimatur, not the money (or, for Harvard, the education), that is different.

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

#34

Post by yeukhon »

xaa wrote: post #31
yeukhon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're really underestimating how much this happens. One incident is a drop in the bucket, and there won't be a whistleblower every time. IMO the only way to fix it, especially in CS type disciplines, is to make it a requirement for publication that all the code is available and easily reproducible. For other disciplines, I don't know the answer. At its core, this is a problem of very high competition and of failures…

I totally understand the institutional and establisment power in place and how many folks out there are on the same boat as this said JHU professor. But this is why we need to blow at every chance we have. We know how policy change takes time at the scale of universe. It takes forever. This is how corruption is defeated or we attempt to defeat corruption in society. Ideally we take out the top guys then all the way down. If we maintain the position that "the wrongdoer is too famous", "he/she is not alone and not fair to single one", then don't bother have peer review journals. I know exactly how corrupted some of the peer recviews can be to be honest. But that's the whole point. If we don't start holding people accountable, espeically the PI, the bad seed will grow and more bad seeds will blossom. Stop the bleeding. This JHU professor is famous so what? Grow up and admit the wrong. He/She is just scared of losing his/her honor and this is exactly what we need to do. Strip the crown and start encouraging people to publish code and dataset openly.

If this professor is famous, you can bet he/she most likely didn't do the actual research. It's almost always the graduate students on the co-author list did the research and then sign by the professors. If a professor mentoring can't admit the wrong how can he/she be a good mentor? If he/she instruct the students to take a shortcut, well, guess what, this is real bad. Do we want more bad seeds? Lead by examples. Let's not do more sloppy and dirty research. Someone who brag about his/her successful research but knowing the data is fake is a sad person. Academic is tough - totally understand that. Professor's tenure and salary often tie to the amount of grants they can bring in and the stress is too much for one to do research with ethics and dignity. But this is why we need to hold people accountable, and reform research. This is a complex issue, but it takes courage. I hope powerful researchers and the leaders on research committees on various government agency will start improving the system.

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

#35

Post by xaa »

yeukhon wrote: post #34
xaa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really underestimating how much this happens. One incident is a drop in the bucket, and there won't be a whistleblower every time. IMO the only way to fix it, especially in CS type disciplines, is to make it a requirement for publication that all the code is available and easily reproducible. For other disciplines, I don't know the answer. At its core, this is a problem of very high competition and of failures…

I totally understand the institutional and establisment power in place and how many folks out there are on the same boat as this said JHU professor. But this is why we need to blow at every chance we have. We know how policy change takes time at the scale of universe. It takes forever. This is how corruption is defeated or we attempt to defeat corruption in society. Ideally we take out the top guys then all the way d…

I said nothing about fairness. If I thought it were practical and would help, I'd advocate outing every single one of them. I have less than zero sympathy for them. And I totally agree that it is really screwing up science.

But to use an analogy, if you have a few weeds in your field/garden, you can pull them. If you have a lot, you need a systemic solution like pesticide. Remember also that the most senior people are close to retirement and if eliminated will in many cases just be replaced by other sociopaths.

The worst case scenario for this guy if the whistle were blown would be that he takes early retirement, goes home to enjoy his pension, and probably comes back as part-time/emeritus.

People would say, well, it's bad that he fabricated this one time, but his contributions to the field as a whole outweigh this one minor lapse. That's a big difference between when senior and junior people are caught in these situations. He would still maintain a lot of respect and connections -- more than enough to make good on his threat to totally screw GP's career.

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

#36

Post by sideshowb »

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.

Yes, or put another way, supposing we solve that problem, what do we do about granting said status to new scientists? Is it a one in, one out policy?

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

#37

Post by wsxcde »

The fundamental problem isn't that grant funding based on peer-reviewed evaluations of research proposals is a bad idea. It's that:

1. The pie has shrunk a lot because federal funding of research has seen a huge decrease when measured as a fraction of GDP.

2. There's also a lot of political pressure to not "waste" public money on research that doesn't yield useful technology NOW.

3. But at the same time, there's an ever-growing supply of people who love doing science. These people are willing to do pretty much anything to get and maintain an academic research position, because like it or not, academia is still the among the best places to do high-impact research.

So there simply isn't enough money to fund all the good ideas, BUT there's political pressure to fund only sureshot research, and an oversupply means that scientists are doing what it takes to be productive in their academic positions.

The obvious solution is to increase federal funding for research. Accept that not everything is going to pan out as intended. It's not like every product a company makes is going to be profitable, so why should we expect science to work any differently? And then just wait! Some of this research will in fact succeed and we'll see the next internet happen.

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

#39

Post by dllthomas »

jcoffland wrote: post #26
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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_...

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

#40

Post by yeukhon »

xaa wrote: post #35
yeukhon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand the institutional and establisment power in place and how many folks out there are on the same boat as this said JHU professor. But this is why we need to blow at every chance we have. We know how policy change takes time at the scale of universe. It takes forever. This is how corruption is defeated or we attempt to defeat corruption in society. Ideally we take out the top guys then all the way d…

I said nothing about fairness. If I thought it were practical and would help, I'd advocate outing every single one of them. I have less than zero sympathy for them. And I totally agree that it is really screwing up science. But to use an analogy, if you have a few weeds in your field/garden, you can pull them. If you have a lot, you need a systemic solution like pesticide. Remember also that the most senior people ar…

I agree and I am no saint either. My thought is don't let a bully win. Sure he may go home with an early retirement or just hide behind desk teaching who knows. But his reputation deserves to be punished. Perhaps no one would remember but that's a stain he needs to live up to. How fan we be so sure his other contributions are questionable? I am the type that can't stand at bully coming at me and I will go head to head. I am sorry if you or others have to go through these science bullies. Often we critize people demoting science in climate change and yet we ourselves can't do true science either
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