41–49 of 49 posts
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.
Crucial question whose answer I didn't catch while reading the articles: how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?
And currently scientists in academic institutions are already giving more than 50% of their grant money as overhead cost to the institution.
I would like to see a small pool of grant money go out like this. Or maybe the lower scored but not grant winning get 1/10th allocation with no requirements to do a small scale study or act as a bridge.
Imagine how amazing technology could be if we swapped the war budget with the health and science budgets.
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.
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.
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…
>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…
This is really not too different from the current system, except for one critical thing, which is that instead of decisions being based on nepotistic review panels, they're based on everyone. So this has the benefit of everyone getting funding, and decisions on who to fund based on some highly democratized process rather than the old boys club.
The issue you're raising is important, but making funding decisions totally anonymous would help. Of course, I don't know that you could make it totally anonymous, and what you're suggesting would still be an issue, but anonymity would go a long way. Also, the thing you're suggesting would probably still happen anyway even in today's system.
The problem in my mind is deciding who gets to participate in the system. Everyone who's a tenured professor? Tenure-track? What disciplines? My guess is this would just shift the funding decision from a per-project issue to a per-researcher issue.
My favorite idea for remedying the current process is to randomize rewards. That is, everyone above the median gets thrown into a pool and everyone has X% chance of being funded.
Also, I'd like to see "term limits" and more randomization of review panels. Make it more akin to jury duty, where, if an institution receives federal funding, their researchers are all put into a pool, and review panels are randomly selected for fixed periods of time.
Finally, indirect costs need to be eliminated, sharply curtailed, or reorganized to require explicit justification. Republicans are finally drawing attention to this, and they're right: it's slush funding. Universities wouldn't give as much of a crap about funding if it weren't a profit margin for them.