What a $500k grant proposal looks like

I only know the European grant system but I'm still perplexed why grant submissions are not blind. It's pretty obvious that certain universities usually get X grants in each cycle simply by putting their name on a proposal. I'd much prefer if you pitched the idea + costs etc. in a blinded document and have double blind decision making which proposals get accepted.

Sure that system could still be gamed but at least it would be a bit better (imo). The downside is that you cannot have the "what did you do before that merits getting the grant section" but that could come in the second round or something. It can probably be ignored, too because it doesn't matter that much if the research design is solid (imo).

Good points!

To the first point, starting in 2017 the Career solicitation dropped the tenure track requirement. I’m not tenure track and I have no aspiration of perusing tenure.

Your point is taken about there being “investors” no matter what, but the expectations of those groups couldn’t be any more different. NSF is happy if you spend your money on grad students. The idea of building a research program that is attractive to paying masters students is a far different prospect from building a profit making venture. I’m quite comfortable talking about and demonstrating the broad impacts of my work, but those impacts don’t include making investors a boatload of money in terms of selling a product. That’s just not in the cards. And to put a finer point on it, I’m much more comfortable with my investors being the general American public and my country as opposed to principally rich people.

To your second point, I agree that it costs a lot for a company to hire an ML engineer as an employee. But I would say it is not typical for a a researcher with maybe only a couple years of experience post grad school to be offered $500k to work on any project of their own choosing for 5 years (or more, let’s just be clear that $500k is like the minimum you’re even aloud to request for a career award).

I mean, maybe that is happening, I’ve honestly never heard of that. Does anyone here have that kind of arrangement, or have you heard of anyone who has been able to pull that off? Would be very interested to know how to approach a company to convince them of that. Pay me a salary, give me $500k, let me work on whatever I want for 5 years at my own direction, and that would sound comparable to the kind of freedom you get with a career award.

Sorry, that was me being lazy because I was typing on my phone. The government tallies up all qualified expenses the company has (salaries, benefits, rent, utilities, etc). And then tallies up all how many hours employees worked on "direct labor" so things directly related to a client (in lawyer speak, think "billable hours"). And then they come up with a ratio which is your overhead rate and that's the rate you're allowed to charge the government.

    all_expenses / total_hours_worked_by_all_employees = average_rate
    all_expenses / direct_hours_worked_by_all_employees = direct_rate
    direct_rate / average_rate = overhead_rate
    my_hourly_rate * overhead_rate = my_billing_rate

There's more nuance on what are qualified expenses and what are direct hours and things like that, but the government has formulae, and they determine your billing rate - or at least the overhead that turns into the billing rate.

Now, of course, my company can't pay me $1000/hour which turns into $2800/hour invoices to the government because then we'd be too expensive and never win the contract. So there is downward pressure on salaries because of that, and it prevents us from hiring superstars because their hourly rate will be too high. So that's one reason the government doesn't really get the A team working for them.

I think the last part of what you are saying is actually maybe closer to why the comparison seems apt to me. Trivial patents are another comparison. There's an Emperor has no clothes aspect of it to me, a focus on appearance of scientific prestige or rigor over actual substance. Ioannidis' "Why Most Scientific Findings are False" is maybe the best-known reference point, although I think that's maybe slightly different from, if related to, the underlying phenomena I have in mind.

HN maybe isn't the best forum to explain all of this but I'm quite jaded at this point with academics.

I don't want to come across as too negative either, as implying nothing works or there is no progress or something like that, but there's a huge disconnect between what I see personally in scientific circles in actuality vs the nominal narrative in terms of how ideas are taken up, how consensus is reached, what happens to accurate but dissenting perspectives, and how credit accrues. Some of it is common to our time, but some of it I think is amplified or something in the academic community.

I also realize at some level my experiences are not universal, but that there are a lot of people who feel the same (apparently) maybe just underscores my point.

When someone like Peter Higgs is saying he wouldn't be employable today (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...), scientific institutions should be paying closer attention and doing something about it.

As academic, coding is my favorite part. I would not give that up