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I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant
by imgabe 11y ago
I've also wondered lately if we shouldn't add some random element to the way we fund scientific research. Right now, as I understand it, researchers write grant proposals and funding institutions evaluate them and pick the best ones to fund.
Presumably then, the researchers who get the most funding would be the ones who are the best at writing grant proposals, and they may or may not be doing the best research or researching the most important things. In theory, there could be brilliant researchers working on important things who don't get any money because they lack the ability to persuade people to give it to them.
One of my "if I had a billion dollars" dreams is to set up a foundation that would randomly award research grants to field of qualified applicants.
I think it's the same problem with elections. Governing and campaigning are two different skills. Elections elect people who are good at campaigning, but may or may not be good at governing.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- caskance 11y agoThen you would be flooded with a deluge of low quality proposals. This kind of thing only works with people because it's not trivial to instantly create a large number of new ones simply to game the system.
- imgabe 11y agoIt would involve a screening process to ensure that a real person wrote a coherent proposal before adding it to the selection pool.
- caskance 11y agoObviously there will be some kind of filter and spammers will adjust their techniques to slip through the filter since you've now given them incentive to do so. This is hardly a new phenomenon.
- imgabe 11y agoSpam filters are pretty effective these days, I don't think this is an insurmountable problem. Maybe something like sending a verification email with a link to a captcha. Not too much of a nuisance to do for one application, but unsustainable for submitting a million applications. Edit: Alternately, an even lazier idea: Randomly award the grant from the pool of applicants rejected by other institutions.
- macrael 11y agoThe one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by other researches, scores are given to the grant and then a cutoff score is determined. All grants above that score are funded, those below are not. This doesn't really change your conclusion, that grant writing is an important skill for acquiring funding but it's not about impressing the funding institution, it's about impressing fellow scientists.
- danieltillett 11y agoThe only problem is the scoring system is highly biased towards track record of the grant applicant not the actual grant content. On top of this once you get the grant you can in practice spend the money doing whatever you want. More fundamentally the peer review process can't actually accurately sort good proposals from outstanding proposals, but we only have the money to fund a fraction of the outstanding proposals. Under these conditions just being honest and moving to a system where all good proposals are put into a lottery and funded by chance would be better approach.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoSee also http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431