5 ms·

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been was

by dasmoth 10y ago

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. -- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?) Does make me think some people have been pondering this for a long while though.

pdimitar 10y ago
I don't know where the quote is from but it represents my only hope for the future of research. Of course, the hardcore bean-counters would not let that middle ground happen either; they are people in power who absolutely positively won't give you almost any leisure. It's still a good idea however. And some managers would embrace it since the notion of "paying somebody for possible benefits 5-10 years in the future" is something which our current form of capitalism hates. But some of them are reasonable people and would accept a middle ground. Another thing I was thinking about in the past is rotational work: given a team of 6 people, have 1 person always working on a research for at least a month with zero responsibility about the money-making activities. After that month -- or two, or six -- expire, return the person back to the capitalistic loop and put somebody else on the research duty. This however is rather clunky because people will have to be constantly caught up with where are the things currently in the money-making job and the research job. Perhaps there are other ideas as well, but I am not aware of them.
- quantum_state 10y ago
  In a university setting, it seems to me that teaching in combination with support from endowment (not research grants) can be one of the scenario for this ... key is still to have fundamentally good people with passion and joy for the endeavor ..
  - deong 10y ago
    The thing that always infuriated me about computer science (my field), is that I don't actually need the big research grant. There are people who do, of course, but I could do most of what I found interesting and useful with a high-end desktop PC and some free time. But universities don't operate that way anymore. It doesn't matter that all I need is $5K and some time -- the university needs their 40% cut of a multi-year, multi-million dollar collaboration. And so the entire system is set up to fund those projects and those projects only.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      But you can only have so much free time, which means you eventually will have to "buy" time. Grants help you do this by allowing you to fund grad students and postdocs.
      - dasmoth 10y ago
        Not everyone who is a good independent researcher is a good man-manager. For some people, researching independently -- or perhaps collaborating with a few other independents -- might be a better route than being forced to spin up a research group (and more-or-less-inevitably finding themselves with limited time to do the hands-on stuff themselves).
    - arcanus 10y ago
      > 40% cut of a multi-year 40%?!? I would kill for overhead that low. Most places are over 50 now. I've heard of 70% at the absolute top.
      - deong 10y ago
CuriouslyC 10y ago
It shouldn't be a surprise given the fact that physics was revolutionized by a patent clerk. Additionally, having a relaxing job with lots of free time doesn't just free you to explore hard problems, it also promotes creativity. This is because stress is the ultimate creativity killer. Thus these sorts of jobs are really a recipe for deep thinking.
- Azkar 10y ago
  Solutions usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee. -- John Gall in Systemantics[1] A very short read, and quite interesting. It touches on a lot of the same points already made in this thread (people will game metrics, etc). The biggest argument that the book makes that is trying to set up a system to accomplish something will cause the system to do everything but accomplish its goal, which leads to the above quote. You can't set up a system to achieve a goal, only set up an environment that allows the goal to be achieved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
enord 10y ago
If you're a private enterprise, anything you do can be reasonably related to money (revenue, profit, long term forecast etc.), and we have ample tools to measure performance, align incentives and evaluate risk over the money-abstraction. This works because money flows through the whole process and partakes in every transaction. Academic pursuits are, monetarily speaking, money sinks. They might be worthwhile investments, but only so far as they deliver patents or attract grants. Academic professionals want to advance the state of the art, and only small parts of that work is applicable to the money-abstraction. In order to prevent Science(TM) from grinding to a halt, we replace Money with some other measurable so we can apply our existing tools and make risk-assessment before granting money to academics who will (most certainly) spend every last cent of it to indulge their pursuits. We chose measurables in a trade-off between academic freedom + infinite spending and academic constraints + finite spending, because the supply of Science(TM) is practically unbounded. I'm stating the obvious here in order to ask the question: What is the gosh-darned alternative?
iamcurious 10y ago
A good solution for universities is to pay researchers a full salary for a 30 hour week. Where 10 hours must be dedicated to teaching and the rest can be used at their leisure. It is a happy arrangement for all parties.
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  The number of stated hours that a salary is allocated for is irrelevant. Nominally, professors are supposed to be working 40 hours a week. This stops exactly nobody from working between 60 and 80 hours regularly. The problem is cultural, not policy-based.
amelius 10y ago
Another reason why UBI could turn out useful.
zeteo 10y ago
There's a long tradition of important advances in knowledge being made by people with an undemanding job [1] [2]. The 19th century university became a hotbed of research because the teaching workload was relatively light and they didn't require that you also did research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_and_optics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_a...
- neuromantik8086 10y ago
  The Parson-naturalist list you link to lacks one very prominent scientist-cleric- Gregor Mendel (though I believe this to be deliberate, as he performed research for economic reasons rather than spiritual reasons iirc). The earliest research on genetics took years to complete and was done as a side-project in addition to other monastic duties.
- jnicholasp 10y ago
  Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many proto-scientists were people with either an established income or independent wealth, who had the freedom to pursue whatever interested them. We ought to be finding ways to broaden the number of people who can pursue their interests, while not forfeiting security, dignity, and social respect. This is one of the arguments for universal basic income, that it could decouple (some) people's desire to pursue knowledge from the need to earn a living, and maybe even especially from the need to produce regular, measurable results. Right not we're channeling most of our people who are interested in and capable of developing new knowledge into jobs which demand "results" more than they demand that truth be followed wherever it leads, and however long it takes. This will lead to a great deal of dubious Normal Science [0], and very little revolutionary thought [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Paul-ish 10y ago
I could see this working in mathematics and many branches of computer science. How would this work in environments that require large outlays of money to do experiments? Do you just hand untested individuals large sums of money and leave them alone?
- p4bl0 10y ago
  I believe letting academic communities in autogestion (as in capacity of workers' self-management) is the way to go. For really large projects you can also include citizens (selected by sortition) and elected politics in addition to the temporarily mandated members of the community in the committee taking the decision. Of course the citizens and politics would have to be trained a bit so the decision process might be long, but these kind of projects are never in a hurry.
trishume 10y ago
This sounds an awful lot like Google's 20% time and the "hack days" done by many other companies. Very few guidelines and no consequences for doing something insufficiently useful, but it ends up with a lot of valuable ideas anyway (and granted, some automated foosball tables).
hardtke 10y ago
The one place where the University and the Professor are perfectly aligned is the summer salary. Most professors are paid for only 9 months by the University. They need to pay the remaining portion out of their grant. This gives the Professor and the University a mutual incentive to secure one or more grants. The Professor gets paid and the University gets their overhead tax on the grant.
fjdlwlv 10y ago
How different is Thompson's idea from modern academy? PhD is granted for showing that you know how to do research. Tenure granted for showing that you can do research. Tenured professors are free to research however they like, and get paid as long as they teach.
- Fomite 10y ago
  It should be noted that "modern academy" involves a lot of people who don't teach, and are in institutional settings where teaching is not a thing.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I just want to say to you and the others in this thread, excellent discussion, comments, thoughts, and references.

by dasmoth 10y ago

pdimitar 10y ago

I don't know where the quote is from but it represents my only hope for the future of research. Of course, the hardcore bean-counters would not let that middle ground happen either; they are people in power who absolutely positively won't give you almost any leisure. It's still a good idea however. And some managers would embrace it since the notion of "paying somebody for possible benefits 5-10 years in the future" is something which our current form of capitalism hates. But some of them are reasonable people and would accept a middle ground. Another thing I was thinking about in the past is rotational work: given a team of 6 people, have 1 person always working on a research for at least a month with zero responsibility about the money-making activities. After that month -- or two, or six -- expire, return the person back to the capitalistic loop and put somebody else on the research duty. This however is rather clunky because people will have to be constantly caught up with where are the things currently in the money-making job and the research job. Perhaps there are other ideas as well, but I am not aware of them.

quantum_state 10y ago
In a university setting, it seems to me that teaching in combination with support from endowment (not research grants) can be one of the scenario for this ... key is still to have fundamentally good people with passion and joy for the endeavor ..
- deong 10y ago
  The thing that always infuriated me about computer science (my field), is that I don't actually need the big research grant. There are people who do, of course, but I could do most of what I found interesting and useful with a high-end desktop PC and some free time. But universities don't operate that way anymore. It doesn't matter that all I need is $5K and some time -- the university needs their 40% cut of a multi-year, multi-million dollar collaboration. And so the entire system is set up to fund those projects and those projects only.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    But you can only have so much free time, which means you eventually will have to "buy" time. Grants help you do this by allowing you to fund grad students and postdocs.
    - dasmoth 10y ago
      Not everyone who is a good independent researcher is a good man-manager. For some people, researching independently -- or perhaps collaborating with a few other independents -- might be a better route than being forced to spin up a research group (and more-or-less-inevitably finding themselves with limited time to do the hands-on stuff themselves).
  - arcanus 10y ago
    > 40% cut of a multi-year 40%?!? I would kill for overhead that low. Most places are over 50 now. I've heard of 70% at the absolute top.
    - deong 10y ago

CuriouslyC 10y ago

It shouldn't be a surprise given the fact that physics was revolutionized by a patent clerk. Additionally, having a relaxing job with lots of free time doesn't just free you to explore hard problems, it also promotes creativity. This is because stress is the ultimate creativity killer. Thus these sorts of jobs are really a recipe for deep thinking.

Azkar 10y ago
Solutions usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee. -- John Gall in Systemantics[1] A very short read, and quite interesting. It touches on a lot of the same points already made in this thread (people will game metrics, etc). The biggest argument that the book makes that is trying to set up a system to accomplish something will cause the system to do everything but accomplish its goal, which leads to the above quote. You can't set up a system to achieve a goal, only set up an environment that allows the goal to be achieved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

enord 10y ago

If you're a private enterprise, anything you do can be reasonably related to money (revenue, profit, long term forecast etc.), and we have ample tools to measure performance, align incentives and evaluate risk over the money-abstraction. This works because money flows through the whole process and partakes in every transaction. Academic pursuits are, monetarily speaking, money sinks. They might be worthwhile investments, but only so far as they deliver patents or attract grants. Academic professionals want to advance the state of the art, and only small parts of that work is applicable to the money-abstraction. In order to prevent Science(TM) from grinding to a halt, we replace Money with some other measurable so we can apply our existing tools and make risk-assessment before granting money to academics who will (most certainly) spend every last cent of it to indulge their pursuits. We chose measurables in a trade-off between academic freedom + infinite spending and academic constraints + finite spending, because the supply of Science(TM) is practically unbounded. I'm stating the obvious here in order to ask the question: What is the gosh-darned alternative?

iamcurious 10y ago

A good solution for universities is to pay researchers a full salary for a 30 hour week. Where 10 hours must be dedicated to teaching and the rest can be used at their leisure. It is a happy arrangement for all parties.

neuromantik8086 10y ago
The number of stated hours that a salary is allocated for is irrelevant. Nominally, professors are supposed to be working 40 hours a week. This stops exactly nobody from working between 60 and 80 hours regularly. The problem is cultural, not policy-based.

amelius 10y ago

Another reason why UBI could turn out useful.

zeteo 10y ago

There's a long tradition of important advances in knowledge being made by people with an undemanding job [1] [2]. The 19th century university became a hotbed of research because the teaching workload was relatively light and they didn't require that you also did research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson-naturalist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_and_optics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Lens-grinding_a...

neuromantik8086 10y ago
The Parson-naturalist list you link to lacks one very prominent scientist-cleric- Gregor Mendel (though I believe this to be deliberate, as he performed research for economic reasons rather than spiritual reasons iirc). The earliest research on genetics took years to complete and was done as a side-project in addition to other monastic duties.
jnicholasp 10y ago
Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many proto-scientists were people with either an established income or independent wealth, who had the freedom to pursue whatever interested them. We ought to be finding ways to broaden the number of people who can pursue their interests, while not forfeiting security, dignity, and social respect. This is one of the arguments for universal basic income, that it could decouple (some) people's desire to pursue knowledge from the need to earn a living, and maybe even especially from the need to produce regular, measurable results. Right not we're channeling most of our people who are interested in and capable of developing new knowledge into jobs which demand "results" more than they demand that truth be followed wherever it leads, and however long it takes. This will lead to a great deal of dubious Normal Science [0], and very little revolutionary thought [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Paul-ish 10y ago

I could see this working in mathematics and many branches of computer science. How would this work in environments that require large outlays of money to do experiments? Do you just hand untested individuals large sums of money and leave them alone?

p4bl0 10y ago
I believe letting academic communities in autogestion (as in capacity of workers' self-management) is the way to go. For really large projects you can also include citizens (selected by sortition) and elected politics in addition to the temporarily mandated members of the community in the committee taking the decision. Of course the citizens and politics would have to be trained a bit so the decision process might be long, but these kind of projects are never in a hurry.

trishume 10y ago

This sounds an awful lot like Google's 20% time and the "hack days" done by many other companies. Very few guidelines and no consequences for doing something insufficiently useful, but it ends up with a lot of valuable ideas anyway (and granted, some automated foosball tables).

hardtke 10y ago

The one place where the University and the Professor are perfectly aligned is the summer salary. Most professors are paid for only 9 months by the University. They need to pay the remaining portion out of their grant. This gives the Professor and the University a mutual incentive to secure one or more grants. The Professor gets paid and the University gets their overhead tax on the grant.

fjdlwlv 10y ago

How different is Thompson's idea from modern academy? PhD is granted for showing that you know how to do research. Tenure granted for showing that you can do research. Tenured professors are free to research however they like, and get paid as long as they teach.

Fomite 10y ago
It should be noted that "modern academy" involves a lot of people who don't teach, and are in institutional settings where teaching is not a thing.

dredmorbius 10y ago

I just want to say to you and the others in this thread, excellent discussion, comments, thoughts, and references.