3 ms·
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 ti
by ISL 10y ago
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 shareholding ability for existing grants, letting them go long and short each project, should they choose to do so, perhaps in an imaginary currency. At the end of each cycle, allow researchers to re-allocate their "capital". The key difference from the article's proposal is that the researchers can retain their "capital" for future use.
It is the shorts I'm most interested in -- people who can accurately predict which experiments won't work in their proposed timelines are the people who I want evaluating grant applications.
- jcoffland 10y agoIf you just shorted everything you'd come of pretty good on average.
- winstonewert 10y agoThe way this would work out is that you win very small amounts when correctly shorting, but lose big amounts for incorrectly shorting. Shorting everything would work out to a small overall loss.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dllthomas 10y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_rules https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_...
- xaa 10y ago> 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.