3 ms·
> If I had the chance to have a second career, I would try harder not to follow of the fashion of the herd. As a fellow researcher, I would question you get to
by 317070 9y ago
> If I had the chance to have a second career, I would try harder not to follow of the fashion of the herd.
As a fellow researcher, I would question you get to have a second career following his advice. I wonder if he would be standing there giving this advice as a senior researcher, if he would have followed it himself.
I agree that it would probably be more useful for science, but from what I observe, it does not help in the current scientific environment. Scientific funding is a dog eat dog world.
- danieltillett 9y agoExactly. All the young researchers that didn’t follow the herd never got funding and never got tenure. When I was an academic I tried to follow a middle path. 75% herd following (more accurately arbitrage exploitation taking advantage that certain fields lag others so applying something old from one field is seen as cutting edge in another), 25% high risk. I would have loved to have spent more time on the high risk activities, but it is just too risky. We really, really, really, really need to change the way science is funded. Not more funding, smarter funding. We get exactly the results we should expect from the totally stupid way science is funded. /s I have a totally novel idea - how about we use science to determine how science funding should be allocated. /s
- kovek 9y agoOn that /s, do you know if there has been research done on what the smartest way to do funding would be? How could I find reputable resources discussing this idea?
- sndean 9y agoThere's some research. Most of it simply says "we're really bad at this." [0]. One way to fix it is to use a sort of lottery [1]. [0] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11335.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11335.abstract [1] http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16.abstract http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16.abstract