5 ms·

I'm not sure where to begin on this, so I'll resort to a brain dump. The Nobel prize has become steadily more political. More senior researchers in the field h

I'm not sure where to begin on this, so I'll resort to a brain dump. The Nobel prize has become steadily more political. More senior researchers in the field have had more time to accrue political power, so expect the awards to reach further back in time. Research productivity has dropped, though. Today a professor in biology has a more than full time job just to get money for their lab. So you go through gradschool, go through postdoc, and when you've got all this training, you stop doing science and become a grant writer. If you don't bring in money, you don't have a lab. For the postdocs and grad students, they live very insecurely. Their pay is poor, they live knowing they will probably relocate somewhere entirely different in three or four years, so there's no point having links into the local community. They work for someone has no training in management and has no time to deal with them if the money is going to flow. And there are still lots of places where the postdocs aren't considered full time employees of the university and don't have, say, health insurance. These are hardly the conditions that you can expect to produce good work. Fields are mined down to the last details rather than looking at unexplored areas nearby. There are many reasons for this. As a grad student you work on what your advisor works on. As a postdoc, you work on what your lab works on. As a professor, you work on what you worked on as a postdoc and it requires multiple years and lots of luck to reorient a lab. You need a community to provide evidence of your competence in order to advance at each stage and get tenure, which you can't easily get if you wander out of an established field. Nor is there any training on how to look effectively find things to work on.

lumost 8y ago
Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Keep in mind by small grant we mean 100-200k towards a million.
  - madhadron 8y ago
    Which is a small grant. You would be hard pressed to run a five year software project on a million dollars, much less a project that requires real laboratory overhead and materials.
- madhadron 8y ago
  > Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. I don't know the trend there. In biology there was a trend in the late 2000's of Singapore recruiting professors to come over. Most of them ended up moving back west, saying that they couldn't find students that could work independently. > The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation. The block grant with periodic evaluation is exactly how Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the NIH intramural researchers work.
scarejunba 8y ago
Interesting. A lot of this is because of imperfect information and transaction costs. I wonder if firms running R&D choose a different route and if that works. Perhaps even random resource allocation would do a better job since it removes the incentive to falsify though it does add an incentive to participate in bad faith.
jammygit 8y ago
Well said. Any thoughts on researchers like Piotr Wozniak (Supermemo founder) who gave up on publishing and academia? "I no longer care about publishing in peer review journals. I don't perish if I do not publish. Some of my old publications from the 1990s are listed here. I consider peer review to be a constraint on creativity and dissemination of inspiration (see: Problem with peer review)."[1] [1] http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak edit: here is a specific article of his on peer review: http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_with_peer_review http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_with_peer_review Its too bad I can't find somewhere he is publishing his raw data, but besides that I appreciate his ability to operate like he does.

lumost 8y ago

Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation.

dnautics 8y ago
Keep in mind by small grant we mean 100-200k towards a million.
- madhadron 8y ago
  Which is a small grant. You would be hard pressed to run a five year software project on a million dollars, much less a project that requires real laboratory overhead and materials.
madhadron 8y ago
> Is this only a US and European problem? when I was in college in the oughts their was a popular trend in Physics PhDs to move to china following there Grad program as China provided a block grant to them to start a new lab. I don't know the trend there. In biology there was a trend in the late 2000's of Singapore recruiting professors to come over. Most of them ended up moving back west, saying that they couldn't find students that could work independently. > The pattern whereby professors have to apply for small grants continuously to keep a lab funded and operated is an inordinate waste of time vs. a block grant with periodic evaluation. The block grant with periodic evaluation is exactly how Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the NIH intramural researchers work.

scarejunba 8y ago

Interesting. A lot of this is because of imperfect information and transaction costs. I wonder if firms running R&D choose a different route and if that works. Perhaps even random resource allocation would do a better job since it removes the incentive to falsify though it does add an incentive to participate in bad faith.

jammygit 8y ago

Well said. Any thoughts on researchers like Piotr Wozniak (Supermemo founder) who gave up on publishing and academia? "I no longer care about publishing in peer review journals. I don't perish if I do not publish. Some of my old publications from the 1990s are listed here. I consider peer review to be a constraint on creativity and dissemination of inspiration (see: Problem with peer review)."[1] [1] http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak edit: here is a specific article of his on peer review: http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_with_peer_review http://supermemo.guru/wiki/Problem_with_peer_review Its too bad I can't find somewhere he is publishing his raw data, but besides that I appreciate his ability to operate like he does.