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> In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is down

> In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. I think that narrative is correct. We can't fix the problem if we don't discuss it. The whole "I believe in science" thing (which you seem to be pushing) is really quite silly. Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I think this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of scientists are hangers-on, i.e. not capable of doing original research. These scientists are terrified of people who can do original research since it makes them look bad (and feel bad, it's actually depressing to think about all the people out there who are way smarter than me). You can imagine funding schemes that attempt to account for these issues. "For every dollar of funding for interpretation A, earmark 25 cents for alternative interpretations". View science as a market, something beyond our powers to predict, then diversify your investments.

svara 7y ago
I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution: Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible. But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.
- btrettel 7y ago
  > But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues. To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals: > [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to. From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ The status quo is not the best we can do.
- clairity 7y ago
  science doesn't have to be conservative at all, so why presume it? most (advanced) knowledge is tentative anyway, so why not take the strategy of accepting it all while it's uncertain? negative results are just a valuable as advances, and contradictions are just areas begging for more research. what you really seem to be asking is "why can't science be more efficient?" and science shouldn't be more efficient. it should be wholly less efficient. we should have more people searching in the dark for the implausible. conservatism wants the safe and sure, and science is, and must be, anything but.
  - bobthechef 7y ago
    When people say that science is conservative, what they mean is that it progresses slowly and cautiously to built up certainty. Science is a tradition that typically progresses incrementally and is revised incrementally (I should say, there are many scientific traditions that proceed this way, not some single, grand, capital S "Science!"). When anomalies occur in the experimental results, it takes a while for them to be digested in a way that leads to model revision and then broad acceptance. Now, that isn't to say that people can't explore unexplored avenues or explore alternatives. They should, but that doesn't contradict the idea that the sciences proceed conservatively. Otherwise, you've got chaos, not science. In any case, you're typically going to profit much more by learning from a meticulously examined and fleshed out tradition than you are by starting from proverbial scratch. Science wants certainty which it why, when done properly (aye, there's the rub!), it goes to great lengths to verify things. Conservatism, contrary to widespread misconception, is not about stagnation, but about being careful and responsible with the stewardship of your hard won inheritance.
    - clairity 7y ago
      you're idealizing science and literally begging the question[0], in this case, making an a priori assumption that science must proceed conservatively and then trying to rationalize that position. conservatism unduly burdens science by overly valuing correctness over exploration. science advances on the latter, not the former. be wrong, it's ok. it only adds to our scientific knowledge. we can't even know when we're wrong without a grueling many attempts at being right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
JackFr 7y ago
> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). That's not necessarily true. There are people who are excellent at both, but I suppose in practice they are relatively rare. The best recognize research as a cooperative human endeavor, and human elements like bias, ego, etc. can never fully be extricated.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Not sure why you are being down-voted, most research is done in teams, and the likelihood is that a good team has a person who is good as writing grants applications, and having such a person enables them to maintain a team.
derefr 7y ago
You’re talking about scientific academia, not science. Much of science occurs outside of academia. Military and industrial scientific R&D, corporations’ basic-research labs, independents, etc. It’s only in scientific academia that these “strictly adhere to the popular scientific paradigm in order to get published” worries exist.
- internet_user 7y ago
  Where do you think military R&D occurs? They fund universities like anyone else. Yes, there is some internal research, but even in fields like math, where NSA probably does a lot of internal reseach, you still have classified top-secret research performed in public universities.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  As the article explicitly shows, private medical research very much follows academic thought, because of the same incentives that makes public funding a political game. There is in fact no fundamental difference between a manager deciding what projects to take on and a bureaucrat deciding which projects to fund from public money - in both cases, the person doing the decision is not using their own money, and they don't have the full qualification to make the best scientific decision. Even if they do, they are held responsible by people who do not (upper managers / higher level bureaucrats), who will evaluate them more on the process they followed than on actual results (especially as results are likely to be far off). Even though 'a company is putting its own money behind the research', it's still people who don't own that money taking the actual decisions. Even start-ups are usually not using 'their own money', but investors' money, with the investors taking the role of grants approvers.
shadowgovt 7y ago
> he people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). Interesting hypothesis. What is your evidence?
- leftyted 7y ago
  I would say that the antagonism between politics and truth-seeking goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and people who specialize in one tend to hold the other in contempt (or at least suspicion). Science is about being right and politics is about a plurality of people working together. In the name of cooperation, politics prefers vague language that is decidedly un-formal whereas science gravitates toward mathematical precision. Both are necessary, but I'd say we're leaning too far into politics these days.
snowwrestler 7y ago
Scientific funding is a political game only to the extent that the politics are not contradicted by evidence. For example, no matter how good you are at scientific politics, you're not going to get the NSF to give you $1 billion to test whether the Earth is flat, or if gravity is actually caused by little fairies pushing us all down toward the ground. Why? Because, at least for public scientific funding, it is bad politics for funding committees to look like they value politics over evidence. It opens up a big lane for other scientists to attack them. If you have 3 groups all studying the same phenomenon, all proposing very similar studies, politics will in part affect who gets that funding. In retrospect, this can look overly conservative and even corrupt... but we must have the discipline to recognize hindsight for what it is. In real time, trying to make funding decisions with little to no hard evidence for the right course of action, it is scientifically valid to use whatever evidence is available, even if it's something as nebulous as a reputation or a hunch. Science has a reputation for producing hard evidence and knowledge, but the practice of science exists far out, on the edge of the unknown. The whole point of conducting scientific research is to explore what we don't know. By definition, evidence is scant there. So what if a group proposes a hypothesis that seems really far out there, or even contradicts existing evidence? It's true that they will be less likely to get funding regardless of their connections. Is it wrong that radically new ideas and approaches have a steeper hill to climb? Not necessarily; they have worse priors. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's true that paradigm shifts often start out looking radically new, but it's also true that most radically new ideas end up being wrong. Setting aside some funding for crazy ideas is not a bad idea, but it should not be very much... it certainly won't be enough to preempt any hindsight disappointment. There will always be a chance we'll look back and say "I wish we had funded those (seemingly crazy) researchers earlier."
- snapetom 7y ago
  > public scientific funding If you're talking about "politics" in this sense, then yes, I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the person you're responding to is saying "politics" in terms of inter-group and inter-department relationships. Egos, arrogance, and insecurities run rampant in academia. Science, like any other fields, are not above these issues, which does hurt "good science."
Gibbon1 7y ago
> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I'd be interested in a compare and contrast with AIDs research. Same time frame but AIDs researchers threw everything but the kitchen sink at it and made progress. You got to wonder one field was dominated by status seekers with fat ego's and the other people working on a disease that mostly afflicts people no one cares about.
- jchallis 7y ago
  After reading “And the Band Played On”, early HIV research had enormous ego collisions between Robert Gallo in the US and Luc Montagnier in France.

svara 7y ago

I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution: Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible. But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.

btrettel 7y ago
> But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues. To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals: > [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to. From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ The status quo is not the best we can do.
clairity 7y ago
science doesn't have to be conservative at all, so why presume it? most (advanced) knowledge is tentative anyway, so why not take the strategy of accepting it all while it's uncertain? negative results are just a valuable as advances, and contradictions are just areas begging for more research. what you really seem to be asking is "why can't science be more efficient?" and science shouldn't be more efficient. it should be wholly less efficient. we should have more people searching in the dark for the implausible. conservatism wants the safe and sure, and science is, and must be, anything but.
- bobthechef 7y ago
  When people say that science is conservative, what they mean is that it progresses slowly and cautiously to built up certainty. Science is a tradition that typically progresses incrementally and is revised incrementally (I should say, there are many scientific traditions that proceed this way, not some single, grand, capital S "Science!"). When anomalies occur in the experimental results, it takes a while for them to be digested in a way that leads to model revision and then broad acceptance. Now, that isn't to say that people can't explore unexplored avenues or explore alternatives. They should, but that doesn't contradict the idea that the sciences proceed conservatively. Otherwise, you've got chaos, not science. In any case, you're typically going to profit much more by learning from a meticulously examined and fleshed out tradition than you are by starting from proverbial scratch. Science wants certainty which it why, when done properly (aye, there's the rub!), it goes to great lengths to verify things. Conservatism, contrary to widespread misconception, is not about stagnation, but about being careful and responsible with the stewardship of your hard won inheritance.
  - clairity 7y ago
    you're idealizing science and literally begging the question[0], in this case, making an a priori assumption that science must proceed conservatively and then trying to rationalize that position. conservatism unduly burdens science by overly valuing correctness over exploration. science advances on the latter, not the former. be wrong, it's ok. it only adds to our scientific knowledge. we can't even know when we're wrong without a grueling many attempts at being right. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

JackFr 7y ago

> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). That's not necessarily true. There are people who are excellent at both, but I suppose in practice they are relatively rare. The best recognize research as a cooperative human endeavor, and human elements like bias, ego, etc. can never fully be extricated.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Not sure why you are being down-voted, most research is done in teams, and the likelihood is that a good team has a person who is good as writing grants applications, and having such a person enables them to maintain a team.

derefr 7y ago

You’re talking about scientific academia, not science. Much of science occurs outside of academia. Military and industrial scientific R&D, corporations’ basic-research labs, independents, etc. It’s only in scientific academia that these “strictly adhere to the popular scientific paradigm in order to get published” worries exist.

internet_user 7y ago
Where do you think military R&D occurs? They fund universities like anyone else. Yes, there is some internal research, but even in fields like math, where NSA probably does a lot of internal reseach, you still have classified top-secret research performed in public universities.
tsimionescu 7y ago
As the article explicitly shows, private medical research very much follows academic thought, because of the same incentives that makes public funding a political game. There is in fact no fundamental difference between a manager deciding what projects to take on and a bureaucrat deciding which projects to fund from public money - in both cases, the person doing the decision is not using their own money, and they don't have the full qualification to make the best scientific decision. Even if they do, they are held responsible by people who do not (upper managers / higher level bureaucrats), who will evaluate them more on the process they followed than on actual results (especially as results are likely to be far off). Even though 'a company is putting its own money behind the research', it's still people who don't own that money taking the actual decisions. Even start-ups are usually not using 'their own money', but investors' money, with the investors taking the role of grants approvers.

shadowgovt 7y ago

> he people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). Interesting hypothesis. What is your evidence?

leftyted 7y ago
I would say that the antagonism between politics and truth-seeking goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and people who specialize in one tend to hold the other in contempt (or at least suspicion). Science is about being right and politics is about a plurality of people working together. In the name of cooperation, politics prefers vague language that is decidedly un-formal whereas science gravitates toward mathematical precision. Both are necessary, but I'd say we're leaning too far into politics these days.

snowwrestler 7y ago

Scientific funding is a political game only to the extent that the politics are not contradicted by evidence. For example, no matter how good you are at scientific politics, you're not going to get the NSF to give you $1 billion to test whether the Earth is flat, or if gravity is actually caused by little fairies pushing us all down toward the ground. Why? Because, at least for public scientific funding, it is bad politics for funding committees to look like they value politics over evidence. It opens up a big lane for other scientists to attack them. If you have 3 groups all studying the same phenomenon, all proposing very similar studies, politics will in part affect who gets that funding. In retrospect, this can look overly conservative and even corrupt... but we must have the discipline to recognize hindsight for what it is. In real time, trying to make funding decisions with little to no hard evidence for the right course of action, it is scientifically valid to use whatever evidence is available, even if it's something as nebulous as a reputation or a hunch. Science has a reputation for producing hard evidence and knowledge, but the practice of science exists far out, on the edge of the unknown. The whole point of conducting scientific research is to explore what we don't know. By definition, evidence is scant there. So what if a group proposes a hypothesis that seems really far out there, or even contradicts existing evidence? It's true that they will be less likely to get funding regardless of their connections. Is it wrong that radically new ideas and approaches have a steeper hill to climb? Not necessarily; they have worse priors. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's true that paradigm shifts often start out looking radically new, but it's also true that most radically new ideas end up being wrong. Setting aside some funding for crazy ideas is not a bad idea, but it should not be very much... it certainly won't be enough to preempt any hindsight disappointment. There will always be a chance we'll look back and say "I wish we had funded those (seemingly crazy) researchers earlier."

snapetom 7y ago
> public scientific funding If you're talking about "politics" in this sense, then yes, I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the person you're responding to is saying "politics" in terms of inter-group and inter-department relationships. Egos, arrogance, and insecurities run rampant in academia. Science, like any other fields, are not above these issues, which does hurt "good science."

Gibbon1 7y ago

> Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I'd be interested in a compare and contrast with AIDs research. Same time frame but AIDs researchers threw everything but the kitchen sink at it and made progress. You got to wonder one field was dominated by status seekers with fat ego's and the other people working on a disease that mostly afflicts people no one cares about.

jchallis 7y ago
After reading “And the Band Played On”, early HIV research had enormous ego collisions between Robert Gallo in the US and Luc Montagnier in France.