4 ms·

Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Acade

by nickff 7y ago

Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other government-funded researchers are simply responding to their incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case. The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted to gaming a government-funded and bureaucratically-run grant system. Major government funded research projects (especially international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive structure. Pouring more money in will not help us. A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.

djaque 7y ago
I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators. Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results. On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.
- _hxy4 7y ago
  Your view of the incentives argument is too narrow. In my experience, the people who actively try to game the system are rare. The majority of the problem is people and ideas being filtered out by the system. This comment by Daniel Lakeland on Andrew Gelman's blog says it better than I could: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-research-research-criticism-research-criticism-criticism-research-criticism-criticism-criticism/#comment-737732 https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-rese... > The way the incentives play out is that they create a survivorship bias. You can’t do science today without at least basically paying your own salary, either through grants (many biomed researchers have to pay a large component of their salary directly through their grants) or through making “having you in the university” make sense for the university so that it pays your salary. That again basically means either grants, or adding substantially to the university prestige and the ability to charge money for tuition and get high quality students etc. > So, anyone with tenure in academia today has spent say 5 to 10 years minimum creating a “brand” that somehow enables them to pay their salaries, and/or funds for lab work etc. If the primary kind of “brand” that universities respond to is a “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” then the primary content of academia today is people who survived that cutoff… > It’s not so much that individuals see the incentives and change their own behaviors to fit it (though this happens to some extent) it’s more just that lots of people go into the filter, and the ones that come out are enriched for that particular behavior. > Also note that this mechanism doesn’t require the individual scientists to be primarily money-driven. It’s sufficient for the MBAs running the dean/provost/president offices to be primarily money driven, which they definitively are. I would recommend reading chapter 4 of the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (a physics PhD). While I disagree with a large fraction of the book (in particular, I don't think the problem is inherently political), I think chapter 4 is mostly right and shows how a researcher can feel self-motivated while actually being under strong external influences. http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ I can give examples from my own experience in academia if anyone is interested.
  - djaque 7y ago
    Yes, yes, I understand your point. What I'm trying to say is that the PIs in my department (the ones who made it through the filter, that is) don't seem to have the “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” that you're talking about. I might just be really lucky to be in a clean department, but Machiavellian researchers accumulating in academia by filtering or otherwise just isn't my experience, sorry. I'm interested in hearing your experience though because it sounds like it's very different. I'm studying accelerator physics by the way, an extremely applied sub-field of physics. It may be that it's easier to weed out the people that don't pull their weight here.
koeng 7y ago
Biotech companies are responding well because they have all the production lines built out to rapidly respond. Academics and other government funded researchers are responding (personal communication) but they can't do so at the speed of companies who already have their ducks in line. In addition, consider how hard it is for an academic to get regulatory approval. The biotech companies already have relationships with the regulators, while this is completely new ground for those academics, all while the regulators are completely swamped with requests from their preexisting network. Most scientists aren't funded well, but I think a big problem is pouring money into the right holes. Some things will help a lot, some won't. I think getting more investors looking at the system can help with figuring out the right holes to put money into, and that will help just as much as the actual money.

by nickff 7y ago

djaque 7y ago

I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators. Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results. On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.

_hxy4 7y ago
Your view of the incentives argument is too narrow. In my experience, the people who actively try to game the system are rare. The majority of the problem is people and ideas being filtered out by the system. This comment by Daniel Lakeland on Andrew Gelman's blog says it better than I could: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-research-research-criticism-research-criticism-criticism-research-criticism-criticism-criticism/#comment-737732 https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-rese... > The way the incentives play out is that they create a survivorship bias. You can’t do science today without at least basically paying your own salary, either through grants (many biomed researchers have to pay a large component of their salary directly through their grants) or through making “having you in the university” make sense for the university so that it pays your salary. That again basically means either grants, or adding substantially to the university prestige and the ability to charge money for tuition and get high quality students etc. > So, anyone with tenure in academia today has spent say 5 to 10 years minimum creating a “brand” that somehow enables them to pay their salaries, and/or funds for lab work etc. If the primary kind of “brand” that universities respond to is a “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” then the primary content of academia today is people who survived that cutoff… > It’s not so much that individuals see the incentives and change their own behaviors to fit it (though this happens to some extent) it’s more just that lots of people go into the filter, and the ones that come out are enriched for that particular behavior. > Also note that this mechanism doesn’t require the individual scientists to be primarily money-driven. It’s sufficient for the MBAs running the dean/provost/president offices to be primarily money driven, which they definitively are. I would recommend reading chapter 4 of the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (a physics PhD). While I disagree with a large fraction of the book (in particular, I don't think the problem is inherently political), I think chapter 4 is mostly right and shows how a researcher can feel self-motivated while actually being under strong external influences. http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ I can give examples from my own experience in academia if anyone is interested.
- djaque 7y ago
  Yes, yes, I understand your point. What I'm trying to say is that the PIs in my department (the ones who made it through the filter, that is) don't seem to have the “fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand” that you're talking about. I might just be really lucky to be in a clean department, but Machiavellian researchers accumulating in academia by filtering or otherwise just isn't my experience, sorry. I'm interested in hearing your experience though because it sounds like it's very different. I'm studying accelerator physics by the way, an extremely applied sub-field of physics. It may be that it's easier to weed out the people that don't pull their weight here.

koeng 7y ago

Biotech companies are responding well because they have all the production lines built out to rapidly respond. Academics and other government funded researchers are responding (personal communication) but they can't do so at the speed of companies who already have their ducks in line. In addition, consider how hard it is for an academic to get regulatory approval. The biotech companies already have relationships with the regulators, while this is completely new ground for those academics, all while the regulators are completely swamped with requests from their preexisting network. Most scientists aren't funded well, but I think a big problem is pouring money into the right holes. Some things will help a lot, some won't. I think getting more investors looking at the system can help with figuring out the right holes to put money into, and that will help just as much as the actual money.