2 ms·
>>Rather than defunding epidemiology, how about giving them enough money to hire professional programmers? See "Moral Hazard". We should not expect integrity i
by no-s 6y ago
>>Rather than defunding epidemiology, how about giving them enough money to hire professional programmers?
See "Moral Hazard". We should not expect integrity issues to be solved by throwing money at the perpetrators. It's more reasonable to suppose they would spend extra funding on hookers and crack cocaine, or some similar academic/bureaucratic equivalent.
If you have money/time/skills to throw at the problem, I implore you to take up a clean room open source effort to reproduce the model.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoWho are the "perpetrators" here, and what "integrity" issues are you talking about? Those are pretty accusatory words you're using. This is a general problem in scientific research. The scientists care about and know a lot about the science and mathematics of their models, but they don't have formal training in programming, software development, etc. They prioritize hiring graduate students who know about the science, and they frankly don't have the budget to poach programmers from industry. Do you know what usually happens to people in graduate science programs who are more interested in programming than the science? They end up at tech firms, making 3-4x as much as they would if they pursued a postdoc. Research that is incredibly important to society is being done on a shoe-string. The "perpetrators," in my eyes, are the politicians who have failed to properly fund epidemiology, virology, public health, and other vital fields. Something is wrong in a society that can spend God knows how much on increasing the accuracy of ad-targeting algorithms by 1%, but which can't afford to fund a FTE programmer for its leading epidemiological research group.