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Equalize the field, radically remove research hierarchies. Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists
by cblconfederate 6y ago
Equalize the field, radically remove research hierarchies.
Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and
4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Let science be fun again
I always return to this article from David Hubel (of Hubel&Wiesel): https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(09)00733-8 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(09)00733-8
I arrived at his lab around noon and found him working alone, recording from an anesthetized macaque monkey. I asked him when he had started the experiment, and he answered “in the morning”, which I finally realized was the morning of the day before. So he had worked, by himself, all the day before, all that night, and that day until noon. What was typical, in that era, was not only the long hours but the fact that the project was done by one person, single handedly. The major papers were either by Mountcastle alone or in partnership with one other person. The leader of the physiology department was Philip Bard, but the idea that Bard should have asked to have his name on any of Vernon's papers surely never occurred to anyone.
- rumanator 6y ago> Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Bureaucracy exists to ensure that funds are indeed spent on research instead of jet skis and shiny toys, and hierarchies are established to focus work on specialized topics pertaining to the state of the art of a field of research. All your suggestions do is ensure that less funds are spent on research, and the few work that is performed cannot be any form of deep dive or continuous effort on a topic, thus resulting only in low-hanging fruits. And by the way, the minute a researcher complains he needs help with his research is the moment you get a hierarchy.
- cblconfederate 6y agobureaucracy cannot guarantee the quality of research beyond the jet ski bar hierarchies are established to ensure that the PI gets citations from the work of postdocs and postgrads typical grants encourage shallow trend-chasing or incremental continuation of the research of - often disinterested - senior PIs who simply get grants because they have gotten a lot of grants. The chase of the state of the art is just another incremental step - that 's shallow a research partner is not necessarily a subordinate
- wombatpm 6y agoBureaucracy exists to ensure the university gets their cut. When I was there the university took 40% off the top for overhead.