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It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the coun

It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions. Of course, the counterpart to this is that you see hype and fads developing very easily. But overall it is very easy to come up with experiments that any experienced researcher would have told you beforehand had no chance of producing interesting / impactful / positive results. The system must discriminates against researchers that are able to come up with interesting (positive) results with greater probability, since it represents every time an expense of finite resources. If your only contribution as a researcher is to be able to make conscientious and well realized experiments, then sadly your place is much more as an assistant than a PI. I've never seen it argued in serious research circles that grants should be given this way, but I did find the non-research community to be overly obsessed over negative results not being published or rewarded. It is simply a consequence of the set of possible experiments being infinite, the same way you can come up with an infinite number of startup ideas, but not all of them are equally good even before implementation. Should we reward startup founders with failed startups because they tried their best and really did the best they could given the circumstances?

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The comparison with startups isn’t valid - they seek an explicit profit outcome where good or bad ideas are judged by success in markets. Research is meant to be a public good, that furthers society’s at large repository of knowledge and culture. > “ It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions.” I don’t think this can be argued actually. This is mythology, usually applied to creditmongers who run labs and accumulate accolades that are actually due to a wide array of students and post-docs who are made to get reduced credit as a type of dues paying laced with rampant discrimination and sexism. I’d say mythologizing the idea of a crack sleuth who has a special knack for research intuition is extremely harmful on all fronts: depriving value to society because it’s false and depriving value to the wide network of lower level staff who are actually responsible for progress.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

The comparison with startups isn’t valid - they seek an explicit profit outcome where good or bad ideas are judged by success in markets. Research is meant to be a public good, that furthers society’s at large repository of knowledge and culture. > “ It can be argued that part of being a good researcher is developing an intuition and taste for interesting and promising research questions.” I don’t think this can be argued actually. This is mythology, usually applied to creditmongers who run labs and accumulate accolades that are actually due to a wide array of students and post-docs who are made to get reduced credit as a type of dues paying laced with rampant discrimination and sexism. I’d say mythologizing the idea of a crack sleuth who has a special knack for research intuition is extremely harmful on all fronts: depriving value to society because it’s false and depriving value to the wide network of lower level staff who are actually responsible for progress.