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"[B]ills introduced to both houses of Congress... increase the NSF’s budget by US$100 billion over five years. The bills... would... allocate the new money to t

"[B]ills introduced to both houses of Congress... increase the NSF’s budget by US$100 billion over five years. The bills... would... allocate the new money to technology development, rather than to basic science." Quantum computing is described as "applied" rather than "basic" research. A lot of serious "basic-but-applied" chemistry/physics research happened at Bell Labs. If NSF is using a similar heuristic for the next 5 years, that might be a good thing. I just hope NSF doesn't interpret the change as a mandate to "de-risk" research.

g_p 6y ago
> I just hope NSF doesn't interpret the change as a mandate to "de-risk" research. I fear this has happened already elsewhere in science, and it will inevitably happen for the NSF at some point. Too many people who don't understand science and the subject of the research are trying to measure the effectiveness of individual projects, as well as funding programmes overall. Government loves to measure how effective things were, and put a number on it. In the last 5 to 10 years, anecdotally, I'm seeing less adventurous bids, and more "safe" bids which have more defined outcomes. In a way, science has moved to a system where you "bootstrap" ahead, test and de-risk something, then bid for the money to do what you quietly bootstrapped, knowing yourself it will succeed. You then use that funding to bootstrap the next step of the research, and deliver the de-risked work you already did. In essence, I think many researchers are quietly working on the next thing on their current bid, to be able to de-risk it going forward. When there a pressure to define outcomes of a project for funders or stakeholders, that means projects do and don't succeed, and that's often attributed to the researchers, rather than the underlying research hypothesis simply not working out. My fear is this will get worse if these changes come through, as the focus will push even more onto measuring outputs, and on knowing the outcome before the work is done, to avoid funding an unsuccessful project. We need to remember that moon-shots are good to fund, and shouldn't be considered as failed projects, but unfortunately they are generally less interesting due to the funding body focusing on its own metrics.
bugakuu 6y ago
Mike Pence's staff need to fund the J.C.R. Lickliders in our time. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!

g_p 6y ago

> I just hope NSF doesn't interpret the change as a mandate to "de-risk" research. I fear this has happened already elsewhere in science, and it will inevitably happen for the NSF at some point. Too many people who don't understand science and the subject of the research are trying to measure the effectiveness of individual projects, as well as funding programmes overall. Government loves to measure how effective things were, and put a number on it. In the last 5 to 10 years, anecdotally, I'm seeing less adventurous bids, and more "safe" bids which have more defined outcomes. In a way, science has moved to a system where you "bootstrap" ahead, test and de-risk something, then bid for the money to do what you quietly bootstrapped, knowing yourself it will succeed. You then use that funding to bootstrap the next step of the research, and deliver the de-risked work you already did. In essence, I think many researchers are quietly working on the next thing on their current bid, to be able to de-risk it going forward. When there a pressure to define outcomes of a project for funders or stakeholders, that means projects do and don't succeed, and that's often attributed to the researchers, rather than the underlying research hypothesis simply not working out. My fear is this will get worse if these changes come through, as the focus will push even more onto measuring outputs, and on knowing the outcome before the work is done, to avoid funding an unsuccessful project. We need to remember that moon-shots are good to fund, and shouldn't be considered as failed projects, but unfortunately they are generally less interesting due to the funding body focusing on its own metrics.

bugakuu 6y ago

Mike Pence's staff need to fund the J.C.R. Lickliders in our time. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!