6 ms·

One of the biggest problems in science (in general) is that your reputation and therefore funding is highly tied to a particular subfield. Everyone in a subfie

One of the biggest problems in science (in general) is that your reputation and therefore funding is highly tied to a particular subfield. Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. If you try to move on to new areas of research, your reputation and funding are gone. The outcome is that areas of research interest become quasi-permanent, even when they are no longer interesting. I talk to the people today that still work in my specialty of nuclear physics (relativistic heavy ion physics) and I'm shocked at how little intellectual progress has been made. At the risk of offending people it's time to give up and declare victory, but the consequences would be dire (hundreds of professors all over the world without grants).

marta_morena_9 6y ago
If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research. The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive") And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem? No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.
- xapata 6y ago
  Perhaps the issue is that the funding agency is not sophisticated enough to realize that there's no value, or more value elsewhere?
  - wadkar 6y ago
    OR perhaps the issue that the same people who are in the clique of the said field are also evaluating the research proposals. So the funding doesn’t run dry? Not that that’s a good or bad thing. You wouldn’t want a “non-expert” to evaluate the proposal. And perhaps a tapering of the funding is better indicator of interest/progress of the field?
    - xapata 6y ago
      Generally there's an outside source of funding that's not part of the field. Thus top scientists find themselves becoming "rainmakers" rather than doing research. You tell your staff to wear their white coats and glasses, lead a tour around the facility, point out how big the machines are, etc.
- isaacjoseph 6y ago
  Well, there _is_ quite a bit less funding for anything in Physics nowadays, at least compared to the Cold War era. Some professors have indeed been forcibly pushed out of Physics for this reason, but mostly it has an effect of making things more hopeless for younger folk (due to the cronyism problem mentioned above).
- wpietri 6y ago
  > If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research. This is very close to "There must be a pony in there somewhere". [1] If the question is whether the field is worth continuing to fund, the answer can't be, "Well since people are still funding it, it must be worth funding." By the same logic, we should just keep putting billions into WeWork. Research is hard to value, and fundamental research especially so. The logic of "if people buy it, it must be good" only patchily applies to normal commerce, where results are relatively easy to measure and feedback loops are short. It's wholly inadequate for feedback loops on the scale of decades. [1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=there+must+be+a+pony+in+there+somewhere https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=the...
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
    +1 insightful; 100% agreed; well-put!
    - rfurmani 6y ago
      Slashdot reference?
      - chrisweekly 6y ago
        Yep
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    And when politicians are funding long term science, they aren't funding the actual long term benefits, they are funding the APPEARANCE of producing long term benefits (and the funneling of money to those who can provide kickbacks). As long as the pretense can be maintained, anything can be funded, regardless of its actual utility.
  - bweitzman 6y ago
    The logic is not "if people buy it, it must be good", but more "if people buy it, there must not be something else that they can buy that gets them what they want for less".
RobRivera 6y ago
hundreds of professors without funding would not be dire consequences, imo. I feel like it would be a market correction. what will universities do? fire them and let the administrators teach? I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.
- ketzo 6y ago
  I imagine it would be extremely dire for those hundreds of professors.
  - peteradio 6y ago
    Won't someone please think of the tenured professors!
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    We have yet to bring back ice delivery for the sake of the delivery staff. We have fridges now. Life does not end because jobs are eliminated, it just changes.
    - intended 6y ago
      The economic term is underemployment, where your only options are roles which pay less than what your training level and capacity are. Lose your job as a foreman at a factory, and you can switch to being a manager at Mc D. Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation. This is all optimization of resources and ownership of course so it’s essentially a question of how the share of the new efficiency derived surplus is split. Part of which could go to things like keeping theoretical research programs alive.
      - Godel_unicode 6y ago
        It certainly could, but should it? If that research is into something that's a dead end, should we keep researching it to avoid underemployment of researchers? It does seem to me that underemployment as a loss function by itself is particularly prone to local maximums.
prof-dr-ir 6y ago
I think you are absolutely on the right track, but in my view the problem is less tightly coupled to the funding and more institutional. As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research. First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years. Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.
dehrmann 6y ago
It's like the publication bias coupled with the grant bias and sunk cost fallacy is self-reinforcing.
BurningFrog 6y ago
> Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. Sounds like a textbook groupthink environment. No one is going to lead a scientific revolution in that environment.

marta_morena_9 6y ago

If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research. The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive") And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem? No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.

xapata 6y ago
Perhaps the issue is that the funding agency is not sophisticated enough to realize that there's no value, or more value elsewhere?
- wadkar 6y ago
  OR perhaps the issue that the same people who are in the clique of the said field are also evaluating the research proposals. So the funding doesn’t run dry? Not that that’s a good or bad thing. You wouldn’t want a “non-expert” to evaluate the proposal. And perhaps a tapering of the funding is better indicator of interest/progress of the field?
  - xapata 6y ago
    Generally there's an outside source of funding that's not part of the field. Thus top scientists find themselves becoming "rainmakers" rather than doing research. You tell your staff to wear their white coats and glasses, lead a tour around the facility, point out how big the machines are, etc.
isaacjoseph 6y ago
Well, there _is_ quite a bit less funding for anything in Physics nowadays, at least compared to the Cold War era. Some professors have indeed been forcibly pushed out of Physics for this reason, but mostly it has an effect of making things more hopeless for younger folk (due to the cronyism problem mentioned above).
wpietri 6y ago
> If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research. This is very close to "There must be a pony in there somewhere". [1] If the question is whether the field is worth continuing to fund, the answer can't be, "Well since people are still funding it, it must be worth funding." By the same logic, we should just keep putting billions into WeWork. Research is hard to value, and fundamental research especially so. The logic of "if people buy it, it must be good" only patchily applies to normal commerce, where results are relatively easy to measure and feedback loops are short. It's wholly inadequate for feedback loops on the scale of decades. [1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=there+must+be+a+pony+in+there+somewhere https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=the...
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  +1 insightful; 100% agreed; well-put!
  - rfurmani 6y ago
    Slashdot reference?
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
      Yep
- pfdietz 6y ago
  And when politicians are funding long term science, they aren't funding the actual long term benefits, they are funding the APPEARANCE of producing long term benefits (and the funneling of money to those who can provide kickbacks). As long as the pretense can be maintained, anything can be funded, regardless of its actual utility.
- bweitzman 6y ago
  The logic is not "if people buy it, it must be good", but more "if people buy it, there must not be something else that they can buy that gets them what they want for less".

RobRivera 6y ago

hundreds of professors without funding would not be dire consequences, imo. I feel like it would be a market correction. what will universities do? fire them and let the administrators teach? I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.

ketzo 6y ago
I imagine it would be extremely dire for those hundreds of professors.
- peteradio 6y ago
  Won't someone please think of the tenured professors!
- joshspankit 6y ago
  We have yet to bring back ice delivery for the sake of the delivery staff. We have fridges now. Life does not end because jobs are eliminated, it just changes.
  - intended 6y ago
    The economic term is underemployment, where your only options are roles which pay less than what your training level and capacity are. Lose your job as a foreman at a factory, and you can switch to being a manager at Mc D. Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation. This is all optimization of resources and ownership of course so it’s essentially a question of how the share of the new efficiency derived surplus is split. Part of which could go to things like keeping theoretical research programs alive.
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      It certainly could, but should it? If that research is into something that's a dead end, should we keep researching it to avoid underemployment of researchers? It does seem to me that underemployment as a loss function by itself is particularly prone to local maximums.

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

I think you are absolutely on the right track, but in my view the problem is less tightly coupled to the funding and more institutional. As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research. First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years. Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.

dehrmann 6y ago

It's like the publication bias coupled with the grant bias and sunk cost fallacy is self-reinforcing.

BurningFrog 6y ago

> Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. Sounds like a textbook groupthink environment. No one is going to lead a scientific revolution in that environment.