221 ms·

The people who fund research look too hard for ROI. The funds that get invested into research buy hours of time of people doing research and maybe gear. They ca

The people who fund research look too hard for ROI. The funds that get invested into research buy hours of time of people doing research and maybe gear. They cannot buy discoveries. Until this mismatch is addressed broadly, we will continue to have both a reproducibility crisis and ‘boring’ papers.

bsf_ 6y ago
I believe this is close to the truth. Moving one step further upstream, the emphasis on high ROI stems from an overall lack of availability of funding. Since there isn't enough money to go around, it becomes necessary to choose some more selective metric to pare down the pool of grant applicants.
- virtuallynathan 6y ago
  Do we just have too many people doing “science”? Clearly people are getting funding to crank out nonsense, boring papers, studies that can’t be replicated, etc.
  - bsf_ 6y ago
    Only if you believe that as a society we have solved all of the interesting problems. Since this obviously is not true, I would instead focus on the way we evaluate science to improve it.
    - virtuallynathan 6y ago
      I’m mostly suggesting the money isn’t well distributed, and I’m pretty sure that’s due to the misaligned incentives. If we incentivized outcomes we care about, I suspect more money would come naturally from the results.
garden_hermit 6y ago
There is a lot of caution in research funding. Some research is considered "safe", whereas others risky. IN a properly balanced portfolio, perhaps 80% of funding should go to safe work and the remaining 20% to more risky, but potentially high-reward studies. However this isn't how funding agencies usually operate. At least in the context of the U.S. government, funding agencies are terrified of being seen as "wasting" funding, because that is a sure way to have funding cut by congress. The "Golden Fleece" awards, a congressman's attack on perceived frivolous spending, have routinely been targeted at specific research funded by the NSF and have helped make the agency afraid of being attacked by congress.

bsf_ 6y ago

I believe this is close to the truth. Moving one step further upstream, the emphasis on high ROI stems from an overall lack of availability of funding. Since there isn't enough money to go around, it becomes necessary to choose some more selective metric to pare down the pool of grant applicants.

virtuallynathan 6y ago
Do we just have too many people doing “science”? Clearly people are getting funding to crank out nonsense, boring papers, studies that can’t be replicated, etc.
- bsf_ 6y ago
  Only if you believe that as a society we have solved all of the interesting problems. Since this obviously is not true, I would instead focus on the way we evaluate science to improve it.
  - virtuallynathan 6y ago
    I’m mostly suggesting the money isn’t well distributed, and I’m pretty sure that’s due to the misaligned incentives. If we incentivized outcomes we care about, I suspect more money would come naturally from the results.

garden_hermit 6y ago

There is a lot of caution in research funding. Some research is considered "safe", whereas others risky. IN a properly balanced portfolio, perhaps 80% of funding should go to safe work and the remaining 20% to more risky, but potentially high-reward studies. However this isn't how funding agencies usually operate. At least in the context of the U.S. government, funding agencies are terrified of being seen as "wasting" funding, because that is a sure way to have funding cut by congress. The "Golden Fleece" awards, a congressman's attack on perceived frivolous spending, have routinely been targeted at specific research funded by the NSF and have helped make the agency afraid of being attacked by congress.