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> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn'

> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. The "how" of science just really matters. One thing I worry about in the US is homogenization in the way science is done. You won't find all that much difference between how scientists operate in California versus how they operate in Massachusetts or Idaho or anywhere else. There's pretty much the same grant application process, same peer review process, same journals, same conferences. And that would be fine if we knew that we were doing things the Right Way -- but as it is, it just feels like putting all our eggs in one basket.

Kye 6y ago
Can you expand a little? It's not clear what problem could come from having a standard process for funding, reviewing, and sharing science. I know there are problems, like the replication crisis, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if/how that kind of thing links to the way science is done.
- pjscott 6y ago
  Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding. One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of the resulting research doesn't seem to be strong, meaning that this process might just be, at least to a first approximation, an ever-more-expensive random number generator. You can certainly imagine other ways to do it. Funding agencies could try allocating money at coarser granularity, e.g. larger grants shared among more researchers with much less specificity about how the money is to be spent; I hear this used to be more common many decades ago. Or they could do a quick-and-dirty screening for what 1-2 page research proposals aren't obviously terrible and send out money to the vaguely plausible ones at random [1], which would at least have lower overhead. Or you could have grant money allocated by individual people instead of committees, with less deliberation and guaranteed fast turnaround time to a yes-or-no decision, e.g. [2] and [3]. In general there's usually more than one way to do something, and I worry about a monoculture getting stuck doing things in a deeply suboptimal way but unable to change. I could tell similar stories about the modern peer review process (a relatively recent thing, and arguably not very good at solving the problem it's meant to solve), or the persistence of bad statistical methods in a lot of fields because they're the standard that everyone expects, or various other things. [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/science-funding-grant-lotteries-research https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/scienc... [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/emergent-ventures-new-project-help-foment-enlightenment.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/em... [3] https://fastgrants.org/ https://fastgrants.org/
  - ylem 6y ago
    Is the problem the grant process or the lack of cash to award? There are pre-proposals for say department of energy that are only a couple of pages so you can see if you should waste your time on an application. I am not sure about other agencies. You do have grants that go across groups of researchers (MURIs/MRSECS/etc) On the tangent that you mention, I sadly agree with you about the difficulty of dealing with bad statistical methods. I am curious about your thoughts on peer review.
  - ghassanmas 6y ago
    Very interesting discussion/thread! I have been thinking lately, that scientists whom research area is around developing vaccination, might not need to worry anymore about getting grants or funded because of covid-19. It might be considred one of best consequence of the unfortunate epidmic.
cambalache 6y ago
If anything America has a way more varied system of universities and research centers, for virtue of being bigger,richer and with a culture of generous donations by private individuals. A system like that has good things and bad things, compared to say Germany or France where most universities and research centers are more or less equivalent in funding, prestige, salaries and lines of research.

Kye 6y ago

Can you expand a little? It's not clear what problem could come from having a standard process for funding, reviewing, and sharing science. I know there are problems, like the replication crisis, but I'm not tapped in enough to know if/how that kind of thing links to the way science is done.

pjscott 6y ago
Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding. One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of the resulting research doesn't seem to be strong, meaning that this process might just be, at least to a first approximation, an ever-more-expensive random number generator. You can certainly imagine other ways to do it. Funding agencies could try allocating money at coarser granularity, e.g. larger grants shared among more researchers with much less specificity about how the money is to be spent; I hear this used to be more common many decades ago. Or they could do a quick-and-dirty screening for what 1-2 page research proposals aren't obviously terrible and send out money to the vaguely plausible ones at random [1], which would at least have lower overhead. Or you could have grant money allocated by individual people instead of committees, with less deliberation and guaranteed fast turnaround time to a yes-or-no decision, e.g. [2] and [3]. In general there's usually more than one way to do something, and I worry about a monoculture getting stuck doing things in a deeply suboptimal way but unable to change. I could tell similar stories about the modern peer review process (a relatively recent thing, and arguably not very good at solving the problem it's meant to solve), or the persistence of bad statistical methods in a lot of fields because they're the standard that everyone expects, or various other things. [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/science-funding-grant-lotteries-research https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/scienc... [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/emergent-ventures-new-project-help-foment-enlightenment.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/em... [3] https://fastgrants.org/ https://fastgrants.org/
- ylem 6y ago
  Is the problem the grant process or the lack of cash to award? There are pre-proposals for say department of energy that are only a couple of pages so you can see if you should waste your time on an application. I am not sure about other agencies. You do have grants that go across groups of researchers (MURIs/MRSECS/etc) On the tangent that you mention, I sadly agree with you about the difficulty of dealing with bad statistical methods. I am curious about your thoughts on peer review.
- ghassanmas 6y ago
  Very interesting discussion/thread! I have been thinking lately, that scientists whom research area is around developing vaccination, might not need to worry anymore about getting grants or funded because of covid-19. It might be considred one of best consequence of the unfortunate epidmic.

cambalache 6y ago

If anything America has a way more varied system of universities and research centers, for virtue of being bigger,richer and with a culture of generous donations by private individuals. A system like that has good things and bad things, compared to say Germany or France where most universities and research centers are more or less equivalent in funding, prestige, salaries and lines of research.