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Scientists with a proven track record should have life-long funding of their laboratory without any questions asked. So they can act as they want without fear o

Scientists with a proven track record should have life-long funding of their laboratory without any questions asked. So they can act as they want without fear of social repercussions. Of course some money will be wasted and the question of determining whether a track record is proven is still open, but I think that's the only way for things to work (except when the scientist himself have enough money to fund his own work).

msg3 5y ago
I think this would be a positive step, but to play devil's advocate, what happens when this superstar scientist retires? If I'm a researcher in his lab, does my job just disappear? If so, I'm still going to feel pressure to exaggerate the impact of my research.
mike_hearn 5y ago
I've been spending a lot of time on 'bad science' as a topic lately (check my comment history or blog for some examples). I think what you're proposing is the opposite of what's required. Firstly, the problem here is not an epidemic of scientists who feel too financially insecure to do good work. Many of the worst papers are being written by people with decades-long careers and who lead large labs. Their funding is very secure. They are doing bad work anyway for other reasons, sometimes political or ideological, more often because doing bad work results in attention, praise and power. Or sometimes because they don't know how to explain their chosen question, but don't want to admit that scientifically they failed and don't know where to go next. Secondly, as you already realized your proposal relies on identifying which scientists have a proven track record, but the whole problem is that science is flooded with fraudulent/garbage claims which are highly cited ("proven") and which were written by large teams of supposedly respectable scientists at supposedly respectable institutions. Any metric you can invent to decide who or what has a proven track record is going to be circular in this regard. To Rumsfeld the problem, we are surrounded by "unknown knowns". You say this is an open question but to me that's a fatal flaw. So the problem is actually the inverse. You say at the end, well, scientists who can fund their own work are an exception. Obviously in most cases scientists don't need to do this, they can also be funded by companies. Most computer science research works this way. Better CPUs and hardware is done almost entirely by companies. AI research has been driven by corporate scientists, and so on. In contrast academic funding comes primarily from government agencies that distribute money according to the desires of academics. This means a tiny number of people control large sums of money, and they are accountable to nobody except themselves. There are no systems or controls on academic behavior except peer review, which is largely useless because the peers are doing the same bad things as everyone else. Viewed from an economic perspective academia is a planned reputation economy. The state is the source of all resource allocation decisions (academics being effectively state employees in most fields). There's also a deeply embedded Marxist worldview: universities have no working mechanisms to detect fraud, because of an implicit assumption that deep down when market forces are gone everyone is automatically honest and good. The hierarchy is stagnant; the same institutions remain at the top for centuries. A good reputation lets them select the people with the reputation for being smart (e.g. by school grade), so that reputation accrues to the institutions, which lets them keep selecting intake by reputation and so on. Supposedly Oxford and Cambridge are the best UK universities, they always have been, and they always will be. In a competitive, free market economy they would face competition and other institutions would seek to figure out what their secret is and copy it, like how so many companies try to copy the Toyota Way. In science this doesn't happen because there's nothing to copy: these institutions aren't actually different. This implies a simple solution, just privatize it all. It would be wrenching, just like it was when the USSR transitioned to a market economy, just like it was when China (sort of) did the same. But one thing the 20th century teaches us is that you can't really fix the problems of a planned economy by tinkering with small reforms at the edges. The Soviets weren't able to fix their culture with glasnost and perestroika. They eventually had to give up on the whole thing. Replacing the current reputation economy with a real economy, with all the mechanisms that economic system has evolved (markets, prices, regulators, court cases, fraud laws etc), seems like a more direct and obvious approach to making things better, even if it may sound extreme.
- toomim 5y ago
  Oh hey, Mike Hearn! I've long been a fan of yours in Bitcoin. It's good to see you're interested in 'bad science' lately as well -- this is a topic I've also been working on for the last N years along with Bitcoin. I hope we get to interact more in the future. :) My envisioned solution is similar to yours, here. But rather than "privatize science", which I think most people will interpret as "move to industrial research", my rallying cry is a little more like "hey scientists, stop depending on public funding, let's find creative ways to get the science done." I also like to point out that money is often not the missing factor as much as community. This has always been true. Mendel discovered genetics by experimenting on beanstalks in his garden at his monastery. It cost him very little to do it, and he only stopped the research when his community told him to stop wasting time on beans and get back to the important accounting work that impacted the church's politics at the time. You might think that maybe science was cheap in the past, but that today you need lots of money, to get the lab equipment, etc. However, science always has a cutting edge of cheaply evaluable questions. We recently hosted a DIY Synthetic Biologist (currently on the homepage of https://invisible.college https://invisible.college) who showed the actual costs of his work, and his laboratory equipment was far, far, cheaper than the "cost" of his time. We can get far more science done with "amateur scientists" (remember that "ama" means love, and an amateur scientist is one doing science for love) by creating a scientific community outside the institutions for interested parties to work together, pool their brainpower and resources, and come up with great novel work. And if anyone else agrees with me on this, please let me know so we can forces. I'm toomim@gmail.com, and am doing work on invisible.college.
  - mike_hearn 5y ago
    Hello! Absolutely, drop me an email any time you like. I absolutely agree that a lot of science can be done very cheaply. Some of the most impactful papers were done by people who weren't in an institutional framework, even in the modern era (Satoshi being an obvious example). Additionally it seems most of the really problematic fields are ones where the budget gets dispersed over large number of people writing very cheap low budget papers, hence millions of social science papers with tiny sample sizes. I'm a big supporter of industrial research though. Many great papers come out of industrial labs. Modern computing is practically defined by such research. The big advances all seem to come from big corporate labs (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Google, DeepMind, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc). The research is powerful because it's funded by people who expect some sort of meaningful results and supervise the work to ensure it doesn't go completely off the rails. Academic institutions have developed this totally hands off attitude that makes research more or less unaccountable to any standard beyond "will it get published", which in turn can be rephrased as "are the claims interesting".

msg3 5y ago

I think this would be a positive step, but to play devil's advocate, what happens when this superstar scientist retires? If I'm a researcher in his lab, does my job just disappear? If so, I'm still going to feel pressure to exaggerate the impact of my research.

mike_hearn 5y ago

I've been spending a lot of time on 'bad science' as a topic lately (check my comment history or blog for some examples). I think what you're proposing is the opposite of what's required. Firstly, the problem here is not an epidemic of scientists who feel too financially insecure to do good work. Many of the worst papers are being written by people with decades-long careers and who lead large labs. Their funding is very secure. They are doing bad work anyway for other reasons, sometimes political or ideological, more often because doing bad work results in attention, praise and power. Or sometimes because they don't know how to explain their chosen question, but don't want to admit that scientifically they failed and don't know where to go next. Secondly, as you already realized your proposal relies on identifying which scientists have a proven track record, but the whole problem is that science is flooded with fraudulent/garbage claims which are highly cited ("proven") and which were written by large teams of supposedly respectable scientists at supposedly respectable institutions. Any metric you can invent to decide who or what has a proven track record is going to be circular in this regard. To Rumsfeld the problem, we are surrounded by "unknown knowns". You say this is an open question but to me that's a fatal flaw. So the problem is actually the inverse. You say at the end, well, scientists who can fund their own work are an exception. Obviously in most cases scientists don't need to do this, they can also be funded by companies. Most computer science research works this way. Better CPUs and hardware is done almost entirely by companies. AI research has been driven by corporate scientists, and so on. In contrast academic funding comes primarily from government agencies that distribute money according to the desires of academics. This means a tiny number of people control large sums of money, and they are accountable to nobody except themselves. There are no systems or controls on academic behavior except peer review, which is largely useless because the peers are doing the same bad things as everyone else. Viewed from an economic perspective academia is a planned reputation economy. The state is the source of all resource allocation decisions (academics being effectively state employees in most fields). There's also a deeply embedded Marxist worldview: universities have no working mechanisms to detect fraud, because of an implicit assumption that deep down when market forces are gone everyone is automatically honest and good. The hierarchy is stagnant; the same institutions remain at the top for centuries. A good reputation lets them select the people with the reputation for being smart (e.g. by school grade), so that reputation accrues to the institutions, which lets them keep selecting intake by reputation and so on. Supposedly Oxford and Cambridge are the best UK universities, they always have been, and they always will be. In a competitive, free market economy they would face competition and other institutions would seek to figure out what their secret is and copy it, like how so many companies try to copy the Toyota Way. In science this doesn't happen because there's nothing to copy: these institutions aren't actually different. This implies a simple solution, just privatize it all. It would be wrenching, just like it was when the USSR transitioned to a market economy, just like it was when China (sort of) did the same. But one thing the 20th century teaches us is that you can't really fix the problems of a planned economy by tinkering with small reforms at the edges. The Soviets weren't able to fix their culture with glasnost and perestroika. They eventually had to give up on the whole thing. Replacing the current reputation economy with a real economy, with all the mechanisms that economic system has evolved (markets, prices, regulators, court cases, fraud laws etc), seems like a more direct and obvious approach to making things better, even if it may sound extreme.

toomim 5y ago
Oh hey, Mike Hearn! I've long been a fan of yours in Bitcoin. It's good to see you're interested in 'bad science' lately as well -- this is a topic I've also been working on for the last N years along with Bitcoin. I hope we get to interact more in the future. :) My envisioned solution is similar to yours, here. But rather than "privatize science", which I think most people will interpret as "move to industrial research", my rallying cry is a little more like "hey scientists, stop depending on public funding, let's find creative ways to get the science done." I also like to point out that money is often not the missing factor as much as community. This has always been true. Mendel discovered genetics by experimenting on beanstalks in his garden at his monastery. It cost him very little to do it, and he only stopped the research when his community told him to stop wasting time on beans and get back to the important accounting work that impacted the church's politics at the time. You might think that maybe science was cheap in the past, but that today you need lots of money, to get the lab equipment, etc. However, science always has a cutting edge of cheaply evaluable questions. We recently hosted a DIY Synthetic Biologist (currently on the homepage of https://invisible.college https://invisible.college) who showed the actual costs of his work, and his laboratory equipment was far, far, cheaper than the "cost" of his time. We can get far more science done with "amateur scientists" (remember that "ama" means love, and an amateur scientist is one doing science for love) by creating a scientific community outside the institutions for interested parties to work together, pool their brainpower and resources, and come up with great novel work. And if anyone else agrees with me on this, please let me know so we can forces. I'm toomim@gmail.com, and am doing work on invisible.college.
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  Hello! Absolutely, drop me an email any time you like. I absolutely agree that a lot of science can be done very cheaply. Some of the most impactful papers were done by people who weren't in an institutional framework, even in the modern era (Satoshi being an obvious example). Additionally it seems most of the really problematic fields are ones where the budget gets dispersed over large number of people writing very cheap low budget papers, hence millions of social science papers with tiny sample sizes. I'm a big supporter of industrial research though. Many great papers come out of industrial labs. Modern computing is practically defined by such research. The big advances all seem to come from big corporate labs (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Google, DeepMind, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc). The research is powerful because it's funded by people who expect some sort of meaningful results and supervise the work to ensure it doesn't go completely off the rails. Academic institutions have developed this totally hands off attitude that makes research more or less unaccountable to any standard beyond "will it get published", which in turn can be rephrased as "are the claims interesting".