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recipients of grants are heavily restricted They are restricted in trivial ways that are easy for a bureaucracy to mechanically enforce, as is true of employee

recipients of grants are heavily restricted They are restricted in trivial ways that are easy for a bureaucracy to mechanically enforce, as is true of employees at every institution. What I meant by accountability is deeper: people are not accountable for the quality or utility of their work, hence the endless tidal wave of corrupt and deceptive research that pours out of government funded 'science' every day. These researchers probably filled out their expenses paperwork correctly but the final resulting paper was an exercise in circular reasoning, or the data tables were made up, or it was P-hacked or whatever. And nobody in government cares or even notices, because nobody is held accountable for the quality of the outputs. Whilst DeepMind is not especially interested in profit it's true, and is just doing basic research, Google itself is an excellent example of how to seamlessly integrate fundamental research with actual application of that research. That's what profit motivated research looks like: just this endless stream of innovative tech being deployed into real products that are used by lots of people, without much drama. We have come to take this feat so much for granted that you're actually asking if someone working on ads is leaving the world better off. Yes, it does. Google ads are clicked on all the time because they are useful to people who are in the market to buy something. Those ads are at the center of an enormous and very high tech economic engine that powers staggering levels of wealth creation. If I understand correctly, a lot of academic papers are actually never cited by anyone - a researcher who optimises search ads by just 1% will have a positive impact on the world orders of magnitude greater than that.

ModernMech 5y ago
> What I meant by accountability is deeper: people are not accountable for the quality or utility of their work, hence the endless tidal wave of corrupt and deceptive research that pours out of government funded 'science' every day. These researchers probably filled out their expenses paperwork correctly but the final resulting paper was an exercise in circular reasoning, or the data tables were made up, or it was P-hacked or whatever. And nobody in government cares or even notices, because nobody is held accountable for the quality of the outputs. Have you ever received and administered a grant? I have to ask. You seem pretty certain about how it works, but it just doesn't match with my experience. You say that there's no accountability in results and this leads to people committing fraud. In my experience, fraud happens when there is too high of an expectation that researchers can't meet. Let's say you get a $5 million grant to do X, and in the course of doing X you find out it's not possible. You have a negative result. First of all, good luck publishing a negative result. Without that publication, good luck getting the next grant. High expectations for results incentivize fraud. There should be room for researchers to come up short with their research and still be able to progress in their careers. But when grants dry up, the publications dry up and then your career is derailed by failing to get tenure. The fact is that not everyone can be researching world-changing technologies. That's just not a realistic expectation. Even Google can't do that, as much as you laud a profit motive (how many Google projects are in the trash right now?). But that's what we expect of everyone who gets grant money, precisely for the reason that people have an expectation that an immediate and tangible ROI must be demonstrated. I don't know if you consider people at funding agencies like the NSF as part of the government, but they do notice when projects fall short, and they do deny 80% of grant applications (I would consider that accountability).
- native_samples 5y ago
  I haven't, but I'm unclear why it's relevant given that you don't seem to really be disagreeing! The NSF denies 80% of grant applications because there is a radical oversupply of people who want to be scientists and the NSF has a finite budget. That by itself doesn't create accountability any more than the fact that lots of people want to be movie stars creates accountability for actors. That's not how accountability works. Accountability means people being held to account for illegitimate acts. If it existed it would look like this: we (the government) gave you money to deliver some genuine research, yet you delivered a paper that simply modelled your own beliefs, cited a retracted paper and cited another paper that actually disagrees with the claimed statement, used a input dataset too tiny to achieve statistical significance, looks suspiciously P-hacked, you then misrepresented your own findings to the press and by extension the government and then to top it all off it doesn't replicate. We will therefore prosecute you for research fraud and failure to meet the terms of your contract. What actually happens is this: nothing. Journals will happily publish papers with the problems I just listed, universities praise them, the 'scientists' who do this stuff proceed to get lots of citations and the government proceeds to award even more grant money because who are they to argue with citations. As you admit, fraud is everywhere in science, supposedly due to "high expectations for results". But so what? Lots of people, non scientists included, have high expectations for results placed upon them. The right mechanisms and incentives to stop fraud are not simply having low expectations of scientists, that's absurd and wouldn't be seriously proposed as a solution in any other area of society. It'd be like saying the answer to fraudulent CEOs fiddling the books is to simply stop expecting them to turn a profit, or like the solution to shoplifting is to just stop expecting shoplifters to pay for things. Expectations on scientists are already rock bottom: large chunks of the research literature doesn't even seem to replicate, other large chunks are not even replicable by design, and nobody seems to care. You can't get much lower expectations than "We don't even care if your claims replicate" and yet this ridiculous suggestion that the solution to fraud is to give fraudsters even more money keeps cropping up on HN and elsewhere. The solution to fraud is tighter contracts to ensure the rules are clear, and systematic prosecutions of people who break them.
  - ModernMech 5y ago

ModernMech 5y ago

> What I meant by accountability is deeper: people are not accountable for the quality or utility of their work, hence the endless tidal wave of corrupt and deceptive research that pours out of government funded 'science' every day. These researchers probably filled out their expenses paperwork correctly but the final resulting paper was an exercise in circular reasoning, or the data tables were made up, or it was P-hacked or whatever. And nobody in government cares or even notices, because nobody is held accountable for the quality of the outputs. Have you ever received and administered a grant? I have to ask. You seem pretty certain about how it works, but it just doesn't match with my experience. You say that there's no accountability in results and this leads to people committing fraud. In my experience, fraud happens when there is too high of an expectation that researchers can't meet. Let's say you get a $5 million grant to do X, and in the course of doing X you find out it's not possible. You have a negative result. First of all, good luck publishing a negative result. Without that publication, good luck getting the next grant. High expectations for results incentivize fraud. There should be room for researchers to come up short with their research and still be able to progress in their careers. But when grants dry up, the publications dry up and then your career is derailed by failing to get tenure. The fact is that not everyone can be researching world-changing technologies. That's just not a realistic expectation. Even Google can't do that, as much as you laud a profit motive (how many Google projects are in the trash right now?). But that's what we expect of everyone who gets grant money, precisely for the reason that people have an expectation that an immediate and tangible ROI must be demonstrated. I don't know if you consider people at funding agencies like the NSF as part of the government, but they do notice when projects fall short, and they do deny 80% of grant applications (I would consider that accountability).

native_samples 5y ago
I haven't, but I'm unclear why it's relevant given that you don't seem to really be disagreeing! The NSF denies 80% of grant applications because there is a radical oversupply of people who want to be scientists and the NSF has a finite budget. That by itself doesn't create accountability any more than the fact that lots of people want to be movie stars creates accountability for actors. That's not how accountability works. Accountability means people being held to account for illegitimate acts. If it existed it would look like this: we (the government) gave you money to deliver some genuine research, yet you delivered a paper that simply modelled your own beliefs, cited a retracted paper and cited another paper that actually disagrees with the claimed statement, used a input dataset too tiny to achieve statistical significance, looks suspiciously P-hacked, you then misrepresented your own findings to the press and by extension the government and then to top it all off it doesn't replicate. We will therefore prosecute you for research fraud and failure to meet the terms of your contract. What actually happens is this: nothing. Journals will happily publish papers with the problems I just listed, universities praise them, the 'scientists' who do this stuff proceed to get lots of citations and the government proceeds to award even more grant money because who are they to argue with citations. As you admit, fraud is everywhere in science, supposedly due to "high expectations for results". But so what? Lots of people, non scientists included, have high expectations for results placed upon them. The right mechanisms and incentives to stop fraud are not simply having low expectations of scientists, that's absurd and wouldn't be seriously proposed as a solution in any other area of society. It'd be like saying the answer to fraudulent CEOs fiddling the books is to simply stop expecting them to turn a profit, or like the solution to shoplifting is to just stop expecting shoplifters to pay for things. Expectations on scientists are already rock bottom: large chunks of the research literature doesn't even seem to replicate, other large chunks are not even replicable by design, and nobody seems to care. You can't get much lower expectations than "We don't even care if your claims replicate" and yet this ridiculous suggestion that the solution to fraud is to give fraudsters even more money keeps cropping up on HN and elsewhere. The solution to fraud is tighter contracts to ensure the rules are clear, and systematic prosecutions of people who break them.
- ModernMech 5y ago