> > After enough filtering, all grants are essentially indistinguishable in quality. > I don't believe this. You can always soften incentives (and thereby pre

> > After enough filtering, all grants are essentially indistinguishable in quality. > I don't believe this. You can always soften incentives (and thereby prevent wasteful gaming) by adding random noise/dithering to your scoring function, but a threshold-only approach seems quite blunt to me. These assessments come from statistically investigating grant scoring and success. What you find that 90%of grants are essentially scored the same, within the noise. In these situations what typically happens is that previous grant success will determine current success, i.e. the person previously got a grant so what they are doing must be good (the "safe" bet). The problem that creates that you create empires of people who get a lot of grants based essentially on one luck of the draw. The biggest issue is though not even that you miss some good people with good ideas, but the incentive structure you create. Because there is an expiry time on the benefit from previous success and it is research area specific, what happens is academics have to write grants constantly and you can't really change fields. Academics spend 30% of their time applying for and reviewing grants. None (hardly any) of the people who are very successful with getting grants are doing research themselves any more. I suspect this is also the reason why most Nobel winning research is done in people's 30s.more senior academics don't have time to do the research (and can't take the necessary risks).