5 ms·

The implication of the quote is that anything "ignited by curiosity" is worthwhile. This is all fine and good, as noble ambitions go, but it does not answer the

The implication of the quote is that anything "ignited by curiosity" is worthwhile. This is all fine and good, as noble ambitions go, but it does not answer the key questions for academia: (1) Which papers to accept for publication?, and (2) Which projects to provide with funding?. The context of course is that there is only limited room for papers in publication venue (journal and/or conference) and limited funding for science.

musha68k 4y ago
Maybe overly limited funding for science is the problem? On the whole it all seems to me as if capitalism and the general problem of the (projected by too many?) “Leistungsgesellschaft” might have invaded science to a much larger extent than it used to? It’s just a wild guess looking at it from the outside, I don’t have any experience with proper science at all. To me this stuff just always reads as “ah great so that’s how we killed the potential for that (classic/next-gen) Star Trek future”.
- melagonster 4y ago
  capitalism offer more money to scientists, but you right, we need more money on science.
ablatt89 4y ago
It's a fair point, that there must be some criteria for some individual or lab to compete for funding. It might be worth creating a stronger distinction between truly novel papers, and general scientific papers, that goes beyond an informal understanding of which journals are prestigious. For example, going through Arxiv each week can be really tedious, with many papers being redundant or written that makes it hard to understand.
bmitc 4y ago
> Which projects to provide with funding? There's a somewhat old adage (?) that says: "Don't fund projects. Fund people." The gist of it is that by funding projects, you're funding a somewhat myopic view in that anything discovered adjacent to the project is now out of scope of the funding. By funding people with interesting ideas, you get a much more creative and free-flowing research program.
- mettamage 4y ago
  Just before I read your comment I came up with that idea "there should be a select few people based on their academic merits (whatever that means/however good that will go) that will have carte blanche." Then I read your comment. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree.
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  Preferring people over projects creates a situation where you are carried by your status rather than your work. If someone had a successful project, it doesn't necessarily mean their next project is going to work. A total newcomer could potentially solve a very important problem (but get their funding denied because they are still not the right "people" to invest in). This also makes it harder for new ideas to propagate. Funding should be a mix of track record with project consideration, not either exclusively.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    There’s a subtlety there. It isn’t suppose to be about who you are but what you’re about. Stopping caring about whether projects work or not is practically the point. Research isn’t about only tackling things we know will work. That’s effectively engineering and not research. A lot of the funding today is already about status. There just needs to be less funding given out to people based on status and funders’ pet projects and more funding based upon the people and proposals. Solid people and proposals should not be turned down via lack of status or not fitting into some box of “this will work”. A lot of topics are lumped into “that will never work”, but it’s often the case that they were never tried or even explored.
    - magic_hamster 4y ago
      Agreed.
  - randomsearch 4y ago
    No, we said fund _people_ not status. Someone’s status is their job title etc. that should be irrelevant in funding decisions. Funding projects is a terrible idea that you should keep at a minimum. If you fund projects you will end up with the BS we have now - marketing in the form of grant proposals. I think a really helpful analogy for how science should be funded is to think of how angels and VCs fund early stage startups - I mean, how they really fund them. Which is: is this a promising area to startup within? Is this a great team? And that is pretty much it. The downside of this approach I think is that personal biases can creep in and create a lack of diversity. You can counter that with pots of funding that directly target diversity. Fund people, your assessment of their ability, their team, and their area of interest.
Kinrany 4y ago
Administration has no clue which projects are good and which "scientists" won't spend the money on a sea of booze. Two mechanisms should be used: 1. Administration decides which projects had real world effect, years or even decades after the work is done. 2. A directed social graph is built from citations and from working together on projects. Money should be allocated to the network. Administration decides who did good work in the past; funding is allocated to everyone endorsed by those people; scientists vote with their grant money for projects that they believe in.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  I think this would lead to a hellpit of sycophantic behavior. And, genius or not, I would not trust any group of people to be immune to the influence of the sycophants.
  - Kinrany 4y ago
    Would that be worse than the current disaster though?
    - mach1ne 4y ago
      Not necessarily. Still, a drastic change asks for strong evidence of improvement.
    - derbOac 4y ago
      Honestly your proposal isn't too different from what I've seen going on in many university administrations. My initial reaction is that it is the current disaster.
- bluenose69 4y ago
  I've never known an administrator who had even the faintest clue what science was all about, let alone what previous was 'good' or what projects would have 'real world effect'. If they had insights on such things, they would likely be working in science, not administration. Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.
RobotToaster 4y ago
>Which papers to accept for publication? That may have been a problem in Feynman's day, but today academic papers takeup negligible storage. The only limiting factor is the number of peer reviewers, I have no idea if there is a shortage of those or not.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Acceptance is less about storage space, but about gatekeeping for "quality". Which in turn is about what papers are going to get read, because nobody has time to read all of the papers. People rely on high-reputation journals to narrow down the time they spend reading. The number of peer reviewers may be one limitation, but I think the main one is the number of readers. The hard limit is how much time readers spend reading. Getting access to that is hard. Anybody can publish. You don't even need a journal; just put it up on your blog. But as with all blogs, the hard part is getting anybody to care that you've done it.
aaroninsf 4y ago
One of the great promises of the Basic Income idea is that within many domains, it eliminates project funding as a constraint, with the anticipatable outcome that a great many people "waste" their time on uninteresting, incorrect, ludicrous, ideas, and a few people who might have been fundable today, do solid real work, and sometimes, a few people who would have NOT have been fundable (per OP), do work which Changes Everything, which might not have been done today otherwise. Those of us reading this, we live in a surplus economy. We could fund everyone. Indeed, we should, because it would over a reasonable time frame, pretty likely Change Everything. All it would cost is fewer 100m long yachts for a few thousand sociopaths.

musha68k 4y ago

Maybe overly limited funding for science is the problem? On the whole it all seems to me as if capitalism and the general problem of the (projected by too many?) “Leistungsgesellschaft” might have invaded science to a much larger extent than it used to? It’s just a wild guess looking at it from the outside, I don’t have any experience with proper science at all. To me this stuff just always reads as “ah great so that’s how we killed the potential for that (classic/next-gen) Star Trek future”.

melagonster 4y ago
capitalism offer more money to scientists, but you right, we need more money on science.

ablatt89 4y ago

It's a fair point, that there must be some criteria for some individual or lab to compete for funding. It might be worth creating a stronger distinction between truly novel papers, and general scientific papers, that goes beyond an informal understanding of which journals are prestigious. For example, going through Arxiv each week can be really tedious, with many papers being redundant or written that makes it hard to understand.

bmitc 4y ago

> Which projects to provide with funding? There's a somewhat old adage (?) that says: "Don't fund projects. Fund people." The gist of it is that by funding projects, you're funding a somewhat myopic view in that anything discovered adjacent to the project is now out of scope of the funding. By funding people with interesting ideas, you get a much more creative and free-flowing research program.

mettamage 4y ago
Just before I read your comment I came up with that idea "there should be a select few people based on their academic merits (whatever that means/however good that will go) that will have carte blanche." Then I read your comment. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree.
magic_hamster 4y ago
Preferring people over projects creates a situation where you are carried by your status rather than your work. If someone had a successful project, it doesn't necessarily mean their next project is going to work. A total newcomer could potentially solve a very important problem (but get their funding denied because they are still not the right "people" to invest in). This also makes it harder for new ideas to propagate. Funding should be a mix of track record with project consideration, not either exclusively.
- bmitc 4y ago
  There’s a subtlety there. It isn’t suppose to be about who you are but what you’re about. Stopping caring about whether projects work or not is practically the point. Research isn’t about only tackling things we know will work. That’s effectively engineering and not research. A lot of the funding today is already about status. There just needs to be less funding given out to people based on status and funders’ pet projects and more funding based upon the people and proposals. Solid people and proposals should not be turned down via lack of status or not fitting into some box of “this will work”. A lot of topics are lumped into “that will never work”, but it’s often the case that they were never tried or even explored.
  - magic_hamster 4y ago
    Agreed.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  No, we said fund _people_ not status. Someone’s status is their job title etc. that should be irrelevant in funding decisions. Funding projects is a terrible idea that you should keep at a minimum. If you fund projects you will end up with the BS we have now - marketing in the form of grant proposals. I think a really helpful analogy for how science should be funded is to think of how angels and VCs fund early stage startups - I mean, how they really fund them. Which is: is this a promising area to startup within? Is this a great team? And that is pretty much it. The downside of this approach I think is that personal biases can creep in and create a lack of diversity. You can counter that with pots of funding that directly target diversity. Fund people, your assessment of their ability, their team, and their area of interest.

Kinrany 4y ago

Administration has no clue which projects are good and which "scientists" won't spend the money on a sea of booze. Two mechanisms should be used: 1. Administration decides which projects had real world effect, years or even decades after the work is done. 2. A directed social graph is built from citations and from working together on projects. Money should be allocated to the network. Administration decides who did good work in the past; funding is allocated to everyone endorsed by those people; scientists vote with their grant money for projects that they believe in.

mach1ne 4y ago
I think this would lead to a hellpit of sycophantic behavior. And, genius or not, I would not trust any group of people to be immune to the influence of the sycophants.
- Kinrany 4y ago
  Would that be worse than the current disaster though?
  - mach1ne 4y ago
    Not necessarily. Still, a drastic change asks for strong evidence of improvement.
  - derbOac 4y ago
    Honestly your proposal isn't too different from what I've seen going on in many university administrations. My initial reaction is that it is the current disaster.
bluenose69 4y ago
I've never known an administrator who had even the faintest clue what science was all about, let alone what previous was 'good' or what projects would have 'real world effect'. If they had insights on such things, they would likely be working in science, not administration. Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.

RobotToaster 4y ago

>Which papers to accept for publication? That may have been a problem in Feynman's day, but today academic papers takeup negligible storage. The only limiting factor is the number of peer reviewers, I have no idea if there is a shortage of those or not.

jfengel 4y ago
Acceptance is less about storage space, but about gatekeeping for "quality". Which in turn is about what papers are going to get read, because nobody has time to read all of the papers. People rely on high-reputation journals to narrow down the time they spend reading. The number of peer reviewers may be one limitation, but I think the main one is the number of readers. The hard limit is how much time readers spend reading. Getting access to that is hard. Anybody can publish. You don't even need a journal; just put it up on your blog. But as with all blogs, the hard part is getting anybody to care that you've done it.

aaroninsf 4y ago

One of the great promises of the Basic Income idea is that within many domains, it eliminates project funding as a constraint, with the anticipatable outcome that a great many people "waste" their time on uninteresting, incorrect, ludicrous, ideas, and a few people who might have been fundable today, do solid real work, and sometimes, a few people who would have NOT have been fundable (per OP), do work which Changes Everything, which might not have been done today otherwise. Those of us reading this, we live in a surplus economy. We could fund everyone. Indeed, we should, because it would over a reasonable time frame, pretty likely Change Everything. All it would cost is fewer 100m long yachts for a few thousand sociopaths.