4 ms·

I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what

by asdff 4y ago

I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what is called for by grant funding agencies for their own research initiatives. If you want disruptive science, fund it then. That's all everyone wants to do in science, but the bills need to be payed somehow, so you play the game the funding agencies want you to play.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Topolomancer 4y ago
Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants, even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas. I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that; sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come back with lessons learned.
seydor 4y ago
The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? It almost seems as a new model would take the world by storm, but it doesnt seem to arise. Even private research often falls for the same pitfalls, like how Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  That’s because our financial system is controlled by power hungry but small minded sociopaths.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    That's an apt way of describing the voter base :). Or the market at scale. That's the major problem humanity faces. Individuals wielding concentrated power are dangerous, but they're also at least capable of thinking about something other than their immediate short-term interest. The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      If what you are saying was true then NIMBYism wouldn't be a problem, and we also wouldn't have any large "open spaces" left. The problem is more parochialism than it is short-term thinking. And both sets of entities (powerful individuals and aggregate masses) are capable of parochialism.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      > The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it. I think this is a dangerous delusion: Historically, centralized control has been a disaster because those individuals wielding power believed they could think of something greater… but actually lacked the skill. So we ended up with simplistic concepts that failed at scale, ideas that never could work because they missed key details, etc. By contrast, society gets on with the business of building the future in spite of and not due to that meddling by centralized power.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? I think there's plenty enough of competition in academia. And competition alone doesn't help, because the metrics over which one loses or wins the race are not correlated with short or long-term worthiness. And while we can describe, even if somewhat vaguely, what makes worthy science, there's no way I know of to have a stable system in which that metric drives funding. > Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward This research at least has some feedback: Google funds it because it expects to make money off using its results in practice, so the research has to be at least somewhat correlated with reality. Unfortunately, this structure also means that "open ecosystem" isn't pursued.

by asdff 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Topolomancer 4y ago

Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants, even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas. I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that; sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come back with lessons learned.

seydor 4y ago

The current small-independent-grant culture is flat. This means that all projects are small and there are is almost no hierarchical 'higher level' science. PIs are happy to publish minor descriptions of the clouds, and journals are happy to publish them , in lack of something more impressive. So much value is lost in creating processes and bureaucracy. The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? It almost seems as a new model would take the world by storm, but it doesnt seem to arise. Even private research often falls for the same pitfalls, like how Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward.

zmgsabst 4y ago
That’s because our financial system is controlled by power hungry but small minded sociopaths.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  That's an apt way of describing the voter base :). Or the market at scale. That's the major problem humanity faces. Individuals wielding concentrated power are dangerous, but they're also at least capable of thinking about something other than their immediate short-term interest. The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    If what you are saying was true then NIMBYism wouldn't be a problem, and we also wouldn't have any large "open spaces" left. The problem is more parochialism than it is short-term thinking. And both sets of entities (powerful individuals and aggregate masses) are capable of parochialism.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    > The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it. I think this is a dangerous delusion: Historically, centralized control has been a disaster because those individuals wielding power believed they could think of something greater… but actually lacked the skill. So we ended up with simplistic concepts that failed at scale, ideas that never could work because they missed key details, etc. By contrast, society gets on with the business of building the future in spite of and not due to that meddling by centralized power.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> The focus is clearly on "getting the grant". And the grant acts as an entity in itself, as it becomes a line in the CV of scientists, which will help them "get the next grant". The outcome of the grant becomes thus irrelevant. Maybe competition is missing? I think there's plenty enough of competition in academia. And competition alone doesn't help, because the metrics over which one loses or wins the race are not correlated with short or long-term worthiness. And while we can describe, even if somewhat vaguely, what makes worthy science, there's no way I know of to have a stable system in which that metric drives funding. > Deepmind keeps seeking to publish proprietary research in Nature, instead of creating an open ecosystem that will drive reinforcement-learning science forward This research at least has some feedback: Google funds it because it expects to make money off using its results in practice, so the research has to be at least somewhat correlated with reality. Unfortunately, this structure also means that "open ecosystem" isn't pursued.