5 ms·

Something seems to be rotten in the state of science. Who decides about the money? I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Orga

Something seems to be rotten in the state of science. Who decides about the money? I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let's try democracy instead of oligarchy (and maybe ending up in populism or anarchy).

naasking 4y ago
I kind of both like and dislike the idea. I suspect this would just become a popularity contest, where the big, prestigious names get all the money and other worthy projects starve. I'd rather the voting be blinded based on project descriptions, and then something like 20-30% of it is lottery based to fight entrenched dogma.
- davrosthedalek 4y ago
  The reviews and funding decisions are normally based on project description. It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. What's the prior experience, etc. It's impossible to give that information without essentially unblinding the personal information anyway.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage. However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.
    - naasking 4y ago
      > Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage. Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is: https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/1625408547541458944 https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...

naasking 4y ago

I kind of both like and dislike the idea. I suspect this would just become a popularity contest, where the big, prestigious names get all the money and other worthy projects starve. I'd rather the voting be blinded based on project descriptions, and then something like 20-30% of it is lottery based to fight entrenched dogma.

davrosthedalek 4y ago
The reviews and funding decisions are normally based on project description. It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. What's the prior experience, etc. It's impossible to give that information without essentially unblinding the personal information anyway.
- naasking 4y ago
  > It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage. However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage. Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is: https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/1625408547541458944 https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...