4 ms·

So what exactly is your criteria for when a study should or should not be publicly funded?

bayindirh 2y ago
Good question. I think if there's a large corpus of research supporting a hypothesis, any research retrying that hypothesis in an insignificant way can be disqualified from funding. If you challenge the hypothesis, or adding something significant to the dark areas of that hypothesis, you could be funded. Moreover, if your research fails to prove that hypothesis, or proves the exact opposite, that should be also printed/published somewhere, because failing is equally important in science. In short, tell us something we don't know in a provable way. That's it. This is what science is. This is what I think with about your question with my Sysadmin/Researcher/Ph.D. hats combined.
- joshuamcginnis 2y ago
  Thanks for your kind response! Are you familiar with the Replication Crisis? What happens when most of the "hypothesis" being challenged can't be rightly replicated in the first place? And what happens when the primary means of funding is attached the volume of papers and not the quality or impact, as is what I believe to be the case generally here in the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Hey, no problem. Yes, I'm familiar with it, and I work in/with projects which aims to create reproducible research (Galaxy, Zenodo, etc.). If you tell me that "I can make this unreproducible paper reproducible, but with a different process (or the same one), and share all the pipeline from dust to result", I'll tell you to go for it, and fund you. At the end, if something is not reproducible, and you're testing reproducibility of that thing, it's illuminating a dark area of that hypothesis. Measuring the quality of the research and its impact is not something I'm very familiar with to be honest, and I'm not from US, so I can't tell how universities push their people, however publish or perish is a real problem everywhere in the world. We used to see citation numbers important, then cite-rings cropped up. We valued paper counts, then professors started to lend their names to papers in their areas for "free" advisory. Now we have more complex algorithms/methods, and now I'm more of a research institute person than an academic, and I don't know how effective these things are anymore. But hey, I do research for fun and write papers now and then. Just to keep myself entertained to find reasons to learn something new.
    - joshuamcginnis 2y ago
      Fair enough and all great points. I think we're more aligned than not on the fundamentals here. Folks seem to be reacting negatively to my even propositioning these questions without even having made a judgment on the merit of the study myself.
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Yes, we agree in the fundamentals. The reality is, academia dynamics is very different w.r.t. to private sector, esp. startups. So, knowing how research works in academia is a bit of an unknown for people who're not interested in this line of work, or people who doesn't know how these things are done in general. In short, the value proposition for a piece of research is very different depending on the lens you're looking through to that research.
rootusrootus 2y ago
This whole thread started because you implied this study was worthless. Would be interested to hear your criteria.
- joshuamcginnis 2y ago
  It's entirely rational and reasonable for someone to at least ask and receive a decent response to the question, "Why should my tax dollars have been used to funded this research?" Academia should have great responses lined up which garner continued support from the public. But the fact that we aren't even allowed to ask questions without immediately being shut down as dissenters of all publicly funded research is problematic. Public research should absolutely be at least partially evaluated by the very people funding it to begin with.
coldpie 2y ago
Why are you asking us? I'm not a research scientist/funding expert. There are people whose job it is to decide that, and they decided it was. I trust them to do their jobs, just like they trust me to do my job when they need my services.
- joshuamcginnis 2y ago
  Why do you trust these people when for the most part, they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests?
  - coldpie 2y ago
    > they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.
    - joshuamcginnis 2y ago
      My agenda is that I think it's completely rationale to ask about the merits of publicly funded research and debate that topic. You may not like that question or my responses, but that is my assertion here.
      - coldpie 2y ago
        > completely rational to ask about the merits of publicly funded research Sure, but asking asking non-experts on some web forum to make guesses at the answers, and insulting the people whose job it is to do this work based on your assumptions of how it works, is a bad way to go about answering that question.
        tolerance 2y ago
        I was rooting against you in this exchange until you said this , because I took your initial plea for authority to be a cop out from joshmcginnis's argument, because I'm a human and have biases and sometimes put the quality of "earnestness" behind my beliefs above others' (i.e., whether I agree with them or not, my counterpart is equally sincere in what they believe in as me). That disposition is unwise and I think my realization of this underpins what I found striking about the comment that you just made. In a way, I think this is what joshmcginnis is guilty of here...but I want to believe that he's aware that he's being provocative, but being provocative is the entire point. Your initial response of deference and the overall response that his comments are receiving from others are decent representations of how the mere questioning of certain institutions (online, pseudonymously, through relatively obscure channels) can be seen as problematic. It is something like social science as performance art. Or the other way around?

Good question. I think if there's a large corpus of research supporting a hypothesis, any research retrying that hypothesis in an insignificant way can be disqualified from funding. If you challenge the hypothesis, or adding something significant to the dark areas of that hypothesis, you could be funded. Moreover, if your research fails to prove that hypothesis, or proves the exact opposite, that should be also printed/published somewhere, because failing is equally important in science. In short, tell us something we don't know in a provable way. That's it. This is what science is. This is what I think with about your question with my Sysadmin/Researcher/Ph.D. hats combined.

joshuamcginnis 2y ago
Thanks for your kind response! Are you familiar with the Replication Crisis? What happens when most of the "hypothesis" being challenged can't be rightly replicated in the first place? And what happens when the primary means of funding is attached the volume of papers and not the quality or impact, as is what I believe to be the case generally here in the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Hey, no problem. Yes, I'm familiar with it, and I work in/with projects which aims to create reproducible research (Galaxy, Zenodo, etc.). If you tell me that "I can make this unreproducible paper reproducible, but with a different process (or the same one), and share all the pipeline from dust to result", I'll tell you to go for it, and fund you. At the end, if something is not reproducible, and you're testing reproducibility of that thing, it's illuminating a dark area of that hypothesis. Measuring the quality of the research and its impact is not something I'm very familiar with to be honest, and I'm not from US, so I can't tell how universities push their people, however publish or perish is a real problem everywhere in the world. We used to see citation numbers important, then cite-rings cropped up. We valued paper counts, then professors started to lend their names to papers in their areas for "free" advisory. Now we have more complex algorithms/methods, and now I'm more of a research institute person than an academic, and I don't know how effective these things are anymore. But hey, I do research for fun and write papers now and then. Just to keep myself entertained to find reasons to learn something new.
  - joshuamcginnis 2y ago
    Fair enough and all great points. I think we're more aligned than not on the fundamentals here. Folks seem to be reacting negatively to my even propositioning these questions without even having made a judgment on the merit of the study myself.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Yes, we agree in the fundamentals. The reality is, academia dynamics is very different w.r.t. to private sector, esp. startups. So, knowing how research works in academia is a bit of an unknown for people who're not interested in this line of work, or people who doesn't know how these things are done in general. In short, the value proposition for a piece of research is very different depending on the lens you're looking through to that research.

rootusrootus 2y ago

This whole thread started because you implied this study was worthless. Would be interested to hear your criteria.

joshuamcginnis 2y ago
It's entirely rational and reasonable for someone to at least ask and receive a decent response to the question, "Why should my tax dollars have been used to funded this research?" Academia should have great responses lined up which garner continued support from the public. But the fact that we aren't even allowed to ask questions without immediately being shut down as dissenters of all publicly funded research is problematic. Public research should absolutely be at least partially evaluated by the very people funding it to begin with.

coldpie 2y ago

Why are you asking us? I'm not a research scientist/funding expert. There are people whose job it is to decide that, and they decided it was. I trust them to do their jobs, just like they trust me to do my job when they need my services.

joshuamcginnis 2y ago
Why do you trust these people when for the most part, they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests?
- coldpie 2y ago
  > they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.
  - joshuamcginnis 2y ago
    My agenda is that I think it's completely rationale to ask about the merits of publicly funded research and debate that topic. You may not like that question or my responses, but that is my assertion here.
    - coldpie 2y ago
      > completely rational to ask about the merits of publicly funded research Sure, but asking asking non-experts on some web forum to make guesses at the answers, and insulting the people whose job it is to do this work based on your assumptions of how it works, is a bad way to go about answering that question.
      - tolerance 2y ago
        I was rooting against you in this exchange until you said this , because I took your initial plea for authority to be a cop out from joshmcginnis's argument, because I'm a human and have biases and sometimes put the quality of "earnestness" behind my beliefs above others' (i.e., whether I agree with them or not, my counterpart is equally sincere in what they believe in as me). That disposition is unwise and I think my realization of this underpins what I found striking about the comment that you just made. In a way, I think this is what joshmcginnis is guilty of here...but I want to believe that he's aware that he's being provocative, but being provocative is the entire point. Your initial response of deference and the overall response that his comments are receiving from others are decent representations of how the mere questioning of certain institutions (online, pseudonymously, through relatively obscure channels) can be seen as problematic. It is something like social science as performance art. Or the other way around?