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When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competit

by azanar 17y ago

When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive. This seems ridiculously inefficient. The belief that two people spending money and effort to keep at odds with one another is beneficial and furthers advancement more rapidly than collaboration seems broken. With all of that waste, I can't understand how anyone at the funding agency can say they are getting the most return on investment following this strategy. A more collaborative model would give them the dual benefit of not having all of this in-fighting waste, while at the same time benefiting from the super-linear growth in results by having two people bang heads together. I sense a sacred cow here. As for how it can be done, what about allowing funding agencies to grant money to something akin to a research project trusts or foundations; something that spans multiple individuals and even multiple institutions, so the lines don't have to be drawn so sharply on who can participate and who can't. Something like the foundation model several OSS projects have adopted, perhaps.

frossie 17y ago
Inefficient doesn't begin to describe it. The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science. So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K. Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery. Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere. The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so. As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.
pfedor 17y ago
There are many examples of competition between in the OSS world. Desktop environments, database engines, programming languages, text editors. The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name, sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it usually is. And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding. You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.
- frossie 17y ago
  But the reason the number of tenured positions is very small IS because of funding. Everything comes down to money.

by azanar 17y ago

frossie 17y ago

Inefficient doesn't begin to describe it. The thing to remember is there's no money in OSS to first approximation - and you don't need money to write OSS. The problem is, you need a lot of money to do science, at least certain kinds of science. So here is how it works in practice. Say you have an idea on how to make a breakthrough on topic X. You figure you need to pay a research assistant for a year, or buy a week on some instrument, or whatever. Either way, say you need 50K. Case 1: You are the only person who wants 50K to do X, you need to convince the agency that X needs doing. This is an advantageous situation to you and depends on only you having the X idea, so you become very closed source about it. This is sub-optimal because it delays people looking into X. Also it is a turnoff to the kind of people who are interested in science and not skullduggery. Case 2. X is in fact a compelling avenue of research, so three people apply to the funding agency for 50K. This is the situation I was describing upthread - now these people have to compete, and prove that they are the best positioned to get an an answer to X if only you give them the 50K. This is suboptimal because by definition 2 out of 3 applicants wasted their time applying for X. Think of the comparison with YC - the startups who get turned down by YC have other options for getting money; moreover they only have the one project they need to worry about getting funded. Whereas a research scientist typically only has one source of money, but many lines of inquiry. This is why scientific seniority often means the death of research time, with people spending large amounts of time on the scatter shot approach - apply to the funding agency for 8-9 projects in the hope that 1-2 will get funded, because if the agency doesn't fund you for something you get to lose your staff and then you are nowhere. The situation becomes worse if what you need is not 50K but 50M, say to build a new instrument. Now your agency can't afford that at all, so the only way to get the money is to form an inter-agency (typically international) collaboration. Now the real inefficiency nightmare comes in; because what the other agencies buy with their money is the right of their people to work on the project. So not only the project becomes a sprawling nightmare, but the rules typically are than if Timbuktu brings 10M out of 50M to the table, they get to do 20% of the work on building the instrument - quite irrespective of whether they are the most qualified people to be doing so. As I said, I do not know what the answer is. The reason the situation is like that is an honest attempt by the agencies to be responsible with taxpayer money; the money is not infinite; they have to decide who to give the money to; and they feel, for reasons that are obvious, that competition is the best way to make sure that the money goes to the best person. I don't think anybody working in science would claim the system is perfect, but other workable solutions are not forthcoming.

pfedor 17y ago

There are many examples of competition between in the OSS world. Desktop environments, database engines, programming languages, text editors. The author of vim told me that at one point he felt pretty content with the program and had not been changing much for a number of years. Then some other guy took on a very active development of another vi clone (forgot the name, sorry) and this gave Bram the incentive to speed up and add many new features to vim. So in this case the competition was beneficial, and I expect that it usually is. And BTW I don't think competition in science is primarily driven by funding. You need little or no funding for theoretical physics, and yet they're as competitive as anyone or more. The main reason for the very fierce competition in science IMO is that the number of tenured positions is very small compared to the number of PhD graduates. You have to be better than the other guy or else you can kiss your academic career goodbye.

frossie 17y ago
But the reason the number of tenured positions is very small IS because of funding. Everything comes down to money.