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No. NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and private foundations all have review systems in place to evaluate proposals. You can quibble with how they're evaluated or who p
by lvs 12y ago
No. NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and private foundations all have review systems in place to evaluate proposals. You can quibble with how they're evaluated or who precisely is writing the review, but they're all generally evaluated by qualified study sections.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoThey don't have the money though, they are just in charge of how it is distributed. The money for science comes mostly from people unqualified to professionally review the work. This is undeniable, otherwise stuff like CERN would not exist, as professional particle physicists are not personally that rich. edit - I view this as an interesting experiment and I am glad that there are people testing out new methods like this. I am not immediately taken with the way it is presented and I do have reservations about the model, however I am deliberately withholding judgment for now and will watch this for a while and see if anything comes of it. I don't think there is anything necessarily untoward about raising money directly from a research source, though it does raise interesting questions about policing charlatanry and keeping funding going for important research that may not be meme of the week, should it take off. And ultimately private individuals have always been able to help fund research, so in some senses it doesn't change that much, it just makes that aspect more blatant.