Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?
johnhawks.net
johnhawks.net
And this would compound existing problems in the tenure system wherein the decision to grant you tenure is in part determined by your competitors at other universities. Imagine, for example, if your promotion at Google were in part decided by Jeff Bezos.
In my own post-doc experience, I caught a National Academy of Sciences member at Johns Hopkins faking data 20 years ago this year, and he decided to threaten me over it. Since no one stood up for me at the time, I left for tech a month or so later. And it's a shame because the method that exposed him was an early form of adversarial search that's now all the rage with Deep Learning. I don't see how a grant system based on a Mean Girls(tm) model of funding allocation would have prevented this.
That's a bold claim.
Do you have evidence to support this claim? Or a name? Could you point us to the data set they faked? If others aren't able to reproduce their data (under the same circumstances), that's fraud.
But the reason my own research was never published was that my post-doc advisor demanded my work achieve the same Nobel-prize worthy result that this professor was claiming to have attained. To put that into perspective, imagine if the requirement to submit a machine learning paper to arxiv was building SkyNet. And this was a status quo requirement for publication so researchers tended to make bold claims about doing so, all of which eventually got debunked, and there still hasn't been a Nobel prize for the achievement yet 20+ years later. There has been significant progress though.
The professor went on to complete a long and successful career but the work in question was exposed as bogus shortly thereafter by a competition that was the equivalent of ImageNet for the field. It was yet another example of predicting the training set in an age when people didn't really understand yet why that would be a problem. And it wouldn't have amounted to data fakery except that said professor denied there was any issue whatsoever when I presented counterexamples to the model located by adversarial search and then proceeded to threaten me professionally, paraphrasing: "Your data could take me down, and if that happens, I'm taking you with me."
It's mostly behind me now, but I bring it up in this thread because I don't see how this new model of funding would have prevented this or a myriad of other issues with science funding.
But IME, they usually try to cover their bases by (fake?) incompetence, rather than this kind of thing. That is, they claim to be unable to see severe problems even when the evidence is placed right in front of them. Plausible deniability, I guess.
In your example, it would be like "I don't see why we can't build Skynet. And if we claim to have built Skynet and have overstated our case, we can just fix it in future work. Anyway, who cares what we claim as long as we made a good-faith effort and get that next grant funded."
Personally though, I doubt whether most fabricated data is fabricated by PIs themselves, but by postdocs etc put exactly under the kind of impossible pressure you're describing. Then, of course, they can take credit for the successes and pretend to be shocked and outraged if the fabrication ever comes to light. The VW scandal probably happens somewhere in science daily.
I agree with your conclusion. Also, the distribution of "credit" or "popularity" is highly exponential in any field, so this proposal would just exacerbate the already rich-and-senior get more rich-and-senior phenomenon.
IMO the only way to fix it, especially in CS type disciplines, is to make it a requirement for publication that all the code is available and easily reproducible.
For other disciplines, I don't know the answer. At its core, this is a problem of very high competition and of failures being unpublishable. Really, it's not a great thing to out highly respected scientists who fabricate -- even though they richly deserve it -- because it erodes public confidence in science. It would be better if we could find a way to prevent these things before they happen.
If this professor is famous, you can bet he/she most likely didn't do the actual research. It's almost always the graduate students on the co-author list did the research and then sign by the professors. If a professor mentoring can't admit the wrong how can he/she be a good mentor? If he/she instruct the students to take a shortcut, well, guess what, this is real bad. Do we want more bad seeds? Lead by examples. Let's not do more sloppy and dirty research. Someone who brag about his/her successful research but knowing the data is fake is a sad person. Academic is tough - totally understand that. Professor's tenure and salary often tie to the amount of grants they can bring in and the stress is too much for one to do research with ethics and dignity. But this is why we need to hold people accountable, and reform research. This is a complex issue, but it takes courage. I hope powerful researchers and the leaders on research committees on various government agency will start improving the system.
But to use an analogy, if you have a few weeds in your field/garden, you can pull them. If you have a lot, you need a systemic solution like pesticide. Remember also that the most senior people are close to retirement and if eliminated will in many cases just be replaced by other sociopaths.
The worst case scenario for this guy if the whistle were blown would be that he takes early retirement, goes home to enjoy his pension, and probably comes back as part-time/emeritus.
People would say, well, it's bad that he fabricated this one time, but his contributions to the field as a whole outweigh this one minor lapse. That's a big difference between when senior and junior people are caught in these situations. He would still maintain a lot of respect and connections -- more than enough to make good on his threat to totally screw GP's career.
Feels too naive to me - jerks in powerful posts will be rewarded by this system. If I know you sit on the committee to decide on thing X I'm very interested in (let's say, access to a new computation cluster), I'll contact you and hint how favorable inclusion of myself will result in more of my 'share' towards yuo. Jerks tend to thrive in such a system since they look for opportunities where they can control the lever, any lever. It doesn't create a more friendly environment, it amps up science's political game, where people look friendly but stab you in the back, without your knowledge.
Some of the most earth shattering members of their fields were infamously unpopular with their peers. Kurt Gödel, George Cantor and Albert Einstein were all responsible for massive fundamental shifts in the understanding of there respective fields, but were all deeply unpopular outsiders, and would be much less likely to get funded under a system like this.
This is really not too different from the current system, except for one critical thing, which is that instead of decisions being based on nepotistic review panels, they're based on everyone. So this has the benefit of everyone getting funding, and decisions on who to fund based on some highly democratized process rather than the old boys club.
The issue you're raising is important, but making funding decisions totally anonymous would help. Of course, I don't know that you could make it totally anonymous, and what you're suggesting would still be an issue, but anonymity would go a long way. Also, the thing you're suggesting would probably still happen anyway even in today's system.
The problem in my mind is deciding who gets to participate in the system. Everyone who's a tenured professor? Tenure-track? What disciplines? My guess is this would just shift the funding decision from a per-project issue to a per-researcher issue.
My favorite idea for remedying the current process is to randomize rewards. That is, everyone above the median gets thrown into a pool and everyone has X% chance of being funded.
Also, I'd like to see "term limits" and more randomization of review panels. Make it more akin to jury duty, where, if an institution receives federal funding, their researchers are all put into a pool, and review panels are randomly selected for fixed periods of time.
Finally, indirect costs need to be eliminated, sharply curtailed, or reorganized to require explicit justification. Republicans are finally drawing attention to this, and they're right: it's slush funding. Universities wouldn't give as much of a crap about funding if it weren't a profit margin for them.
Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."[0]
Ultimately, I believe, we'll need human moderators to (1) detect and prevent abuse of the rules, and (2) modify the rules when they stop working.
And beyond pure greed and the political aspect, there are professors that also have pointless grudges.
Continued funding will require perennial marketing to your peers.
It democratizes science funding, but as in pure democracy, it forces each citizen to spend much of her day at the forum.
My related pet hack: Give researchers a shareholding ability for existing grants, letting them go long and short each project, should they choose to do so, perhaps in an imaginary currency. At the end of each cycle, allow researchers to re-allocate their "capital". The key difference from the article's proposal is that the researchers can retain their "capital" for future use.
It is the shorts I'm most interested in -- people who can accurately predict which experiments won't work in their proposed timelines are the people who I want evaluating grant applications.
I'm not a fan of this proposal either, but how does this aspect differ from the current system, really? Who do you think reviews grant proposals?
If I had a nickel for every PI who came back from a study section saying "We gave high scores to project X, because I know the PI, Y. He does good stuff." (i.e., the decision was made apparently with little reference to what was in the actual proposal), I could afford at least a better parking spot.
I like your idea. One problem, though. It seems to require some kind of post-hoc evaluation of whether a proposal succeeded or not. In its simplest form, this would reward low-impact, sure-to-succeed types of projects which are already a scourge at least at the NIH. The worst kind of grant IMO is not the one that fails, but the one that, after it succeeds, nothing of value was learned.
I think post-hoc grant evaluation is a great idea and needs to be done much more, I just wanted to point out that "success" is multidimensional: successful at meeting its aims, or successful at improving our state of knowledge? The latter is what we want but very difficult to evaluate even qualitatively.
I would like to see a small pool of grant money go out like this. Or maybe the lower scored but not grant winning get 1/10th allocation with no requirements to do a small scale study or act as a bridge.
Imagine how amazing technology could be if we swapped the war budget with the health and science budgets.
Those who think scientists would act differently or that scientists aren't otherwise-ordinary human beings with specific areas of talent, should read the history of Nobel Prizewinner William Shockley (a very public racist). Or the ugly and public priority fight that Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin fought with respect to the Polio vaccine, which resulted in neither being considered for the Nobel Prize.
New mechanisms that explicitly favor assumption breaking research will generate variance that a scientific community can sample from to generate progress. The impact his will have is to entrench the current paradigm.
New mechanisms should explicitly favor developing researchers rather than made researchers, to fund the research that is relatively valuable - underfunded research. Mechanisms that optimize for the largest return on the margin, instead of optimizing for name recognition / popularity, which is already pareto distributed.
And currently scientists in academic institutions are already giving more than 50% of their grant money as overhead cost to the institution.
The record would make things like gaming and collusion clearly visible after the fact.
1. The pie has shrunk a lot because federal funding of research has seen a huge decrease when measured as a fraction of GDP.
2. There's also a lot of political pressure to not "waste" public money on research that doesn't yield useful technology NOW.
3. But at the same time, there's an ever-growing supply of people who love doing science. These people are willing to do pretty much anything to get and maintain an academic research position, because like it or not, academia is still the among the best places to do high-impact research.
So there simply isn't enough money to fund all the good ideas, BUT there's political pressure to fund only sureshot research, and an oversupply means that scientists are doing what it takes to be productive in their academic positions.
The obvious solution is to increase federal funding for research. Accept that not everything is going to pan out as intended. It's not like every product a company makes is going to be profitable, so why should we expect science to work any differently? And then just wait! Some of this research will in fact succeed and we'll see the next internet happen.
> In Bollen’s system, scientists no longer have to apply; instead, they all receive an equal share of the funding budget annually—some €30,000 in the Netherlands, and $100,000 in the United States—but they have to donate a fixed percentage to other scientists whose work they respect and find important. “Our system is not based on committees’ judgments, but on the wisdom of the crowd,” Scheffer told the meeting.
> Bollen and his colleagues have tested their idea in computer simulations. If scientists allocated 50% of their money to colleagues they cite in their papers, research funds would roughly be distributed the way funding agencies currently do, they showed in a paper last year—but at much lower overhead costs.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-system-scientists...
Still think it's a pretty interesting idea, but they should probably team up with some game theorists.
I have applied for grants that might as well have been written for my group, very niche, and been denied, multiple times. One of my advisors actually told me "Do you know how to deal with the mafia? You make your own mafia."
I consider an NIH R01 to be equivalent to a degree from Harvard: it's the imprimatur, not the money (or, for Harvard, the education), that is different.
In the same way we do now, using a system that would overlook people like Einstein, a patent clerk who hadn't finished his Ph.D., who published articles having no supporting empirical evidence. In fact, there was little concrete evidence supporting his ideas until 1919 (a solar eclipse), which would eliminate him from consideration for the "scientist" label in modern times.
Or Alfred Wegener, a mere meteorologist who had some crazy ideas about the continents floating around and who was shouted down by the real scientists during his lifetime (reliable evidence for plate tectonics only appeared long after his death).
Ironically enough, both stories support a foundational principle of science -- that evidence trumps eminence.
Who is this we who has the power to completely change the grant system?
(hopefully HN readers understand the differences, as well as similarities, of academic vs governmental politics. Seems like the distinction is lost in the general public).