Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

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I happen to be extremely well acquainted with one tenured professor of biological oceanography, and one tenure track professor of physical oceanography, and I can't say I agree with your observation. My experience has been that tenure or not, the amount of work that these individuals have on their plate is essentially endless. Grants are extremely difficult to come by these days, although its getting better, and it is worth noting both of these individuals must pay a significant chunk of their salaries from grants. Not to mention that the pressure to keep publishing is essentially unending. Also, sabatical is not code for vacation. The system is the same, if you don't publish it's hard to get funding, and if you don't get funding you don't get your full salary.

That said, my experience in this is only with Oceanography professors who are research professors first and teachers a distant second.

> Grants are extremely difficult to come by these days

Only because of competition. It's still vastly better in the U.S. than any other country.

Competition is good.

To a point.

There was a retrospective study looking at grant scores vs. outcomes (citations of the papers produced). The correlation was pretty weak. Reviewers can identify the obvious dreck, but beyond that was a bit of a toss-up.

If you have too much competition, people start rushing sexy, half-baked results out the door, regardless of whether they seem likely to hold up--or even make sense. This selects against the people doing the careful sort of research that we probably intend to encourage.

Yes, competition is good.

But as you say, the incentives are not aligned correctly. And yes, it's very difficult for reviewers to make the best decisions.

So instead, they reject and request preliminary data. Which requires money. But at least this is better than a sexy shot in the dark, which I think private institutions should be funding. Or things like MD Anderson's moonshot program.

Things aren't perfect, but I think we can both agree that there is no perfect solution to this problem, incremental improvement? Certainly.

Turn the competition knob to 0, everybody slacks. Turn it to 11, everybody cheats.

It's at 10. We're hearing more and more about large cheating scandals. I wonder, what could possibly be wrong with the system?

And beyond cheating we have a lot of bad science. * Reproducibility project.

I don't think slacking in science is a bad thing. Less papers means less noise and if people are not sufficiently motivated by their ideas themselves may be it is best for everyone they are not publishing.

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