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Comment by dasudasu | Hacker News Reader

The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level. Research funding is a bit like a command economy in that there are no market forces that can be drawn upon to just sort it naturally, so of course it ends up being especially thorny.

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> Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to the next level.

What does "far from optimal" mean? Let's pretend the allocators are not god-like decision makers (if they are, let's fire all the scientists because our god-like decision makers can do the research for them).

Let's just accept that if we have a large bunch of diverse potential researchers, and limited funding, the best way to get a breakthrough is by funding a random sample of these researchers.

Maybe this sample should be stratified, but it should not be stratified in such a way that it incentives chasing grants (effectively making the grant-allocators the real PIs - with all their flaws and biases systematically driving the process, but without any accountability or management effort on their behalf).

We can't get optimal without unlimited wisdom, and if we had unlimited wisdom we wouldn't need scientists.

Why do you need unlimited wisdom to rate the merits of the people?

> There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job.

Counterpoint: the current system doesn't do this. It optimises for competency to attract funding. This occasionally overlaps wroth competency to perform good research, or competency to perform research well, or competency to oversee, nurture and guide research in others. But that is far from given.

I think there should be two pools of money, one that is granted at random to anyone who has obtained a professorship at a university, let that be the first filter for competency. The second pool of money can be given to projects that have immediate social interest and impact, and the government can, in this case, be very selective as there should be some social weight to succeeding here.

The first pool is for idea generation, failure is an option. The second pool is to direct invention for social benefit.

I guess the first positive outcome of this would be that everybody working at a university would be immediately promoted to be a professor. ;-)

To followup, I believe there's a subtle problem with funding in general, which is that increasing the funding available means that more research positions will be created, which means that eventually grant proposals go back to the same dismal funding rates they were before.

That's an interesting Malthusian argument. I think I mostly agree in a sense that vast majority of PhD students I know had plans of staying in academia but had to join industry precisely because lack of resources. But if there were more resources and they did join academia they would then oversee an even greater number of grad students until we again hit subsistence.

> There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding.

So why not just fund them?

Any process you could create or that currently exists just ends up being gamed by people who understand how to get funding.

There are no ways around that. You cannot feasibly make funding infinite nor do anything about the lack of political will for increasing research funding. Even if funding was to increase dramatically, you'd get people coming up with even more expensive research projects (new particle accelerator anyone?) and there would still be winners and losers of that funding game.

There's also the fact that a PI minting dozens of PhD over their careers, especially in fields with limited industry opportunities, inherently produces a pyramidal scheme that is bound to push people away from science.

Why not?

We seem to have no problem with infinite funding for Department of Defense and to bail out banks. The amount needed for science is paltry by comparison and typically has much better long term return on investment.

The funding for the military is far from infinite, and the US is actually pretty "privileged" as far as how much money trickles down to grants for seemingly unrelated stuff through DARPA and other similar agencies.

The discussion on how much money should be allocated to research is a different one, and it's always going to be finite. In the end, funds for research as conducted in universities have to be extracted from societal economic outputs, be it from taxes or otherwise, which is sadly not infinite.

It would be far more fair to say that we have no problem with infinite funding for non-discretionary entitlement spending, since that's most of that the Federal Government spends money on. Military spending in the US is not wildly outside of the norm for the developed world as a percentage of GDP, and money spent to "bail out banks" is a rounding error in terms of spending, and has historically turned a profit for the Federal Government. One of the largest sources of research funding in the US is actually the Department of Defense.

As for why research doesn't get more funding, sadly there is a faction in the US government that is opposed to universities and to government spending in general, and views research funding as easy to cut without provoking public outcry among their core voting demographics. This is the same reason that the Department of Defense is now such a large part of research funding, that same voting demographic is far more vocally opposed to reducing military spending.

What is entitlement spending?

These?

"Social Security and Medicare are sometimes called "entitlements," because people meeting relevant eligibility requirements are legally entitled to benefits, although most pay taxes into these programs throughout their working lives."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

Pretty much, “entitlement” isn’t a technical term but it refers to government spending on pre-defined benefit programs. A better term above might have been Non-discretionary Spending, but most of it is entitlement spending. And yes, Social Security and Medicare are the two most significant components, followed by Medicaid as the third. Those three plus interest on debt constitute the majority of the federal budget.

For sure. I was just trying to be sneaky and point out that we pay taxes for our "entitlements" so even though it's an accepted term, I think it's an inaccurate one and implies things about the programs people call "entitlement" programs which aren't true.

You don't need to make funding infinite, in order to meet the current demand for it.

And increasing funding will not increase demand in lockstep. There are indeed more people who want to do science then there is money allocated to pay them, but the number of those people is not going to vastly increase if 'researcher' continues to be a job that requires years of post-secondary education, has long, shitty hours, and pays peanuts.

Well if the goal is to fund everyone, the pressures that ensure it “ requires years of post-secondary education, has long, shitty hours, and pays peanuts” will likely reduce.

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