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Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest problems in science (in general) is that your reputation and therefore funding is highly tied to a particular subfield. Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners. If you try to move on to new areas of research, your reputation and funding are gone. The outcome is that areas of research interest become quasi-permanent, even when they are no longer interesting. I talk to the people today that still work in my specialty of nuclear physics (relativistic heavy ion physics) and I'm shocked at how little intellectual progress has been made. At the risk of offending people it's time to give up and declare victory, but the consequences would be dire (hundreds of professors all over the world without grants).

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I think you are absolutely on the right track, but in my view the problem is less tightly coupled to the funding and more institutional.

As a professor it is simply extremely unnatural to just drop your main area of research.

First, your academic network will almost entirely stem from the subfield you have been working on. This affects the expectations of your PhD students, the recruitment of postdocs (who are often swapped between colleagues in the subfield), and the conferences you visit -- where you will see all the familiar faces of colleagues you have known for years.

Second, your mind has been shaped significantly by years of working in your own little subfield. It is easy to come up with ten projects in your area, rank them by difficulty as well as the interest they would generate amongst your colleagues, and help your students to execute them. It is significantly harder to do anything like that outside your subfield; for one, you will not have the mentoring that a typical PhD student has.

It's like the publication bias coupled with the grant bias and sunk cost fallacy is self-reinforcing.

hundreds of professors without funding would not be dire consequences, imo. I feel like it would be a market correction. what will universities do? fire them and let the administrators teach?

I read you comment as another anecdote towards the general belief that higher education requires a refactor for many parties and the general growth of knowledge creation.

I imagine it would be extremely dire for those hundreds of professors.

We have yet to bring back ice delivery for the sake of the delivery staff. We have fridges now. Life does not end because jobs are eliminated, it just changes.

The economic term is underemployment, where your only options are roles which pay less than what your training level and capacity are.

Lose your job as a foreman at a factory, and you can switch to being a manager at Mc D.

Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

This is all optimization of resources and ownership of course so it’s essentially a question of how the share of the new efficiency derived surplus is split.

Part of which could go to things like keeping theoretical research programs alive.

It certainly could, but should it? If that research is into something that's a dead end, should we keep researching it to avoid underemployment of researchers? It does seem to me that underemployment as a loss function by itself is particularly prone to local maximums.

I’d argue yes.

I mean these are physics and mathematical specialists.

I’d rather have a country that can keep such people engaged and active than lose them.

I mean what other options do you see? They could join hedge funds. Open an ML based startup.

In the end someone else has to work on this material- the problem isn’t going to go away.

And it sounds like this requires tools to do measurements of astral phenomena. Considering that America lost its telescope recently, and further investment is unlikely, I don’t think the investment in ancillary fields is high either.

No, these people should be exploring new sub-fields. When you reach the end of a vein of rich ore you don't go ask the government to pay you keep digging in that same direction. You start digging somewhere else. That is what we need string theorists to do.

You lost the thread. We’re not talking about eliminating funding for physics. We’re talking about not funding very specific fields that haven’t produced anything useful for decades.

Someone with an IQ high enough to become a physics professor can't retrain, even within another sub-field of physics?

Moving about a bit is not losing people, and if they're not providing something useful then they've already been lost anyway, and the opportunity cost of what they might be doing usefully elsewhere is also spent. May as well employ them at McDonalds, except they'd probably be rubbish at it.

> Automation offers more of this, and it’s essentially going to go feed the owners of that automation.

An economist visits Communist China and they proudly show him a railway being built. He notices the workers are using shovels to dig the holes, instead of construction machines.

- Why don't you use construction machines?

- We care a lot about the workers here, using construction machines would make some of them unemployed!

- Well, in that case, I suggest you make them use spoons instead.

well when you are at professors level, then it is not only about yourself. Especially in physics with you have small teams, some grad students what are under your wing. Their livelihood and career depends on you. And some of them are newlyweds with baby incoming. So then comes human factor.

Though how big institutes work i do not know.

ah - but you speak towards the granting vacuum en absentia of an appropriate appropriation reaction by the institutions and of the government. A proper refactor that provides umbrella funding for a decade long transition would readily facilitate a painless migration, iff current academia cashflows are supplanted by a superior system...but the deus ex is i. finding said superior system.

You’ll teach MBAs.

Or you’ll dump the theoretical physics and spend on hair growth products and techniques.

The market doesn’t care for the long term- it’s an optimization system for competing needs, often with immediate needs overwhelming long term.

Markets also use regulatory forces to ensure that everyone isn’t mainlining addictive chemicals or dis-incentives are created for not wearing seatbelts.

> I feel like it would be markets correction.

Universities and higher learning isn’t and shouldn’t be a market. I’d argue that one of the reasons for the sad state of academia today is that too many MBA are running everything, including those things that aren’t businesses and shouldn’t be run like such. If researchers didn’t need to always chase after the next grant, a lot of the shortsightedness and lock in into specialities wouldn’t even be a problem in the first place.

It says something about how thorough neoliberalism won that few people react today when, again, it is taken for granted that everything is a market and what the market decides is right.

> Everyone in a subfield knows each other and gives positive grant reviews and external tenure letters to other practitioners.

Sounds like a textbook groupthink environment.

No one is going to lead a scientific revolution in that environment.

If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research.

The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive")

And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem?

No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.

Perhaps the issue is that the funding agency is not sophisticated enough to realize that there's no value, or more value elsewhere?

OR perhaps the issue that the same people who are in the clique of the said field are also evaluating the research proposals. So the funding doesn’t run dry?

Not that that’s a good or bad thing. You wouldn’t want a “non-expert” to evaluate the proposal. And perhaps a tapering of the funding is better indicator of interest/progress of the field?

Generally there's an outside source of funding that's not part of the field. Thus top scientists find themselves becoming "rainmakers" rather than doing research. You tell your staff to wear their white coats and glasses, lead a tour around the facility, point out how big the machines are, etc.

Well, there _is_ quite a bit less funding for anything in Physics nowadays, at least compared to the Cold War era. Some professors have indeed been forcibly pushed out of Physics for this reason, but mostly it has an effect of making things more hopeless for younger folk (due to the cronyism problem mentioned above).

> If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research.

This is very close to "There must be a pony in there somewhere". [1] If the question is whether the field is worth continuing to fund, the answer can't be, "Well since people are still funding it, it must be worth funding." By the same logic, we should just keep putting billions into WeWork.

Research is hard to value, and fundamental research especially so. The logic of "if people buy it, it must be good" only patchily applies to normal commerce, where results are relatively easy to measure and feedback loops are short. It's wholly inadequate for feedback loops on the scale of decades.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=the...

+1 insightful; 100% agreed; well-put!

Slashdot reference?

Yep

And when politicians are funding long term science, they aren't funding the actual long term benefits, they are funding the APPEARANCE of producing long term benefits (and the funneling of money to those who can provide kickbacks). As long as the pretense can be maintained, anything can be funded, regardless of its actual utility.

The logic is not "if people buy it, it must be good", but more "if people buy it, there must not be something else that they can buy that gets them what they want for less".

I think that's within the working definition of "good", but even if it isn't, I think my concerns still apply. It might on average be true in certain narrow circumstances, but there are so many exceptions it conceals at least as much as it reveals.

This makes sense until you realize the people funding the grants are not the people approving the grants. It is really a lot easier to spend other people's money poorly than to spend your own poorly. Besides, if you want to know if a grant is worth funding who are you going to ask? Probably esteemed people in that field or something related, who all have the same poor incentives and institutional inertia to contend with.

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