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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

From another Nature article, linked on this page (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00685-2):

> SOFIA’s publication rate is now starting to creep up, and last year it was 33 papers. The ultimate goal is 75 to 100 papers per year, says James Jackson, associate director for research at the Universities Space Research Association, the Maryland-based group that manages SOFIA. “More than 150 was a stretch goal,” he says.

I really, really hope they found a better way of assessing the telescope's value than number of papers published. "75 to 100 papers per year" feels like a bit of a Freudian slip as to what professional science sees as its ultimate goal.

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It's refreshing to at least see them admit their lunacy here!

Scientific incentives are so insanely wrong that it's hard not to see everything not directly supporting an immediate application flaming out within the next 50-100 years (assuming no major course corrections).

I'd probably still be a scientist if things were better. But they're not.

Incidentally, this is why the science worship/science fetishism is so cringe-inducing for those of us who've been down at the coal face (ok, for me it was the iron face in Soudan, but whatever). The process, capital-S Science, is worthy. What we have now is not that.

Incentives in general are insanely bad in most places if we honestly looked at it. It is so very difficult to get anything long term done anywhere.

I agree with your overall point, in that the number of papers published != the amount of 'science' being performed, however that sort of metric might not be such a bad way to gauge the output of a shared resource like a telescope. For the sake of argument, if the telescope time is split up between 100 different groups, each of which submitted a proposal for which the end goal is a publication, is it not that unreasonable to assume that the publication would at least be available as a pre-print say six months after the group's observation time has ended?

results might not be significant, project might not pan out for any number of reasons, projects can easily take more than 6 months. sadly, people still don't care about negative results

This is a good point, but if there are few (if any) publishable results coming out of a costly apparatus (and none are particularly notable), isn't that an indication that resources should be refocused to more productive projects? Resources are always limited.

If you think this costly and relatively unproductive apparatus should continue to receive funding, is there any circumstance which would cause you to discontinue it in favor of something else (which is not a direct replacement)?

not an astrophysicist so can't comment on the science directly. cost-benefit analysis in science funding is a really difficult problem. that being said, $85M buys quite a lot of science.

SOFIA has been flying since 2014, so the lack of influential publications is not for lack of analysis time.

It's easy to agree that number of papers published is a poor indicator of "quality" or "quantity" of raw science generated... but we hardly have anything better. Publication record is the currency at the moment.

And for every cancelled experiment / unfunded grant - there is someone else getting that money instead. I want to believe that savings from the operations of the SOFIA will be channeled into another scientific project. I am pretty sure there is a lot of smart folks out there that will happily convert newly available budget into interesting observations.

It's truly unfortunate. Science should be about understanding how wrong we are just as much or even more than understanding how right we are. And yet, the push to publish puts things on safety rails to make sure you're always right. It's like putting blinders on science when we should be letting it run free.

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