Comment by cossatot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cossatot | Hacker News Reader

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I see a lot of appeals to "fund people, not projects", but the main issue I have with it is that I think it strongly biases people to select "super stars" who have impressive credentials / come from high status organizations.

Please, someone, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is essentially how the European Commission allocates scientific funding--professors basically get big block grants to fund their labs to do whatever. Then there are some big grants that go to institutions, with those like ETH Zurich soaking up a lot of the funds, and then those institutions can distribute to the smaller ones as they see fit. Rubbing up to high-profile professors at ETH or GeoForschungsZentrum feels a lot like petitioning King Frederic of Prussia, rather than anything merit-based.

It's really not clear to me that this is a better system; at least in my field (geosciences) I don't think that the European labs are more innovative or productive than their American counterparts, which is what the 'fund people, not projects' idea is supposed to enable. Furthermore, it completely blocks nonacademic research funding, or much project-specific funding. For example, I work for an applied science nonprofit based in Italy, and we have a lot of ideas that would (in principle) be big hits at NSF, but there is no real avenue to fund ~€100-300k projects on an ad-hoc/project-specific basis.

> but there is no real avenue to fund ~€100-300k projects on an ad-hoc/project-specific basis.

Long time ago I had a colleague who lamented that his projects were never selected by the R&D funding committee of our employer. I suggested him to multiply by ten his proposed budget and then at the next round his proposal was accepted! This was at a time were there where much more money in the Telecom sector than now.

So please do not hesitate to multiply by 10 your proposed budget. It does not have to be more ambitious on your side, all is needed is to find additional partners who could bring value to your proposal, for example by implementing it.

(I was both work package and project leader for EU FP7 projects)

How does it benefit the EU tax payer when projects that could be successfully done for 300k, are blown up to 3M with questionable added value? That's exactly the kind of problem that needs to be solved: You are just advocating to game the EU bureaucracy better.

> How does it benefit the EU tax payer when projects that could be successfully done for 300k, are blown up to 3M with questionable added value?

At least in FP7, the EU wanted implementations and new markets or businesses, because they didn't want to pay for something they didn't understand.

Trade metrics are easy to understand and less objectionable than funding someone with an innovative idea on a domain where there are few experts. Th EU commission themselves has also to report about their actions to EU parliament and EU council.

> You are just advocating to game the EU bureaucracy better.

You may not know but it happens that EU commission, or national authorities ask for reimbursement of funds if they thinks they have been gamed. Tricking the "EU" is not advisable.

You are just restating that for the EU, bureaucracy is more important than genuine research. Furthermore, the "gaming" I referred to is of course the legally allowed game that the EU is actually expecting you to play, and that you advised in your previous comment.

> You are just restating that for the EU, bureaucracy is more important than genuine research.

Perhaps but that's not my impression. My impression is (as in this thread) there is no good intrinsic metrics for research, except if it shows an impact on society.

There is no good intrinsic metrics for research, we can agree on that. Impact on society is not a good measure either, because if you had funded 10 smaller research projects instead of one big one, you might have gotten a much bigger impact on society, but not so easy to measure and attribute, and maybe not as quick to do the impacting.

So yes, bureaucracy. Because instead of actually doing the job that needs to be done, the EU is more interested in covering their own asses so that it looks as if they were doing the job. But the EU is not special in any way here, except that it is a very big example of a bureaucracy, of course.

This reminds me of many anecdotal reports of companies having difficulty selling in Japan, only to be told to "add a zero" to their prices and find huge success. Too cheap = not very good/desirable, in other words.

> Too cheap = not very good/desirable, in other words.

I think that's the EU mindset (at least in FP7), it wants their funds having the greatest impact as possible, certainly a small project can't have much impact.

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