Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
statnews.com
statnews.com
IMO, the US needs to clean house. We should restructure our research funding so that it goes to motivated and curious people instead of politically connected PIs. This means totally disconnecting NSF/NIH/DARPA funding from the university apparatus. Treat academic affiliation -- and the associated albatross of "overhead" -- as a hindrance to grant applications as opposed to a requirement.
Imagine how much better the caliber of our research will be if we pay grad students $100K instead of paying them $35K and their university $65K. We could 10x our research spend by giving money to the right people instead of giving it to people who can stomach and afford giving 2/3rds of their funding to sad excuses for institutions that American universities have become.
At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments.
https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/
They're an insignificantly-tiny fraction of EU research funds, but I'm shocked how often I come across an outstanding project (nix, chips4makers, betrusted, libresoc, searx, OTR, osmocom, qubes, sourcehut, wireguard) that they funded.
Whatever awesomeness the NSF had in the 1970s-1980s died somewhere in the mid-1990s, and appears to have been reincarnated with these guys.
Some institutions (eg famous ones) have near 100% overhead. Overhead sounds reasonable for example to maintain IT and core facilities, but I have a suspicion that a lot of it is wasted in a black hole of unknown function generically labelled “admin”
https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/Endow...
A surprising amount of overhead goes to employees in accounting who perform some black magic so that everyone on staff is payed by some combination of projects. Whether someone actually works on said projects is irrelevant of course.
The overhead rates are supposed to reflect the University’s actual costs and are negotiated with the government, so I suppose you could try to make a FOIA request for them.
If I had a factory with 100 people assembling my product, or a sales team with 100 people selling it, I'd be quite happy to only budget for the cost of another 100 people to pay my rent and run my IT, payroll, accounting, janitorial services, maintaining my machinery...
I get the impression that modern universities have five or ten other employees for each teacher/researcher, which assuming everyone gets the same pay implies 500-1000% overhead, or subsidy from sources other than grants.
This doesn’t paint the whole picture though as sometimes additional overhead costs (eg. healthcare benefits) can be budgeted as Fringe Benefits for personnel working directly on the project. In that situation, the F&A rate would stack on top of those costs.
(It's not, especially for disciplines like CS and math.)
As for math and CS, I am quite positive at least in Math most work is done by individual professors/post-docs/students without much involvement of grants. In fact, a lot of universities do reduce the overhead charged to purely intellectual pursuit with no major facilities usage kind of departments. Not sure all math or cs research will qualify for that because of the HPC requirements, but the option is out there. Universities as signals for funding and research success really appears to me like the best of a bad option set.
To me this sounds not as a critique of the proposed system, but rather defense of the current system.
Science is underpinned by the scientific method which essentially is "form hypothesis -> create controlled environment -> test hypothesis". I do not want to start debate around expected outcome rations, but negative result (hypothesis being false) is perfectly normal outcome of the scientific method. Current system tries to defend against rent seeking by being heavily biased towards positive outcomes. This encourages heavily incremental research, which a bit paradoxically can be also seen as rent seeking. Furthermore, it also encourages low quality science (like p hacking and similar stuff) and discourages publication of negative outcomes, possibly leading to hitting the same dead ends multiple times.
Blind grant proposals could reduce bias towards "past performance" decreasing ratio of positive results, and encourage "riskier", more brave hypotheses to be formed and tested.
Past performance as a metric in grant application encourages research optimization. Some may see this as a good thing, but it discourages early-to-mid career researchers (and even late in their careers) from pursuing something non-obvious. Safe science is more often than not optimization and edge case/condition testing.
However, your argument is still orthogonal to grant blindness itself. Mere affiliation with with research institution does not guarantee (although highly increases the likelihood, I can agree on that) access to certain research instruments.
This is the thing I have tried to explore in my previous comment. Current model practically revolves around researcher "fame" and grant board "knowing" their [lab's] ability to execute technical part of the research. This creates some perverse incentives. Naturally, grant boards become more inclined (consciously or not) to favor certain institutions and researchers, giving more grants, further increasing "competitiveness". Researchers become disincentivized to publish negative results and are incentivized to resort to data hacking and irreproducible science. This sure does give rise to the OP's mentioned Twitter prof or "trust me bro" science. There is much more politics in science than we publicly admit.
Current process does not actually evaluate grant proposal on technical ability to execute, this is left for institutions "underwriting" proposal. We could start evaluating technical ability regardless of whether grant applications are blind or not. If peer review meant "peers got roughly similar basic results in basic reproduction" instead of "someone in the field looked at the final draft" I guess we could have blind proposals with advantages of current system without its major political disadvantages.
I can agree that open process does help filter out researchers underqualified to do the research in question, but it does come at a certain cost. Ability to weed out underqualified teams does not necessarily require current process, i.e. this can be achieved by other means.
Almost every organization has more people in support roles than in line positions. If not directly, then indirectly. If the "overhead" is not high enough, the people who are supposed to do line work have to waste their time as incompetent janitors and secretaries. That's a very common situation in universities, which employ many administrators for regulatory reasons but often don't have the money to hire enough support personnel.
If you want to pay grad students $100k, then the grant must be $165k. Or maybe $180k to allow the grad student to focus more on their research. Maybe the sum can be a bit less, if you manage to reduce the regulations and reporting requirements. But then you have to accept that a larger fraction of grant recipients will misuse the money or spend it on research many taxpayers would consider frivolous.
In wet lab disciplines the story is more complicated. But there are many possible configurations that are more efficient than the current university-as-gatekeeper system.
I did that for a couple of years as a CS postdoc on a private grant. I believe my overhead rate was 15-20%, which was mostly health and other insurances. To reach that, I did accounting and taxes on my own. I also had a loose affiliation with a university, so I didn't have to pay for office space or computing.
If you start using paid services, hire employees, and accept more restrictive grants, your overhead rate can easily climb above 50%.
This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)
Basically MIT is an enormous government research lab with a small school bolted on the side. This was a deliberate structure thanks to James Conant and Karl Taylor Compton working for the government in WWII.
* honestly I’m astonished they are willing to run that minor (and by a lot of faculty reviled) operation at a small loss.
They have a nice presentation with various charts and such which is where I get this info myself. I don’t know if it’s online. I forget how I got it when I was in school but now the people who come visit from the development office bring it with them because they know I’m interested.
Then, some 35 years later came the Bayh-Dole act, which however well-meaning it might have been, really provided the incentives for universities to turn into fed money capturing enterprises. The rest is history.
This was before the Manhattan project was authorized.
But the education public services were long-since defunded so that states could cut their local taxes and "attract business".
The "Twitter prof" is the academic who has learnt to master the advertiser-funded hype machine.
The internet should be an advertising-free internetwork as it once was.
Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding.
When we fail regulate so-called "tech" companies, we watch the value of the internetwork continually degraded to nothing more than a means to advertise and disseminate "junk".
The rise of the Twitter Prof has nothing to do with Twitter’s funding model.
HN has advertisements and is part of a .com (Ycombinator).
Companies advertising open position on HN do not pay for the ads. HN does not rely on imcome from ads to run the website.
(Now, one could argue that HN is owned by YC, YC makes money from "tech" companies and "tech" companies generally use online ads or ad services as their "business model". Fair enough. In response, I would point out that HN does not need surveillance, data collection or ads in order to survive. HN's "content" comes from from submitters and commenters. These individuals are unpaid. Unlike sites run by "tech" companies, the users generating the "content" are not paid from online advertising revenue.)
At the same time, few applicants, or applications, seem to be punished for grandiose, but not completely impossible, claims. Grant making follows the golden rule: https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-an...: he who has the gold, makes the rules.
I think this is missing the forest for the trees. These aren't the reason schools cost so much and in turn why student debt is so high. Meeting with other scholars internationally has been happening for over a hundred years. European schools often travel to America a lot because conferences are often here, and their costs aren't what American universities are. Despite having similar levels of research output. The high cost is for other reasons. This also isn't why professors ignore their teaching requirements (find time to do both research, which is the higher priority, and teach. You sure can't in 40hrs)
As to the rest of the comment, I am in a lot more agreement with. I don't even think grad student pay needs to even be that high, it would just be nice enough if I didn't need to rely on internships for my cost of living. If I had enough money to pay off my undergrad loans instead of letting them rack up tens of thousands of dollars more.
But one thing I would highly argue, is that research is investing in your own country. Academia is a common place for innovation to be derived from. It is no surprise given you put a bunch of smart people together that are passionate about learning that they make new things. Especially considering how research is literal innovation. I think there's a large argument to be made about how this is a national security issue, and can be justification for diverting military budget for non-weapons based research. War is about economics after all. Really it is about a lot of things besides the actual fighting parts. Innovation has been a key element in America's (and many others) success. It is weird to think that we wouldn't place this as one of our highest strategic assets.
> I think this is missing the forest for the trees.
Not at all. People have a sense of right and wrong, and this fact offends them far more than the nebulous task of assess the effectiveness of research.
I have a PhD and spent a lot of time within and interfacing with academia. I think even the average science-skeptic congressperson massively over-estimates both the short-term and long-term value of the sort of research that happens in most of academia. But we're probably not going to agree on that.
So, see, we can go back and forth all day about the relative merits of academic research. And there's always cover because most congressional people -- let alone voters -- don't know enough to have a really informed opinion.
If I go to a congressional staffer and complain about the NSF or NIH, not much is going to change unless the candidate already agrees with me and is passionate about the issue. They know voters don't care.
But I can go to a congressional staffer and ask: why does your candidate support bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments?
And THAT question is going to be viewed very differently, because it's something that could anger voters who don't have the time and attention to vote on the basis of whatever useless crud the NSF is funding this year.
I think the whole idea of small-grant-based funding in academia has outgrown its usefulness. Just pay people directly and let them work on whatever they like.
That would make a big difference I think. Especially in fields where private sector pay much more. That being said, research remains attractive for the brightest minds and there's no shortage of great candidates yet.
(Emphasis mine)
This is the essential point, buried in the article. Granting agencies cause a lot of this nonsense. The grant assessment criteria they provide will literally say things like: “demonstrate the work is novel and transformational.”
As is clear in this thread people want bang for their buck. So applications are asked to justify what bang they will provide, and the successful ones tell it.
"R01, R03, R21, R34. Reviewers will provide an overall impact score to reflect their assessment of the likelihood for the project to exert a sustained, powerful influence on the research field(s) involved..."(Emphasis mine).
There are whole sections called "Innovation" and "Significance."
On Hacker News we often talk about bad incentives in science from an individual's perspective, but the main incentive problem is at the organizational level. From an organizational perspective, every additional grant-seeking researcher is still a marginal benefit, no matter how little time they actually spend on research. E.g., even a 99% marketing 1% research split (an exaggerated ratio, only for illustrative purposes) means adding another "researcher" is still a marginal benefit to the organization even though it wastes most of public's money on institutional growth rather than science. The equilibrium state is a near-total focus on grant-seeking and marketing. To ensure the public's money is spent effectively, funding agencies need to pay more attention to designing their policies to counteract this tendency.
You might get your wish regarding the NSF specifically though. An 18% increase will make a difference for a couple years: https://nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2023/index.jsp
Just the last couple of weeks: - Flooding in Pakistan kills 1000+: https://www.vox.com/world/2022/8/30/23327725/pakistan-floodi...
- Ongoing slow disaster in the Colorado River Basin: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/27/1119550028/7-states-and-feder...
- Jackson, MS water crisis: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/us/jackson-water-system-faili...
- Record breaking heat forecasted for CA this coming week: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-31/the-heat...
- Spanish drought destroys harvests: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62707435
- China factories shut down because of heat wave: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-factories-hurt-amid-covi...
- Drought dries up rivers in France: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-river-loire-set...
Researchers are scientists, not marketing-people. If you really want to impact policy, go into politics. Otherwise it's an authoritarian twist on what democracy is
What you are doing by makign a random list of events is even a travesty of science. How do these events compare to the past.
Guess you don’t work in academia.
In prior years I heard a big emphasis on climate vs weather, to inform the public that just because they had a cold winter, doesn't mean that the earth itself is cooling. It's a longer term trend, and it's hard to attribute individual events to it. I think that's the correct and nuanced view.
The view I have seen most recently in the media is "every extreme weather event that supports is evidence of long term climate change, every one that does not is short term weather". Are you promoting that view?
[1]: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/increasing-politicization-and-h...
Can you paste them, maybe?
The fact that these terms are political isn't controversial. In fact, you can trace back the popularization of some of them in political discourse to landmark SCOTUS decisions and executive orders. See [1], for example.
[1]: https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_r... "The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Lewis Franklin Powell, ruled that a state may constitutionally consider race as a factor in its university admissions to promote educational diversity, but only if considered alongside other factors and on a case-by-case basis."
Grant given: fill their application with hype and buzzwords to get grants.
Well well, who could have guessed this completely unforeseeable consequence...
"MY research is TRANSFORMATIONAL."