Hacker News Reader

Comment by warkdarrior | Hacker News Reader

The implication of the quote is that anything "ignited by curiosity" is worthwhile. This is all fine and good, as noble ambitions go, but it does not answer the key questions for academia: (1) Which papers to accept for publication?, and (2) Which projects to provide with funding?. The context of course is that there is only limited room for papers in publication venue (journal and/or conference) and limited funding for science.

View on HN

> Which projects to provide with funding?

There's a somewhat old adage (?) that says: "Don't fund projects. Fund people."

The gist of it is that by funding projects, you're funding a somewhat myopic view in that anything discovered adjacent to the project is now out of scope of the funding. By funding people with interesting ideas, you get a much more creative and free-flowing research program.

Just before I read your comment I came up with that idea "there should be a select few people based on their academic merits (whatever that means/however good that will go) that will have carte blanche."

Then I read your comment. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree.

Preferring people over projects creates a situation where you are carried by your status rather than your work. If someone had a successful project, it doesn't necessarily mean their next project is going to work. A total newcomer could potentially solve a very important problem (but get their funding denied because they are still not the right "people" to invest in). This also makes it harder for new ideas to propagate.

Funding should be a mix of track record with project consideration, not either exclusively.

There’s a subtlety there. It isn’t suppose to be about who you are but what you’re about.

Stopping caring about whether projects work or not is practically the point. Research isn’t about only tackling things we know will work. That’s effectively engineering and not research.

A lot of the funding today is already about status. There just needs to be less funding given out to people based on status and funders’ pet projects and more funding based upon the people and proposals. Solid people and proposals should not be turned down via lack of status or not fitting into some box of “this will work”.

A lot of topics are lumped into “that will never work”, but it’s often the case that they were never tried or even explored.

Agreed.

No, we said fund _people_ not status. Someone’s status is their job title etc. that should be irrelevant in funding decisions.

Funding projects is a terrible idea that you should keep at a minimum. If you fund projects you will end up with the BS we have now - marketing in the form of grant proposals.

I think a really helpful analogy for how science should be funded is to think of how angels and VCs fund early stage startups - I mean, how they really fund them. Which is: is this a promising area to startup within? Is this a great team? And that is pretty much it.

The downside of this approach I think is that personal biases can creep in and create a lack of diversity. You can counter that with pots of funding that directly target diversity.

Fund people, your assessment of their ability, their team, and their area of interest.

The question then is, how do select the people. In VCs, like you said, you'd look for a great team. What does that mean? It means mostly one thing: track record. This is what I meant by status. It's not your title. In academia, very similarly to tech, some people are rising stars, and they can get funding for anything they like. I'm just saying, consider the project and not just the person.

I don't think that's accurate. One of the things that make incubation and choosing which startups to fund so difficult is precisely the lack of track record. According to Graham himself, when everyone involved with a startup are new to the scenes they're invading, you instead end up relying on such nebulous concepts as "imagination", "naughtyness"[1], or "earnestness"[2].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html

Einstein completely transformed physics with some stand-out papers - most written as a patent clerk - and then spent the rest of his career producing almost nothing of interest. He commented on other work at conferences and in letters, but there were no more huge breakthroughs.

In modern academia that would be a terrible record.

But giving him tenure was a smart bet, because he might have produced more.

It's the Sabine Hossenfelder problem. Should physics fund incremental research which is a fairly safe bet in employment terms? Or should the money go on talented and creative researchers who may waste most of it - but one or two may produce something transformative?

Academia is heavily slanted towards the former approach. Because academia is now a business and has the same bureaucratic and corporate values as other bureaucratic corporations.

This is terrible for original research, because smart people need to given a free hand to follow their intuitions and interests.

Being able to afford to explore, play, and potentially fail would transform physics.

Because in reality academia is producing a lot of failure anyway, without the upsides of transformative new insights.

Maybe the trick is to do the y-combinator of research?

In the startup world it is widely believed that a bit of hardship is needed to show dedication.

1. Make the application process much simpler

2. Support with smaller amounts, individual subsistence salary

3. Provide the right placing in the right environment.

What you're describing there is called grad school

Einstein is really a great example for when your past success does not translate to future endeavors and I even considered mentioning him in another comment.

I know a few institutions where exploring and playing is a standard procedure, however they aren't many. And even this has a limit because science is expensive. So you need a way to know which silly ideas to pursue and how to best utilize your resources and budget.

Actually, Einstein's 1935 paper along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen basically highlighted the existence of entanglement in Quantum Mechanics. Of course Einstein was trying to show that QM was wrong via the EPR paradox but although reality has since proven him wrong, it was still a major paper written decades after his more famous work.

I don’t disagree with your main point, but I’ve actually seen Einstein cited as someone who had a long scientific peak. He first transformed physics during the 1905 miracle year and then again in 1915 after completing the theory of general relativity. From what I understand, special relativity was built upon the work of Lorenz and Poincaré, and likely would have been discovered only a little later without Einstein, but general relativity was a staggeringly original achievement. The University of Zurich’s bet paid off more than well when they granted Einstein tenure in 1909. His best work was still in the future.

I agree with you. Einstein published general relativity when he was 38-ish around 1917 or so, over a decade after his miracle year in which he revolutionized or kickstarted several domains in relativity, Brownian motion, and quantum mechanics. Even in the year of publishing general relativity, he basically kickstarted the principle behind lasers.

I mean general relativity is one of the most tested and verified physical theories, and it was practically done all by Einstein himself. It’s a hallmark of a theory. That alone is worth everything, and yet he was also the genesis for several other fields, both before and after general relativity.

Einstein is not a great example for this discussion. Even his “failures” are useful contributions. Many here are missing the point in that it is failures that we should not be afraid of funding, within reason of course. I.e., it’s okay if a promising idea “fails”. It is input to the broader research community and questions.

> almost nothing of interest

> terrible record

> might have produced more

You do not seem to have much knowledge of his publication record.

Here is a list of 272 journal articles by Einstein and coauthors, the majority of which would certainly be considered peer reviewed by modern standards.

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

From just these papers, among the things you put into the bucket of "not huge breakthroughs" were (in small length scales) Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensates (notably his 1924 and 1925 papers), his atomic emission and absorption theory (the "stimulated emission" in laSEr), and his paper with Podolsky & Rosen and (in large length scales) General Relativity, Einstein gravitational lensing, the Friedmann-Einstein and Einstein-de Sitter expanding universe cosmological models.

Economy is always finite, sadly. Sometimes it may be just bad administration (inefficient, low funds, etc), but then you have to deal with politics, and thats another whole show...

Nah. The big 4 were written in 1905 . It was like in the 1920s or something that he worked on general relativity and wormholes.

Everything else I’m not going to read because it’s just bleeding heart nonsense.

I've had a pretty successful research career, but it's very rare I've had a project that actually delivered what I said it would on the funding proposal. Something more exciting has always come along while we were working on the original topic, and I've always gone with it. We've ended up significantly delivering better research than the original project would have.

And in 30 years, no project officer from a funding agency has ever complained that we'd delivered really good results but they weren't the results we'd promised. They're generally happy something good came out of the funding, because frankly, most funded projects don't produce much of value. Very occasionally (mostly on EU projects) we've had to write up the results in a project report with the original section titles that no longer match the new content to tick some boxes and keep the funder beancounters happy.

The amount of shifty money practices I've seen so far is astonishing, all in the pursuit of more science per proposal. Ideally you use some of the funding from the previous project to do some exploratory research somewhere very different and then write up a proposal around it, but since you already did some of the work there'll be money for more research and instruments and things and maybe fun ideas that students have.. creative accounting all around. I'd be appalled if it wasn't in the name of science.

I think many people do that - it's very hard to write up a compelling proposal without having spent some time working on the idea to see if it's viable, but there's often no funded way to do preliminary work on an idea. If you don't do something like what you describe, it's nearly impossible to branch into new areas, and that makes it nearly impossible to do good research. This is another problem with funding project proposals.

But what I was describing was slightly different - once the proposal is funded, many PIs feel compelled to deliver what they said they would, whereas in the two years since you wrote the proposal, the world has moved on, you've learned things, both from your early work on the project and from others, and more promising avenues are now possible. If you feel compelled by the funder to continue in the original direction, you'll very rarely deliver good research.

You shouldn't be appalled: grants that force you to work on a precise area with no flexibility are what's appalling. Research just doesn't work like that! The current grant proposal process is the creation of administrators and politicians, not scientists.

Many of the most critical research results came out of some random hallway conversation, as a response to some new result that didn't exist when the research plan was formulated, or because someone had a brain fart. If at each point someone had put up their hand and said "sorry, scientist, that's not on your current grant roadmap" we'd probably still be dying of preventable diseases and lighting our homes with gas fixtures.

It's a fair point, that there must be some criteria for some individual or lab to compete for funding. It might be worth creating a stronger distinction between truly novel papers, and general scientific papers, that goes beyond an informal understanding of which journals are prestigious. For example, going through Arxiv each week can be really tedious, with many papers being redundant or written that makes it hard to understand.

>Which papers to accept for publication?

That may have been a problem in Feynman's day, but today academic papers takeup negligible storage. The only limiting factor is the number of peer reviewers, I have no idea if there is a shortage of those or not.

Acceptance is less about storage space, but about gatekeeping for "quality". Which in turn is about what papers are going to get read, because nobody has time to read all of the papers. People rely on high-reputation journals to narrow down the time they spend reading.

The number of peer reviewers may be one limitation, but I think the main one is the number of readers. The hard limit is how much time readers spend reading. Getting access to that is hard.

Anybody can publish. You don't even need a journal; just put it up on your blog. But as with all blogs, the hard part is getting anybody to care that you've done it.

Administration has no clue which projects are good and which "scientists" won't spend the money on a sea of booze.

Two mechanisms should be used:

1. Administration decides which projects had real world effect, years or even decades after the work is done.

2. A directed social graph is built from citations and from working together on projects.

Money should be allocated to the network. Administration decides who did good work in the past; funding is allocated to everyone endorsed by those people; scientists vote with their grant money for projects that they believe in.

I think this would lead to a hellpit of sycophantic behavior. And, genius or not, I would not trust any group of people to be immune to the influence of the sycophants.

Would that be worse than the current disaster though?

Not necessarily. Still, a drastic change asks for strong evidence of improvement.

Honestly your proposal isn't too different from what I've seen going on in many university administrations. My initial reaction is that it is the current disaster.

I've never known an administrator who had even the faintest clue what science was all about, let alone what previous was 'good' or what projects would have 'real world effect'. If they had insights on such things, they would likely be working in science, not administration.

Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.

I'll just say that whatever it is, it has to be corruption-proof. And in the current environment, I regularly see gaming the sorts of things you're suggesting.

Maybe overly limited funding for science is the problem? On the whole it all seems to me as if capitalism and the general problem of the (projected by too many?) “Leistungsgesellschaft” might have invaded science to a much larger extent than it used to?

It’s just a wild guess looking at it from the outside, I don’t have any experience with proper science at all.

To me this stuff just always reads as “ah great so that’s how we killed the potential for that (classic/next-gen) Star Trek future”.

capitalism offer more money to scientists, but you right, we need more money on science.

One of the great promises of the Basic Income idea is that within many domains, it eliminates project funding as a constraint,

with the anticipatable outcome that a great many people "waste" their time on uninteresting, incorrect, ludicrous, ideas,

and a few people who might have been fundable today, do solid real work,

and sometimes, a few people who would have NOT have been fundable (per OP), do work which Changes Everything, which might not have been done today otherwise.

Those of us reading this, we live in a surplus economy.

We could fund everyone.

Indeed, we should, because it would over a reasonable time frame, pretty likely Change Everything.

All it would cost is fewer 100m long yachts for a few thousand sociopaths.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com