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Comment by shae | Hacker News Reader

You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.

And you can't get through peer review if you did. That process maintains consensus.

Albert Einstein failed peer review the one time he was subjected to it. Newton was not subject to it at all.

He was asked to address some questions and make revisions. He was so aggravated that his paper was subject to peer review at all that he withdrew it. But his subsequent submission to another journal did incorporate some of the referees concerns. Einstein was a great scientist but he too was wrong sometimes. [1]

His 1905 seminal papers were not peer reviewed per-se but the journal's editor who accepted the paper was Max Planck! So it was reviewed by another legendary physicist.

These days science has branched off into such specialized areas that another specialist in the field is needed for review. Whether that should be an anonymous referee, or someone else it is still valuable to catch errors and determine the soundness of the techniques. Also the selections of those peers is something for debate too.

[1] https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.211782...

Well you get the funding before you do the experiment and thus before you know whether it's going to disagree with existing research. If you have the results before you do the experiment, you're not doing science.

No, grant proposals normally expect you to provide preliminary results. The more controversial your proposal, the better your preliminaries have to be. Especially you have to convince the funding deciders that you did the appropriate positive and negative controls.

Preliminary results are results from a previous experiment that already had to be funded. And yeah, you don't want to throw funding at researchers who are only getting weird results because they are bad at conducting research.

Literally every preliminary result I got was from an experiment that was explicitly not funded for the purpose it was requested for. That is, by year 2 of my grant, I was spending my monies on stuff I hadn't proposed, to prepare for the next grant proposal.

I guess part of the reason I exited academia was because I was bad at conducting research :)

The chicken-and-egg problem illustrated in this thread seemed like the most appropriate place to highlight: So (see disclaimer at the end) there is a publication I appreciate called Seeds of Science. My understanding is that it is (in part) intended to offer a pathway to work around structural failure in comventional peer review; As its web page describes:

" What is a 'Seed of Science'? It is a speculation, an idea for an experiment, a novel observation, a thought-provoking question and discussion, the highlighting of an under-appreciated problem, or an unorthodox research study"

They got an ACX Grant last year from AstralCodexTen to pursue this.

---

CoI Disclaimer: My work is published in SoS.

Disruptive work doesn't necessarily need to disagree with previous results.

So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve. The more things change the more they stay the same.

> So instead of being branded a heretic and chased out of town you just starve.

Your income level is probably higher after leaving academia and going to work in industry. So you probably starve more by staying in academia.

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