Hacker News Reader

Comment by atrettel | Hacker News Reader

I have heard a similar story about Richard Feynman. If I recall correctly, Feynman claimed to have only applied for grants on work that he already completed, that way he knows he can fulfill what he set out. I am unable to find the source for this but I presume it was in his autobiography.

View on HN

This is a common trick for theorists. You need to have essentially completed the work in order to write a compelling grant proposal.

I did this when I was a researcher even though I was not a theorist (I was working in mobile robots). I always worked a year ahead, and write a proposal for what I had done the year before. I acquired a reputation as someone who always delivered. Then one year I had a proposal rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was impossible to achieve within the budget and time frame I was proposing. That's when I quit.

They wanted you to ask for more time and money? What kind of grift were they actually running?

People evaluate the proposals expecting them to be estimations. And when somebody estimate some work taking too little time or money, people often don't trust that estimate.

This is all completely normal and reasonable. Except for the part where you are expected to estimate results of scientific research.

Yeah too good to be true things are red flag for fraud or pipe dream

I hope you quit, took 6 months off, then came back with the previously finished work and told them, “You were right! It only took six months and zero grant money; I did this while traveling in Japan.” That might have blown their little bureaucrat minds.

The problem is that the reviews were anonymous (which was supposed to make the process less political). My direct managers knew what I was doing.

it's not uncommon for labs to ahve a grad student working on a skunkworks project funded by a previous, unrelated grant. They generate initial data, which is shown in the grant application. But often the grad student is still working in parallel with the extremely long grant cycle to get more publishable results and can sometimes even get to a full paper before being funded.

I think of it like speculative execution and pipelining.

That's the sad reality of most grants today

Reply on news.ycombinator.com