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Comment by gklitz | Hacker News Reader

> Why couldn’t she get financial support? “You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a former faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There is a vicious cycle,” he says. Interesting. So, the idea doesn’t matter.

What a weird conclusion. You are more likely to get a high paying job as a professional athlete if you have won a lot of tournaments, and you are more likely to win a lot of tournaments if you’re a highly paid professional athlete. So they conclude “Oh, so skill in the sport doesn’t matter?”

Of cause it does!

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Except there's studies showing increasing turnover in academics and exiting being unrelated to research quality metrics.

There's also research showing pretty clear seniority effects on grant receipt.

You're raising a good point but my sense is it doesn't fit the data well.

There's also a really basic question of whether grants per se should matter at all in things like tenure decisions. You could make an argument that they're a means to an end, and using them for hiring decisions is sort of a tail wagging the dog phenomenon.

But sport is by definition set up so what is measured is the result we care about.

We would perhaps not care so much about the "vicious cycle" if the incentives were aligned with "good" research. If cancer gets cured, at the end of the day I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over how. But the concern is the incentives are misaligned in favour of exploiting the metrics instead of "good" research.

This is incorrect way to think about it. Because optics matter more than whatever skill may be involved.

The way to think about it is to imagine a non tenured person writing two identical grants. They take one grant and change their position to full professsor while other stays at non tenured.

They are saying that the one that says full professor will get a higher score on average than the non tenured application.

Athletics have refs and a score and rules all simple enough to sort winners from losers. Papers don't. The analogy is flawed.

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