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Comment by throwfgtpwd234 | Hacker News Reader

Wrecked how? Fixed how? Can you describe either or are you just saying words?

US scientific research funding is largely driven by nepotism and favoritism. Insiders know but don't talk too much about it. They have a few options: a) just quietly stay in the system trying their best to do good work b) join the gravy train through social climbing c) quietly leave and move on with their careers.

lol no

If that's true, and you've offered no evidence to support that it is, canceling funding for anything tangentially associated with "DEI" doesn't seem like it actually solves any of those problems.

I remember being told that the most important thing in a grant application after who you know is to get the margins and formatting right.

Word

This is pretty vague and gestural, I'd love specific examples to support your accusation. I work on NIH funded grants, and while I don't write the grants, I'm reasonably familiar with the process. I disagree with your assessment when it comes to any grant I've been involved with. I've never seen corruption like that. These grant proposals look a lot like private sector bids: here's what we want to do, and how it aligns with your mission, and here's how we plan to do it, and how much we're asking for. The process is competitive, and a committee decides on the outcome. Everything has oversight, and is very procedural. Before working on NIH grants, I worked in the private sector doing large contracts for 13 years, and the downside of the way the NIH does it is not corruption, if anything it's bureaucratic slowness and overcaution. The private sector was much shadier and prone to cronyism, and has nothing to teach the government on that count... believe it or not.

Don’t know about NIH.

I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.

My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.

The whole point of many of these grants is to invest in research on the leading edge where, by definition, nobody knows whether what they're trying to do is going to work, because it's actually new.

Of course that can be gamed, and of course we need good faith oversight, but if none of the research projects we're funding were to ever fail, that would be evidence that we're being massively too conservative in the avenues for new discoveries that we're investing in exploring.

Even taking this as true, and also taking it as true that we need to build a new research funding system from a clean slate to fix it - that can still be done in parallel while leaving the existing system in place! So as usual the effort of trying to discern some higher purposes is unwarranted, and the goal of these people is to just straight up destroy our country.

Please name a specific government grant that was given to a specific researcher based nepotism and favoritism.

The last time I checked when I worked at a Stanford biomedical university department that was substantially NIH-funded, there were 2 full time employee grant writers who had to supply the government grant process with a laundry list of specific data with each carefully-worded proposal because they were regularly competing with other universities to win a specific grant.

Some Stanford guy caused the NIH to deprioritize the infectious etiology theory for Alzheimer’s for decades. It’s not clear why his research was considered better than the others’, but it did receive a lot of attention and became the driving force. Millions have paid the price. His voice was not the only one, it was just the favored one.

Insiders have little say. NSF is probably the most merit based system in all the US government. Literally any other program (defense?) is less merit based.

Also, if nepotism and favoritism are the criteria for removal, let's start with the Executive branch.

>Insiders know but don't talk too much about it.

Insiders right fucking here are insisting they have not experienced that.

Which insiders are right?

Guess what, it's both! America is 350 million people. Most things have been experienced by someone. That does not allow you to generalize usefully.

Meanwhile the women and non-white insiders are still experiencing straight up racism and sexual harassment and sexism so....

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