A Defense of Weird Research
asteriskmag.com
asteriskmag.com
The total result of the current academic incentive structure is towards the frequent publication of safe, boring positive results, especially pre-tenure. Academic research needs to become LESS like the quarterly return driven private sphere, not MORE like it.
2. In general, the problems are harder today than they were 40 years ago. We are constantly delving into problems plagued by noise and heterogeneity. This makes progress much tougher.
3.
Science isn't like other commodities. In most of recorded history it is only ever produced, never destroyed [1], and the product is basically free to replicate [2]. The result is massive inflation: it might be hard to make a profit growing corn the same way we did 200 years ago, but doing a 200 year old science experiment is utterly pointless outside a classroom demonstration.
So making science that is worth paying for is just always going to get harder. And yet we equate science with other industries when we expect anything less than billion dollar experiments to yield fundamentally interesting results. This doesn't mean science is somehow getting worse, or that the practitioners are to blame, it just means it's evolving to attack much more difficult problems.
All this being said, there are plenty of ways to reform to keep the progress going: reproducibility is theoretically easier than ever, and yet many journals aren't requiring open datasets or public code. We need to keep the pressure on to evolve in a positive way, not just throw up our hands because things are harder than they were when we knew less.
[1]: Ok, there are some examples were lots of information was destroyed, and a bias from what is recorded.
[2]: I don't mean repeating the same experiment, just that the results from one experiment are trivially disseminated to millions of people.
Could we blame the "industrialisation" of PhDs on that we should expect less impact from each researcher and thus the obvious policy the keep interesting research happen is more researchers?
From the late 70s through about 2005, scaling semiconductor generations was easy. MOSFET scaling followed rules formulated by Dennard, which provided a fairly easy method of scaling semiconductor designs from one generation to the next, keeping power density roughly constant and continually improving performance. The problem is that by around 2005, if you did it that way, your gates were no longer switches, they were dimmers, and leakage power started to dominate, and that meant that chip architectures had to change radically to keep on scaling.
So, we can no longer just scale designs from one generation to the next, we have to come up with completely new approaches. That's much harder.
There is a dearth of rewarding research to pursue, even less grant money, and in such a crowded ingroup people become hyper-competitive at status-seeking activities. Now we have entire catalogs of journals that are pretty much just publication mills. There are entire continents whose papers can't be trusted to be anything but outright fabrications. No meaningful reform is possible.
Yes there are low-quality papers out there but I'd rather have 100 low-quality papers if it gives us 1 truly insightful piece of research. Any expert worth their salt can read a paper and judge its veracity very quickly, and it is those high-quality papers that get cited.
Even when one of those high-quality publications gets shown to be false, it moves the field forward. Real science is incremental and slow.
The former is usually characterized by describing the details of the experiment, which are meaningless to the untrained audience, the latter is characterized by describing its ultimate goal.
This could sound like a blind defense of “trust the experts“, which can be a problematic attitude. The point is that someone you can’t answer the latter question, then any critique should be suspect. If the researcher can’t answer the latter question concisely, then a closer look is definitely warranted.
Like a vast quantity of their research output is badly designed studies that don't replicate, and serve only to launder the authors ideology through a veneer of science. It honestly think that certain social sciences might have negative RoI, e.g., the famous one about Alpha Wolves (wolves don't form Alpha beta Beta hierarchies in the wild, they actually have family unit packs).
The oft repeated claim is the replication crisis as you mention but this isn’t limited to social science nor is social science the worst offender. Replication rates for psychology have ranged between 36 [1] and 62% [2] in a few metas I just pulled up
A notable paper in biology is the Amgen paper that shows an 11% replication rate for landmark cancer research[3]. There’s a paper from Bayer that shows only about 25% of published preclinical trials could be validated [4]
Similarly in economics there have been papers finding replication rates of 54% [5]
So maybe the issue is not a wildlife ecology study from the 40s that was definitively debunked by a biology study in the 90s. Maybe it’s p-hacking, journals that focus entirely on publishing novel research over replication (and grant funders that act similarly), refusals to share data and methodological details/process transparency, etc that apply to all fields.
[1] DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z [3]10.1136/bmj.e2555 [4]10.1038/nrd3439-c1 [5]10.1038/s41562-024-02062-9
I've seen the term alpha wolf so many times that I justed assumed it was a thing. It is quite emberrassing reading up on it.
Historically, prior to Bayh-Dole in the early 1980s, basic research was done at universities and was mainly financed by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, and applied research was done at industrial research centers like Bell Labs. Generating profitable intellectual property was the goal of the private research sector, but it relied heavily on the basic research at universities - eg development of semiconductor transistors follows this pathway, with a lot of basic scientific research in the first half of the 20th century followed by focused applied research efforts aimed at replacing vacuum tubes at Bell Labs.
This whole system has gone off the rails in the USA, because under Bayh-Dole, corporations realized they could essentially cut their own R & D divisions, outsourcing their applied research to universities with funding supplied by taxpayers and cutting their own R & D division spending. This decimated a lot of basic research at the university level, and destroyed institutions like Bell Labs as well. Now, threatened cuts to federal funding for research are likely to do even more damage to scientific progress in the USA, conducted by people who don't even seem to understand the system created since the 1980s, flawed as it is.
The solution is obvious: delete Bayh-Dole and make all taxpayer-funded research available to any US citizen or business under free non-exclusive licenses. Corporations will then be forced to reinvest in their own applied R & D divisions if they want that lucrative IP to be solely in their own hands.
If this doesn't happen, the USA will become a second-rate follower of others work, and it's already happened to some extent, with Chinese universities now widely regarded as superior to American ones, by several metrics.
However, I feel the implied argument: DOGE investigating science funding and talking about cuts is bad seems flimsy. The system of funding and incentives is pretty broken, and not only broken, but actively decaying, you can't increase your return by increasing the funding and a lot of the money is spent on actively harming science (e.g., funding bureaucracy, or unmeritoricatic ideology rather than science).
The talking points about harming science by giving it money is triple absurd considering how you characterise doge actions. They are literally trying to stop public science, they are not removing administrative costs and they don't mind the science decaying or being broken. Their whole mission is to break it.
How can it even justify the name on the previous sentence without the quotes?
Plenty of value, I think. It's e.g. not weird at all to research very mundane things like "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen". Or something like "let's test if this chemotherapy drug is more effective than this other chemotherapy drug".
Sure there is radical, weird research, like rock licking or maybe some sociological study on fetishes. But I think there's space for both the weird and non-monetizeable research (think: 16th century lacemaking in a european country that doesn't exist anymore) and the monetizeable research (some incrementally improved LLM model probably).
What qualifies is "can we track as many diabetic people as we can through 10, 15, 20 years and see what other health outcomes happen by using only the same procedure and data other people have been using for a while so that it has been on the news more than a few times".
And yeah, you still have a point in that it may still be useful. But it's either something people blatantly ignored for some reason, or it's not really research, but product development.
How on Earth does, for example, the "shrimp threadmill" paper not have immediate and obvious economic use?
- should we borrow money (from future tax payers) to fund basic research now? Given the $2T deficit, it's not clear this optimal strategy for our grandchildren. Especially given how close we are to monetary collapse if we continue to borrow from the future at the rate we have the last 5 years.
- who controls the priorities and agenda of the public funding? In a constitutional republic, the will of the people should be reflected in the agenda of the science funding. We just had a presidential election, and this is democracy in action. It's not clear that science funding is even going down, the executive branch is simply steering research funding away from topics it doesn't think is a priority for the American people.
Source for this claim?
1. In absolute terms, the amount of money we're talking about (e.g. NSF+NIH) is a drop in the bucket compared to $2T; it's been well-covered elsewhere, but scientific research funding simply isn't a significant contributor to the federal budget (and its deficit). It's a rounding error next to defense, social security, medicare, and medicaid.
2. Basic scientific research is an investment in our grandchildren's lives and health, and one that (as described in the article) historically has resulted in a very good rate of financial return.
3. When trying to cut costs, it is important not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. These decisions are difficult, and if we want to have a hard look at what science gets funded, that's fine... but we need to do that in some kind of organized, serious, and systematic way, and that process absolutely has to involve the people doing the work at some level, as well as (ideally) other stakeholders (e.g. the people who might be affected by whatever the research would be accomplishing). A chainsaw is not the right tool for that job.
As to the second question, about priorities and agendas, this one's a bit trickier. First of all, let's be clear: we are not seeing a "steering" of research funding. What we are seeing is more of a "indiscriminate slashing" based on truly nonsensical and heavily politicized grounds: - https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/nx-s1-5295043/sen-ted-cruzs-l... - https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-reexamines-exist...
Besides funding of new research grants, the bigger impact is actually in education, training, and workforce development. Training grants are being badly affected, and because of the threats to indirect costs and the general uncertainty about future research funding levels, many universities are dramatically decreasing their number of PhD admissions this year, or eliminating them altogether. I also know of several programs aimed at scientific workforce development that are on the chopping block, and we are worried about our existing students losing their funding mid-way through their PhDs. Again, that's not "steering", unless you mean "steering" in the sense of "steering American science off a cliff". We are, in the most literal possible sense, eating our seed corn. I'm reminded of that reservoir in California that was recently ordered to dump a bunch of water, which means that the farmers in that part of the state won't have as much as they are going to need this summer. That's what is happening in science right now, as we speak.
Secondly, I don't quite know how to say this, but it's not really the executive's job to decide which grants get funded. That's up to the scientific and programmatic leadership at funding agencies, together with the existing and well-defined scientific peer review process. We did indeed just have an election, but our system of government is very much not a dictatorship. This is literally part of why Congress set up dedicated agencies to administer scientific and medical research; those projects need to persist beyond any single election and need to be insulated somewhat from day-to-day politics. Congress making those funding decisions was also an expression of democracy in action.
Also, this is why funding agencies are staffed by career civil servants with domain expertise, and why funding agencies have extremely well-documented and carefully designed peer review processes in place, and why scientists from all over the country give up lots of time to participate in those processes several times per year. Undermining all of this process and structure --- which is in place to try and mitigate biases and ensure as much objectivity as is possible in an inherently subjective world --- is one of the best ways I can imagine to ensure that government-funded research becomes more ideologically-driven, not less.
Anyway, that's my two cents!
The deficit doesn't matter: 1) we owe money that we print ourselves, and 2) reducing public debt just expands private debt.
That being said, I think that Trump's economic strategy is smartly focused on the real problem, which is the massive trade deficits that we've been running since Reagan. The problem isn't government debt, it's foreign debt. Cutting government spending with a continuing trade deficit just forces the private sector to borrow more to make up for lack of government spending.
https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/socialprovisioning2/chapte...
We're not borrowing anything from future taxpayers. We are building the world we will hand to them. The problem isn't the degree of investment, if it were effective (i.e. profitable) investment it would obviously be good. The problem is if we're investing money badly. Endlessly borrowing in order to buy imports is an obvious sign of domestic malinvestment.
When government is failing, it should be not be getting any smaller. It should be expanding and improving the things that work while reforming, replacing, or eliminating the things that don't. Conservatives only seem to understand this when demanding crackdowns on poor people committing street crime.
edit: cheerful perspective for Trump cynics from Varoufakis: https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterpl...
Thinking trade deficits are good never had an argument behind it, it was a retroactive justification for domestic infrastructure neglect, government cuts, and the coddling of the wealthy that began with the Reagan administration. The arguments for it are similar to the arguments for running a bunch of personal credit card debt "It's free money, take it, let them try to get it back."
The USA can't live as a parasite forever.
I am sickened at furious at the actions of this administration on science.
A whole round of funding opportunities sunk for no damn reason.
Historian Will Durant noted that the ancient Greeks thought of history as a vicious circle that repeated again and again. E.g. there was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle.
Related, ancient Greek historian Polybius pushed a theory called anacyclosis, with six repeating stages of history, a concept explored by others as well. Polybius’ stages were monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule).
Support for this theory came from the historical evidence that the ancient Greeks had, looking around at their 1500 city states. Notably, the six stages come in pairs that proceeded through a good-bad sequence (for example monarchy as the good form and tyranny as the bad form). Those city state examples tended to proceed in the order listed and not the reverse. Thus, the cycle.
So the weird research concept (whether good or bad) can be seen as a symptom of our times?
I'm not sure we can really internalize many lessons from what were at best Iron Age societies, and the fruits of technology weren't well spread.
When my great-grandfather was born, people in our village eeked a hand-to-mouth existence that wasn't much different from that our ancestors would have lived 1500 years ago.
When I was born, vaccines became normalized, electricity existed, indoor plumbing became common, etc.
The fact that human capital is now being nurtured and enabled in most societies, we can actually see major changes being unlocked.
I mean, if we're brutally honest - has scientific and engineering research really slowed down?
Artifical Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Global Communication, and Handheld Oracles have become normalized in just 25 years. This is the kind of technology you'd see in science fiction 30-40 years before today.
For every negative about a technology you can also point to a positive. It's not technology that's the issue - it's humans.
They're against taxing people to do weird research.
By their nature, taxes are compulsory, and the bar for compelled action is high.
who is compelled to invest in the future? (e.g education, public works, etc)
After that, however, the rest of the article seems to be a good-faith attempt at defending general public funding of science. It does use the straw-man as a crutch a few times, and it neatly avoids the real problems like the slew of reworded papers on known junk science, or the ideologically targeted wolf-in-science-clothing research that clogs "the pipeline."
It doesn't change my opinion that the pipeline appears to need a hard reset.