Hacker News Reader

Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

It's all well and good to suggest that each program receiving funding gets a thorough review. Of course, that review needs to be by experts, to ensure it gets a fair shake. Who are the experts in the field? The odds that you can be an expert in the field (by publication count, let's say) without having already been funded by the NIH is pretty slim. So now your experts are also insiders.

That's going to be a big problem as very few insiders are going to be willing to rock the boat. Even if it's necessary.

Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem. It would be wonderful if there was some solution, even if it was hard.

View on HN

> Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem.

You're the one who has identified this as a problem, shouldn't you be the one to suggest an alternative?

The alternative being implemented is that insiders could not police themselves, so outsiders are doing it for them with far less precision.

It’s like a hoarders show where everyone is shocked (SHOCKED!) that things had gotten as bad as it is, the hoarder has lost the capability to determine what is valuable or necessary, so a third party with no attachment or sentiment comes in to clean house and throws out the good with the bad.

Couldn't at least part of the reviewing be done by foreign experts?

Having said that, this smells witch-hunty to me. The US can boast decades of excellence in medical and biological sciences, which in turn generates a massive windfall. Completely upending the architecture behind this dominance on the suspicion that a few hundred million bucks are less-than-optimally spent is a hell of a gambit, and even ignores all the higher-order effects that even that "spare change" bring about.

Out of curiosity, how much direct experience do you have with the NIH? Or are you just assuming that what you say is true?

I contributed heavily to a paper once. One of my reviewers lit it on fire with ample, good criticism.

There may be problems with the system (show me one without), but it does work.

You're insane. Jaw dropping ignorance justifying world ending cruelty.

You understand that they're delaying the flu vaccine in a way that will kill 10,000 elderly people next year?

You've made at least 2-3 personal attacks against me while seemingly not even trying to address the problem that I highlighted. If that's your goal, OK. It definitely goes against the spirit of the rules here if not the letter.

Delaying the flu vaccine? Ok that's bad, sure.

It's also a real goalpost move and also doesn't address the technical problem "insiders going to inside" I raised in answer to the parent's paraphrased "I can't understand this, why is this necessary?"

I don't know that doing things this way is strictly necessary. But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.

It _seems_ like the question was

Q> Can you explain why the sledge hammer approach, removing funding for things wholesale and causing large amounts of destruction (both economic and health) is reasonable?

And your answer was

A> It looks like there is a problem with the current system, and changing something would be beneficial.

And, while I agree that the sentiment ("changing something would be beneficial") is fair... as an answer it falls squarely into "We should do something, this is something, so we should do this", which is categorically ridiculous. The way to approach these types of issues, where changing things can (and does) have real, significant impact on lots of people, is to come up with a plan and discuss what the impacts/tradeoffs are. It is _not_ to just do the first thing that comes to mind and then ignore the people who's lives your destroying.

> But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.

ok but burning down a house with a family in it because of a hypothetical burglar usually isn't a good solution.

We spend a large portion of the federal budget on human death prevention. It sounds like hyperbole, but anyone dying from administrative changes is literally “world ending” for them.

If a plan to cut bureaucracy was somehow analyzed to find that we could save 5% of the US budget in exchange for 10,000 lives, reasonable people might consider otherwise. To take these changes against life-saving organizations without first analysis of consequences is pretty reckless.

It's simple, really. Make it so the experts have 0 leverage. Maybe have "the workers" make all the decisions! ??? Profit? :-) They tried this in Soviet Union...

I wouldn't call the nomenklatura mere "workers".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com