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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

The current (I mean, pre-AI) grant writing process is already not science, and it's mostly a huge waste of time. I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where it's replaced with something worse. In fact, just giving everyone a base funding and then opting to more by CV without evaluating any project at all would be immensely better. And I say this as a scientist that has been quite successful with grant requests, and also evaluates plenty, so it's not at all the case that I have been disadvantaged by the current system.

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This. Instead of using your expertise doing science, we are spending huge amounts of time begging for money and writing grants that tries to hide the real complexities from reviewers who are mostly not experts in the precise area and are not equipped to understand a plainly truthful presentatio....and so we write grants that don't exactly lie, but surely do ommit complexities that might lead non-expert reviewers down a false path, and trust that the one or two people on the review who know enough to recognize the omission will also and understand the reason for the omission (not a true weakness scientifically, just in terms of grantsmanship).

See how much of a waste of time it is?

Exactly. That, plus we have to pretend that we have a clear planning for several years and make a Gantt chart of what we will be researching each year. Which I guess in some areas with very structured processes or long studies (medicine with its clinical studies where you follow patients for years, I guess) may make sense, but in mine (CS) is impossible because each research step is rather short and subsequent steps depend on the result of previous steps. So we write pipe dreams about discovering an algorithm using technique X to solve problem A on year 1, then finding a faster version on year 2, extending it to a larger coverage on year 3, etc.; when in reality technique X fails (which is legitimate, if it were obvious that it would succeed it wouldn't be cutting-edge research) and you end up using technique Y, and maybe solving problem A' instead. Which of course also has to be justified in reports about how everyting went different from planned but results are still awesome, again taking a huge amount of time.

LLMs are a godsend for writing these formulaic things and since the starting point is a situation with useless processes where everyone wastes inordinate amounts of time, I can't imagine them being harmful overall for the grant process. The bar is just very low.

Requiring a formal research plan can still serve as a filter for researchers who are not serious or disciplined, even if they don't stick to it exactly.

I personally don't agree. Anyone can make a Gantt chart, it's basically busywork. If it's required, every applicant will include it, serious or not. In fact is the kind of thing you could even outsource to a consultant (if you had access to one) and now, of course, to an LLM. Where seriousness matters is in actual execution. Which takes me back to what I previously said: we would probably be better off evaluating just the CV (which has signal about past execution) than evaluating project proposals.

This is perhaps a good argument for AI-enhanced reviews.

in my experience since 1982, reviewers will pick you to death. Peers know the real complexity. Sure, you will occasionally get reviewers who completely miss the point, but it is usually more common that your negative reviewers know way more than you do or they have a different ax to grind then the one you want to grind.

I'm a fan of thinking about using some kind of block grant approach.

Seriously, in the EU only something like 10% of the money (citation needed) actually makes it to the researchers. A lottery or even a giant pinata would be more efficient. And that's not even accounting the wasted researcher hours.

That's incredibly low - surely anyone involved at the higher end of that pipeline would come down hard on such trash statistics.

Is this actually citable?

Why do you say that writing grant applications is a waste of time? For me it is a time to dive deeply into the state-of-the-art and figure out better ways to address important questions. I do not see writing grants as a trivial core, but as a chance to reformulate my science for the better.

For me it's 20% the deep dive you mention (which I would do anyway if I didn't have to write grants) and 80% figuring out how to pitch it, optimizing the text, cutting/expanding sections, and writing useless formulaic sections (Gantt chart, data management plan, gender dimension section, and so on). So mostly a waste of time, but I guess YMMV.

Fortunately the interesting part is where LLMs don't help (at least for now) and the pointless parts are where they help immensely.

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