And you probably end up with club full of like-minded cronies who are all pursuing the same approach to the same general topic. They don't have the necessary friction of people telling them they're doing everything wrong and their emperor is a naked baby.
-
-
And worse you may well end up with a like-minded club pursuing a smoke-and-mirrors field that couldn't make it in academia at all and that exists only because your institution is so well-funded it can spew out hundreds of cut-and-paste nonsense papers every year.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
(Presumably you can guess some of the ones I have in mind!) This is especially a risk if the funder got sold on the bogus field by smoke-and-mirrors in the first place, and then is ego-invested in keeping it going in the face of doubters.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
So you have a principal-agent problem. You need institutional management that is somehow accountable to you to spend your money well. However, you know you don't have the expertise to assess that, at least not on a timescale less than 5-10 years.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
The management has two functions: straight-up operations (make sure your building's chalkboards are supplied with chalk and the employee health plan is sound), and research management per se, which includes line management of scientists (if you do that) and hiring or grant-making
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
This is the best paper I've read on research management. Come to think of it, it's about the only paper I've read on that, but it seems very good: http://worrydream.com/refs/Kennedy%20-%20Administration%20of%20Research%20in%20a%20Research%20Corporation.html …pic.twitter.com/Hq3uCK4NRB
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
This is an inherently meta-rational function, meaning that it's about understanding and acting upon rational (scientific) work from above and outside it.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Meta-rational also meaning that it inherently can't be done rationally. For example, it cannot be done by metrics of any sort (although it might take metrics, probably peculiar and continually adjusted ones, into account). It's inherently a matter of judgement, not justification.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
This means that decisions about what research to fund must NOT be accountable to anyone other than, in the long run, the funder(s), and must NOT be justified in any specific way. That would be merely-rational and leads to the bureaucracy-heavy mediocrity we have now.
1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes -
The danger here is that the decisions are based on cronyism, self-interest, or (more likely) the hobbyhorsical crackpot whims of some charismatic charlatan. (Not pointing to any specific examples here :)
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
Like all principal-agents problems this is inherently not solvable by any specific mechanism (it is also meta-rational). However, the good news is SV VCs make meta-rational decisions, and character decisions, all day everyday, and may be pretty good at them.
-
-
One random thought before apologizing for spamming your inboxes. A rule that decision makers can only choose projects/people in fields they are NOT expert in might help a lot. I believe this for several reasons you can probably easily guess.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
I agree with some variation of this. But all outsiders are not created equal. I've noticed that people who come from fields where experimentation is possible are very dismissive of other approaches (i.e. more than is warranted).
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like - 2 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.