Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Of course university hiring not flawless but for me the biggest selling point of UBI etc is the saved aggregate grant writing hours, and removal of a biased and noisy funding allocation process.

Years ago I watched a talk given by someone who was on a decades long no strings funding arrangement. Honestly it was pretty bad, no focus, minimal theory, just a long list of findings. My worry is that 0 grant pressure leads to rambling and ineffective research agendas

Doesn’t have to be zero pressure, could still have competitive schemes in addition to a UBI. Also there are other drivers of competitiveness: jobs, prestige, fame, etc I would hesitate to generalise from n=1!

Of course but this also resonates with my own experience too and I've heard others say the same, i.e That grants help to focus thoughts.

I also get benefits from writing grants but not in proportion to the amount of time I put in. The polishing time and low success rates are too costly I mean come on, if it’s just a case of forcing people to write stuff down we could mandate some national essay writing sessions.

So let's get to the punchline. What are some of the parameters of the UBI scheme you're envisioning? It's easy to favor some theoretical concept over the present bespoke thing we have so long as you don't have to make the actual hard decisions and fill it out with some details.

I actually don't like this idea because I think network effects would lead to power law distributions and the same problems with some mega rich labs as we have now.