While spending as a pct of gdp might be going down, that’s not relevant to the direction of the returns on spending using absolute terms. It’s important to be careful throwing money at a problem that wasn’t caused by a lack of money, which is the case here.
-
-
I have yet to hear "lack of money isn't the problem." Maybe I missed that part. One successful funding structure doesn't mean the whole rest of it is broken? I mean, correlation effects, only fits some types of research, etc. The system can be better AND is underfunded.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
I’m generally supportive of more funding for science in principle but I *would* say that lack of money is not the primary problem today and that the marginal returns to additional funding would be (have been!) slight.
1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes -
What would you say is the #1 action our society should take? (Or does that require more study before we know?)
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Break up NIH and NSF into 10+ bodies with fully independent approaches. Every 5-10 years, reassess their budgets. Hegemonic monoculture today very pernicious.
12 replies 3 retweets 53 likes -
Like. Though we already have DOE, DOD, and other sources of funding so that experiment is already partially afoot? I like idea of a wide diversity of sources. Some light, fast, and private (yours!). Some gargantuan. Everything in between.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
DOE/DOD not that relevant for most scientists. And DOE budget dwarfed by NIH. Certainly better than nothing, yes. I think gargantuan funding institutions are bad because they force ecosystem to adapt to their preferences. (Not doing so is an irrational career strategy.)
1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes -
Relevance to most scientists I think less important than the scientific value of the efforts? (And hard to compare full-time government scientists at National Labs to university profs?) No gargantuan funding means no space program, no LHC, etc.? Hard to see how we avoid a mix.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
LHC some of the lowest-ROI science ever done! I’m not *against* funding it but it sure isn’t an example of a healthy funding ecosystem IMO.
4 replies 0 retweets 9 likes -
And do you agree that gargantuan efforts are sometimes necessary? LHC may be a bad example but of course even big bets are still bets and there seem to be many other good ones. I am for more heterogeneity and more $.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
Maybe? On the one hand, overwhelming majority of important discoveries haven’t come from gargantuan efforts. On the other hand, I would be fully supportive of some of our sharded funding bodies experimenting with this approach. I’m skeptical it’ll work but experimentation good!
-
-
This sort of "meta" org design experimentation is fascinating but seems so hard to pull of in practice
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Might be enough to shard the grants themselves, placing smaller grants in the direct control of the grad students/early-career researchers actually doing the work, letting them be free agents instead of being at the mercy of disengaged PIs and bloated institutions.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
End of conversation
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.