Is Money Corrupting Research?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'd say the answer is likely 'yes' - even for those who are trying to be conscious about it, there's a desire for things to work, to make people...well...happy. No one is going to be really excited to know their drug is shit. I've heard private industry researchers talk about this, even in companies that make an effort to shield research from finances - you don't want to let the team down.
On the other hand, you know what else corrupts research? Wondering where the funding for your soft money lab is going to come from. How you're going to pay your grad students, technicians, etc.
Research costs money, and the government has been providing less and less of it. The gap has to be made up somewhere.
Today's 'big science' grant funding model is so far removed from the average citizen or constituent, that by the time they see or feel the impact, it's hardly recognizable anymore. Because it's behind paywalls, or is too technical, or locked in IP, or anti-collaboration.
What we need to solve this problem is a direct connection with research and science. If you were motivated to go out and seek an answer for yourself, then perhaps you'd be less likely to lean on witnesses, testimony, or experts that you don't understand. The reality is that before the internet, people never really had that ability to go out and seek the truth for themselves. And I mean 'Truth' with a capital T, within significance, reproducible, and transparent.
At least that's best thing short of everyone becoming a scientist, or doing science independently.
Fundamental research often has no direct impact on the public. If it does, it's often 10 or 20 years down the line. Fundamentally research is, by it's nature, removed from the impact it has. Nobody knows what the final results will be.
This isn't conducive to crowdfunding.
http://experiment.com/snails http://experiment.com/dicty http://experiment.com/vanek
I'll be honest, I looked at crowdfunding when I was working on my dissertation. It was more work than an industry grant (especially when you include wooing the public) for a fraction of the money.
I like the idea of experiment.com, but right now...it's just not there. I want it to be, but it's just not. None of the projects you link even approach "Pay a grad student for a year", let alone supporting an assistant professor and their lab.
I'd also like to note that you're taking "close to the average citizen or constituent" as an inherently good thing, and I'm not necessarily convinced that's true, or at least so true it doesn't need examination. What's worth research is not necessary what captures the public imagination. Heck, its not even what captures the imagination of other scientists - I have no idea what's worth funding and studying in high energy physics or theoretical CS, and I very much doubt they know the same for my field.
Still, big science does not equal good science. In most cases, the opposite is true. I find it's such a huge stereotype, even within research, that scientists forget about the creative, entrepreneurial, or hustling spirit of doing science that they default to pointing to have's and have-not's. "He has a big grant, so I how can I compete", and that zero-sum attitude is so counter productive.
> an inherently good thing
Yes, I vehemently believe it's a good thing. If we ever approach the levels of science literacy needed to create the adverse effects you're hinting at, then that would be fantastic. And, not knowing what's worth funding isn't a citizen's fault, that's on the scientist. If scientists were more vocal about their work, new opportunities, and big challenges, then of course the public would be able to identify what's worth funding. This is because communicating science is inherently a good thing, and when done well, it can motivate people to learn new things or act differently. Look at what pointing a bomb at the direction of the moon did in the 60s.
With respect to the problem in the article, these regulators and policy-makers need a big rocket to point at a single direction. When people are disconnected with what's out there, then there's no context for when science gets taken for a ride with a different agenda.
Again, using the numbers on your site:
5,615 projects created and 364 funded is a 6.5% success rate. If I'm going to be pouring energy in to single digit success rates, they need to hit pretty hard - and while you do have some successes, right now their long-tail oddities. If experiment.com takes off and you regularly get R01-sized projects, that's awesome. But it's just not there yet.
And while "big science" does not equal good science, there are some things that just have to be paid for. I'm not talking about massive grants. And I've got experience doing the whole scrappy underdog thing. It's not a zero-sum attitude - it's that the effort for crowdfunding at the moment isn't necessarily worth what comes out of it. I think your problem is that you're conceptualizing your critics as proponents of "Big Science". I funded by dissertation with grants that aren't even approaching big science-type grants, but they brought in way more money than most of the projects on experiments.com, and required, combined, four pages worth of proposals.
> Yes, I vehemently believe it's a good thing. If we ever approach the levels of science literacy needed to create the adverse effects you're hinting at, then that would be fantastic. And, not knowing what's worth funding isn't a citizen's fault, that's on the scientist. If scientists were more vocal about their work, new opportunities, and big challenges, then of course the public would be able to identify what's worth funding.
Would they? [Citation Needed]. I'm about as science literate as the average citizen could possibly be expected to be, and as I said, I've got no idea what's worth funding in fields well past my own.
As I've said, I really like the idea of experiments.com. I've considered it in the past. I'll keep an eye on it in the future. But right now, suggesting it as an alternative to traditional funding streams, or even industry funding is, at this point, just not realistic.
By the way the number you want is 860 projects launched. The 5,615 figure is people who've started working on a project but haven't launched. So closer to ~42% success rate.
I can't give you a specific figure, but off the cuff? I'd like to see decent numbers of projects regularly getting funded at the ~ 50K level. That would have a couple benefits:
- We're now talking about a year's funding for a postdoc/grad student/significant % effort for a prof. This is I think a fundamental hurdle. We can't pretend that crowdsourcing is a viable funding stream if someone else has to keep the payroll going.
- 50K is also about the level, at least in my field, where we can talk about long-term investment purchases. Equipment, computers, larger datasets...the kinds of things that are hard to put on a single project.
- That's also about the point where spending time on crowdfunding campaigns likely won't irk chairs, tenure committees, etc. A couple years back I asked the folks in the fiscal office at my department about how a ~3-5K crowdsourcing project would work, and I got serious side eye.
- It's also about where modest but decent pilot grants come in in my field generally.
The extreme is a Jack Horner type who would eschew academia (but oh, the creative control he has!), but the thing I like about the size that we are right now is that we're flying under the radar of the tier-1 schools, and we're just funding and seeing lots of cool stuff. I'll happily duel university administrators in the future, but for now we get to focus on small pockets of really impactful science.
Many private companies do this, and as long as it's something that's stated clearly and publicly, grants offices often go along.
But it's not an adequate alternative to more traditional forms of scientific funding, for a lot of reasons.
First, the amounts are just too small. Even a very successful crowd funder would have an incredibly difficult time paying for a single full time employee, even at grad student rates and even before administrative overhead / tuition. Which is essentially $10-$15/hr.
Second, if you look at sites like experiment.com, it's rare for a project to be funded without a very clear picture for what questions are being asked, how they are being asked, and exactly how they will be answered. And none of the projects I found asked to recoup that cost. This is particularly problematic for fundamental research, where scope and intent are not well-defined almost by definition.
(Being a cynic, I'd be unsurprised if a lot of the people doing the crowd funding thing in small dollar amounts are mostly just in it for the sex appeal it will have on their next grant report, rather than e.g. actually needing the money. There are often way easier ways to scrounge up a few thousand bucks at a major research university. Heck, were I did grad school, you could get grants in the small thousands just for being a grad student with a pulse, and doubling that money was about as easy.)
Actually, it's the other way around. Granting agency budgets are so constrained that funders are looking for heuristics to de-risk their funding decisions.
You do realize that the average CS professor in the US spends many thousands of dollars per year, just on conference travel, just for themselves, right? $5k or even $10k for a side project really isn't substantive.
+ which in the sciences is usually in the mid five to low six figure range, before the cost of lab materials, travel, etc.
In my experience speaking with program officers and grant reviewers, particularly NSF, the public or 'broader impact' section of a grant application is starting to grow in importance, because like I said above, it's become a way for grantees to stand apart from the growing number of applicants. So having more to put in that section certainly helps, and I do know that it's come up with a few tenure committees (successfully). It just depends on who, where you are, what field, etc.
CSE is always a bit of an outlier, given the lower costs but still. I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do.
If you're saying what I think you are, then that's exactly what I meant by the sex appeal comment. Regardless of how it's talked about, people aren't treating it as an alternative; rather, it's a particularly sexy supplement (because it's new and because it addresses dissimination / public awareness / education broader impact criteria that their more traditional sources of funding care about). So even though they could have picked up 2k in travel funding from a random pool of university cash or just funded everything out of an existing grant, they do the crowd funding thing instead for the sex appeal factor. But it's also possible that's not the case, they really need the money, and I've just spent too much time around the wrong types of academics.
> I realize your hostility is towards the notion of someone being entirely alternatively funded, which we've never claimed to do.
I don't mean to sound hostile. Maybe incredulous. Your earlier posts certainly sounded like you were proposing an alternative :-)
Anyhow, good luck.
Sadly, you'll be hard-pressed to do direct public funding in anything that is not publicly-attractive. You'll get a gazillion bazillion dollars for research on canabinoids, and barely a dime on some boring ray-bending materials research problem that will eventually turn out to be easy to integrate on an organic substrate, opening the way for silicon-on-organic optoelectronic devices.
The "average citizen or constituent" has a level of scientific education that would prove at least as, if not more toxic than commercial interests. The current (absolutely terrible!) grant funding model is indeed too technical for the "average citizen or constituent"; a frickin' k-12 textbook is too technical for the average citizen, of course high-level research is too technical! That's why it's high-level!
> If you were motivated to go out and seek an answer for yourself, then perhaps you'd be less likely to lean on witnesses, testimony, or experts that you don't understand.
That's how we ended up with the anti-vaccines craze. People are motivated to go out and seek an answer for themselves, but they're also lazy and seek comforting answers.
Like, 75% of the money goes to the funded project, 5% to the crowdfunding company and 20% is given to some less popular research.
Problem is, how to distribute those 20%.
Also, these platforms would be less attractive to the original researchers, because they lose 20%.
I think this problem can be solved exactly as it is solved in academia. Since technical things are indeed too technical, even many researches do not understand the precise value of a particular research. And this is why a commissions are created and peer-review is used. So the money from ordinary people should go to this commissions instead.
Upd: of course such a commission should be able to explain/promote the corresponding research to the public. This will be their work, too.
Take a look at this, http://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/sens-mitochondrial-repair-p...
A crowdfunded mitochondrial repair project, fully funded ($34K) with 14 days to go.
But in all seriousness, there are different types of research, no? Some research leads to new technology and some is verification, repeatability and just plain knowledge discovery.
There might be some way of rigging up the system so that people who fund potentially patent creating research could get a cut of the royalties.
And the reproducibility area would be great for a large number of people especially if such things are kept track of ("This particular study has only been done once"). If we can get people to trust repeated studies more than not repeated that site will help better clarify emergent research trends/topics.
To partially address this, those of us in the US should support the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research bill[0, 1]. FASTR would essentially mandate all journal articles resulting from federally funded research to be published in an open repository online after a short embargo period, as in NIH PubMed Central.
To effect real change, we'll need to see senior researchers lead the way in publishing in open journals, and there just isn't buy-in among that crowd in some fields outside of math, physics, and CS.
In addition, I think researchers need to do a better job personally engaging the public regarding their research. Fully addressing the gap between researchers and the general public may well require an educational component.
0: http://www.sparc.arl.org/advocacy/national/fastr/faq 1: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/779
I'd say there isn't a best way. The money will "corrupt"; I scare quote it because when it's just an unfixable constant you're sort of stacking the cognitive deck calling it "corruption", which usually implies a conscious choice. Therefore, the best solution is to spread your bets; government funding, corporate funding, crowd funding, startups, that thing YC is about to do, any and every other funding model you can get your hands on.
You can stop arguing about "which" is corrupted, because the answer is "all of them". But hopefully in the crossfire of all the different "corruptions" the truth will emerge. And if it still doesn't get out, well, we took our best shot.
First off, it would greatly misallocate research funding. The people who'd get the most funding interest would be those who can pitch their research to the public the best, to the expense of those who'd struggle to communicate their research. You'd see AI get good funding while things like compiler or parallelization research would be rather poor, for example--even though the latter would conceivably have more immediate impact on peoples' lives.
The other problem is that there is a loud crowd of people who aren't interested in objective research, but want researchers to prove their facts. The anti-vaxxers or anti-GMO people would fund study after study until they found one that "proved" their claims. They already do this today, but trying to move to a purely crowdfunded research model would reduce the research that provides counterexamples to avoid the implied p-hacking.
Research today has many problems. That most journals are pay-to-access, in my opinion, is actually among the least important. Let's face it: very few people who aren't researchers are going to care to actually try reading 10+ pages of dense scientific text as opposed to a journalist's lay summary; there's also very few disciplines were amateurs without access to research infrastructure are capable of doing publishable research (admittedly, CS and math are disciplines where an amateur can do it just about anywhere, and I suspect most commenters here are most interested in these disciplines as opposed to agronomy or microbiology).
Bigger problems are underreporting of negative results (e.g., we found arsenic-based life! Actually, now it looks like those results were wrong...), the desiccation of research funding, the lack of interest in "fundamental" research, reputational bias in grant funding and even research paper acceptance (it's generally possible to guess which group is publishing a paper, even if it's a blinded submission), etc. None of these are helped by crowdfunding, and, generally, they'd actually make them even worse.
What do you mean by 'corrupts' here? It's obvious not having funding will make research difficult (or impossible), is that all you mean by 'corrupts'?
Or do you think that kind of funding insecurity effects outcomes, other than in the ways suggested by the OP in the first place?
And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if funding insecurity effects outcomes. Keeping your research on a clearly fundable path, not rocking the boat, etc.
If you want to tackle the shame that is using science as a populist tool for denialism, that you are allowed to conjure up an expert witness for any contrarian point of view or agenda, then you must tackle this problem head on. Front and center of this is the congressional ban on gun research.
Probably the first step would be to change the way we present data and facts to policy-makers in a more sophisticated way, e.g. shorter review periods, or being able to democratically control those who sit on these committees. Or better, have more knowledgeable people there in the first place. Something something, series of tubes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes).
It's research done to create new knowledge but without any specific application in mind.
It's the foundation of future applied technologies just like quantum mechanics was for the laser.
When the government stop putting money into "fundamental research" it hurts everyones ability to maybe come up with revolutionary solutions for problems in the future.
Integral Research used to give their researchers a decade to find a way to make their research applicable I remember in the beginning of the zeroes it was down to a 3 years or something like that.
The question we need to ask ourselves is not whether it's corrupting research but weather it's corrupting our future.
On the flipside, absolutely nobody will believe research coming out from Shell that says that climate change concerns are overblown, or by Philip Morris that dismisses the health harms of smoking. This is why when energy companies want to contest research funding, they attempt to buy out credible scientists and ask them to speak in their own name: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpage...
This is definitely a fact.. look how long it took for the lipid theory to be seriously challenged... years of research in support of what the government would fund. The food pyrimid is probably the best example of the results of this.
As long as business and politics are so intertwined, putting government in charge isn't a viable solution in and of itself. It would be nice to see some efforts put towards pure/directed research... Unfortunately that's a hard sell to a lot of people who simply don't see the value.
Still pretty controversial though now that they are pulling funding:
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-...
Employ people who will research the correct topics in the correct way to provide the largest amounts of funding to... continue the cycle.
http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/how-lobbying-work...
However government money for research also has issues (I can only talk about how it works in Germany but it's similar in most of Europe). Namely I think the practice of research projects is somewhat questionable. You need to build a consortium of anywhere form 3-10ish partners and write a proposal and hope it gets accepted. This results in 2-4 year projects that are funded. Sounds decent enough at first glance but the devil is in the details. First of all it is not a blind process so I fully expect some institutions/individuals to get more or less autoaccepted due to name recognition alone. I can't say for sure but there's humans involved so anything else would surprise me. That unfortunately adds a political dimension. As a young academic you (and your professor) rely on a stream of funded projects to keep you employed (there's also non project-money jobs but these get rarer and rarer and are usually limited to 50% employment time) which means that your freedom of research is fairly limited (you can't really publish a paper that isn't related to the project and go to a conference for example) and more importantly there's a constant need to reacquire new funding. If I were to guess people spend anywhere form 20-40% of their time trying to get new projects and not working on the actual projects they have already secured. And of course this need for project money gives governments a good way of influencing what research is being conducted (which is somewhat opposed to the principle of freedom in research) as only things they offer will get funded.
Lastly, it is surprisingly hard to do research as an individual with no institutional backing if one doesn't happen to have a good chunk of money set aside. Access to pay walled stuff (can be circumvented) and the need to travel to conferences (at least in CS) and depending on your field the need for costly equipment and access to test subjects. There's some developments in this regard (citizen research) and I hope it'll get easier because I think there's quite a few capable people who'd enjoy spending their free time on research that interests them and publish it when done.
presumably testimony that unabashedly is hearing about continued funding (e.g. progress reports) should be OK.
In TFA -- yes, to the point that it wasn't fully disclosed.
For publicly funded research -- probably not.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oli...
Strangely enough, on the same general topic. Perhaps it's taboo to point out the obvious when the topic is the corrupting influence of money.
If the question is 'Is Money Corrupting <thing>?', then the answer is almost always yes.
There is a whole another category - paid research/engineering projects. Scientists doing the work expect to publish something. Yet the meat of the research has to remain hidden for the company investing to hold market advantage. Result? Technical babble in papers. And it is quite often hard as hell to find which pieces of the paper are not honest.
Government funding application forms usually include a field labeled something like "Expected result/outcome". So you cannot just get funding without certainty of success in one form or another. Which basically results in funding directed to projects with some preliminary results. And those preliminary results are funded from another projects and so the cycle goes. This is very well illustrated in PhD Comics [1].
One of the core reasons behind all of this mess are funding gatekeepers: private companies know what they want and will pay for that particular output. Public funding is usually behind some Government Agency where the same set of people review funding applications and... "known to be well behaving" (delivering promised results) researchers are much more likely to get funded, see [1]. Either way, it is next to impossible to do what in my book is actual research - come up with a new idea and get funding to test whether it has any grounds at all.
[1]: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd050611s.gif
Edit: fixed link
Ton of money - lol nope. "To prove" rather than "to investigate" shows a PR-tainted lack of understanding the method. And if you publish rubbish, it's your reputation that's shot down when the papers showing how bad it is come round.
Generational wealth and poverty are real. By your measure, the current Kardashian generation would be considered among the best and brightest in America.
Wealth is only a goal for some people, and I'd argue that the best and brightest are more likely to perceive that maybe a rat race to the top isn't the best use of their limited time on earth.
Oh, right, because you believe in a Harrison Bergeron-esque future in which everyone with talent is handicapped til they are at the level of the lowest retard. I wish you all deserved success with that.
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Second, that argument sounds like Laissez-Faire economics, where those who succeed are enabled to succeed more. In practice, it leads to imbalances and winner-take-all problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire#Critiques
On the other hand, excessive regulation can suffocate innovation. So you need a balance. The debate comes when you try to figure out what the balance should be. In academia, that balance includes disclosure, peer-review, and openness. It's far from perfect, but we're working on it.
But this article is mostly about government and policy that is informed by research, and the serious imbalances, information asymmetries, and lack of voice of non-business interests.
2. . . . "vote[s] themselves a full stomach" by preventing regulation requiring them to act in the best interests of the people who they are giving financial advice to.
3. This comment then notes that the US is "explicitly designed" so that those with more money have more power. I suppose this historical note is meant to convince the reader that this is a good thing, but that seems pretty bizarre.