Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaclaz | Hacker News Reader

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As a side note, there is another effect that we have to consider.

If these brilliant scientists/professors are not (adequately) financed for their research, inevitably a large part of their time will be dedicated in looking for funds, detracting it from the time dedicated to the research itself.

So, not only some research is not possible (or gives scarce results) because of the lack of funds, but the time spent in looking for other funds will reduce the research results in a perverse spiral.

In a perfect world research institutions should be able to make their lead researchers "worry free" (about the funding and the other bureaucracy matters), as this condition is the one where creativity and productivity is at the top level.

Since funds are obviously limited, maybe the issue is about starting too many researches (underfunding each of them) as opposed to choose a limited number of research projects and fully fund them.

But if you use this approach, the issue becomes the war for being selected, the possible corruption (or simply bad judgement) of the selecting commission, etc.

I guess noone has a proper solution to the issue.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been trying a neat approach at their Janelia research center: the researchers they accept are completely funded by them on the condition that they stop getting other grants. The idea is that they should spend all of their time on research, and since HHMI has a somewhat ludicrous amount of money if they need something they make the case internally rather than starting the grant process.

The role of professors in experimental sciences has simply changed. The most successful ones manage multi-million dollar annual budgets, have connections with politicians and local billionaires. They almost never do research themselves, their success is measured by their management of big projects. I know of one professor that has ~100000 citations, oversaw the construction of two institutes during his tenure and has been involved in big european projects for over 30 years now.

It is a wholly different story in theoretical fields like theoretical physics or mathematics of course, where you basically need no money.

If you increase the funding then the supply of scientists will simply grow until funding as again as competitive as it is today. The first order problem is that the funding ends up with mediocre scientists rather than brilliant scientists.

It’s more complex than that. For example, consider the subject’s complaint that “This old guy is out of touch” as a problem. It has been equally argued, with data, that giving established, older investigators a steady funding stream simply by weight of seniority is strangling promising early career labs.

This argument seems like it needs some evidence behind it.

Where's the infinite supply of scientists coming from?

It’s not infinite, but the boom of funding during the Clinton-era fostered a large increase in faculty positions, especially soft money positions.

From the same place that the infinite supply of budget is coming from.

In the US, in the biomedical sciences, it is pretty easy to be paid to get a PhD, but far more difficult to become faculty, and even more difficult get a grant as faculty. This imbalance has created the funding problem we have today.

An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s.

Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.

>Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.

It is also possibly part of the reasons why, sure, still there should be a "fair" method to choose the "best" among the "many".

What I fear is happening now is that instead - given the current situation - the scarce funds available go not to the "best" scientists, but rather to the ones that are better at relations/PR/self-promotion, so not only you need to be able at whatever your field is, but you have to be very good at selling yourself (which is something the "typical" genius may not be so good at) and - at least I have this impression - the lack of security/funding makes scientists more selfish and averse to collaborations.

I cannot believe that in current times it would be possible, to make an example, that - should a new Srinivasa Ramanujan come out - there would be a Godfrey Hardy capable of recognising him and sponsoring/supporting him.

To somewhat counter-balance this, in a recent grant panel I was on, several established, senior investigators were given a “pass” on methodological issues in their grants with “I’m sure X’s Lab knows what they’re doing...” while younger investigators got eviscerated.

“X is a genius” is a form of PR.

>To somewhat counter-balance this ...

I am missing the counter-balance effect, it seems to me we are saying the same thing, the "senior investigators" were passed not because they were geniuses (or not only because of this) but rather because they managed to get the reputation of genius[1], while "younger investigator" got eviscerated not because they were not (possibly) geniuses, but rather because they had not such a reputation preceding them.

[1] BTW not necessarily undeserved

I wasn't satisfied with "counter-balance" as a word when I wrote that, honestly.

It was mostly more the idea that what counts as "PR" for a senior academic isn't necessarily intuitive.

I guess it is easy to trace casuality to increasingly imbalanced wealth distribution. People who don't picture themselves as the rare exception who somehow makes the jump over to the winning side (as seems to be the default on hn) will aim for the best salaries and the traditional answer to that is education. Everybody is pressing hard into the highest qualification brackets because it is everything that is left of 20th century middle class. The market does what it does when supply increases but that won't make those on the way into being part of the oversupply reconsider, as no qualification is not an option.

In all this struggle, science is the unnoticed roadkill. Inconsequential publications have always been a part of modern scientific process, they are the soil on which occasional advances of the art grow. But when the fraction of involuntary pretend-acts who will never succeed at getting beyond writing only for the sake of having published gets too big, the real deal will suffer. What could have been the soil for something to grow on turns into a landslide that buries the seedlings.

Given the current resources and constraints of the economic system, it might be accurate to state it as an "oversupply" of scientist.

Given the sad state of actual science however, I think it's more useful to characterize it as an undersupply of resources and/or political and societal will to value science correctly.

We need large scale studies validating and invalidating each other with publicly available data so they can be repeated, performed with different population groups, and we need negative results to be seen to be just as important as positive results are. And hopefully a better understanding from everyone in the world of what the process of science is and should be.

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