Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

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Assessment can never be done by non-experts. They do not understand the subject matter and cannot even judge which journals are good. It just makes no sense.

The problem with this assertion is: non-experts are paying for all of this.

Imagine you are an ordinary taxpayer. You are feeling the pinch yourself, you look around you and see infrastructure crumbling, every day the press says healthcare and this and that is underfunded. Now along comes some scientist, he or she wants a few billion for a new particle collider that will make no difference whatsoever to your life, and their only justification for it is "well other scientists say we should get all this money, and they're cleverer than you, shut up".

Can you see why funding something with no accountability might be considered problematic?

There's also the fact that an expert who can't explain something to a non-expert probably doesn't understand it very well themselves...

If non-experts are in charge of individual funding, then you're virtually guaranteed to get nonsensical decisions. It couldn't possibly work, and even if you got it to work, the results would be abysmal.

> Can you see why funding something with no accountability might be considered problematic?

Maybe you're confusing budget decisions with funding and hiring decisions. These are fundamentally different. Universities and research institutions, as well as national funding authorities, get budgets that are decided politically, i.e., by elected representatives. These can have broad categories and guidelines or preferred research areas (e.g. "excellence initiatives"). Budgets are usually allocated well in advance, for instance our national funding authority gets budget security for 4 year periods (if I'm not mistaken). How they spend it is dictated by political guidelines for the respective period and plenty of complicated national and international laws.

In contrast, I was talking about hiring decisions and decisions about individual funding. How can it not be obvious to you that these decisions need to be made by experts on the basis of CVs and scientific project proposals, not by politicians or other laymen?

Only experts can make this judgement in the short term. As time goes by, the reception of the work accumulates and it becomes increasingly possible for non-experts to judge.

It took over 20 years after the Standard Model reached broad acceptance (ie., the experts thought the theory was probably right) for the first supercollider powerful enough to observe the Higgs boson to be financed. This was enough time for policy makers to reach high confidence that the experts had not gone badly wrong and for there to be reasonably well-informed public opinion on the merits of the search.

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