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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

I've had a pretty successful research career, but it's very rare I've had a project that actually delivered what I said it would on the funding proposal. Something more exciting has always come along while we were working on the original topic, and I've always gone with it. We've ended up significantly delivering better research than the original project would have.

And in 30 years, no project officer from a funding agency has ever complained that we'd delivered really good results but they weren't the results we'd promised. They're generally happy something good came out of the funding, because frankly, most funded projects don't produce much of value. Very occasionally (mostly on EU projects) we've had to write up the results in a project report with the original section titles that no longer match the new content to tick some boxes and keep the funder beancounters happy.

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The amount of shifty money practices I've seen so far is astonishing, all in the pursuit of more science per proposal. Ideally you use some of the funding from the previous project to do some exploratory research somewhere very different and then write up a proposal around it, but since you already did some of the work there'll be money for more research and instruments and things and maybe fun ideas that students have.. creative accounting all around. I'd be appalled if it wasn't in the name of science.

I think many people do that - it's very hard to write up a compelling proposal without having spent some time working on the idea to see if it's viable, but there's often no funded way to do preliminary work on an idea. If you don't do something like what you describe, it's nearly impossible to branch into new areas, and that makes it nearly impossible to do good research. This is another problem with funding project proposals.

But what I was describing was slightly different - once the proposal is funded, many PIs feel compelled to deliver what they said they would, whereas in the two years since you wrote the proposal, the world has moved on, you've learned things, both from your early work on the project and from others, and more promising avenues are now possible. If you feel compelled by the funder to continue in the original direction, you'll very rarely deliver good research.

You shouldn't be appalled: grants that force you to work on a precise area with no flexibility are what's appalling. Research just doesn't work like that! The current grant proposal process is the creation of administrators and politicians, not scientists.

Many of the most critical research results came out of some random hallway conversation, as a response to some new result that didn't exist when the research plan was formulated, or because someone had a brain fart. If at each point someone had put up their hand and said "sorry, scientist, that's not on your current grant roadmap" we'd probably still be dying of preventable diseases and lighting our homes with gas fixtures.

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