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silence_kit posted:I don't know if lack of resources is really what stifles applied scientific research. There's already a lot of junk science and research that is out there (a tonne of academic publications are never cited and only serve as bullet points on a resume) and it could be argued that funding applied science research more heavily would only attract more low value "me-too" research. That argument shouldn't be to hard for people in this thread to accept--we are in the thread where people constantly bitch about how the over-investment in startup companies leads to me-too companies which don't add any value. It's a lack of resources magnified by the stupid way in which these resources are allocated. In most of the English-speaking world you do your undergrad (with student loans), do a PhD (with someone else's money), do a postdoc or two (with someone else's money), and then become some sort of prof (or a hobo because you have no job). When you're at the prof stage you suddenly notice you don't have someone else's money to spend anymore, and start writing grant applications. Everyone else at the prof stage also does this. Because everyone else at the prof stage is also doing this, you better apply to every loving funding agency and company that might possibly have money so you at least get something. So does everyone else. Everyone thus wastes their time writing many more grant applications than their research plans actually require. The funding agency people get buried under a mountain of funding applications, and even after tossing out the stupid proposals for idiots that mountain of funding applications is still too large. The funding agency people now need to whittle down the mountain further, and start applying criteria like "what they're trying to do sounds like it might work" and "that prof has a history of producing results" and "I am only one person and can't realistically understand every single field of science and I have finite time so I can't actually evaluate anyone's results", so everything in a field too different from the overworked grant agency guy's gets tossed, everything that's too ambitious gets tossed, and everything from people who haven't produced results according to overly simplistic metrics like H-index, number of paper and which journal they went into, etc. gets tossed. If at this point the pile of remaining applications is still too large, everything from people who haven't previously gotten big grants from you or another well-known funder gets tossed. If the pile is still too large, really silly criteria get applied. Right now, there are funding agencies rejecting grant applications for a punctuation mistake or for using a slightly wrong font size. As a result, everyone applies everywhere to do research closely related to that year's strategic statements of the relevant funding agencies that they can pretend will have ~impact~ (by being applied/easy to commercialise, looking cool so it goes into clickbait articles, whatever) but isn't actually too hard, and aims to publish any barely-interesting finding in as high-ranking a journal as possible, i.e. a bunch of low value me-too research. Because nobody knows which grants will get funded, everyone writes a PhD student or postdoc position into every grant application who will be expected to janitor their experiments and computer with next to no help, instead of employing permanent mid-level research staff + permanent assistants who have a loving clue how to fix the equipment when the new guy breaks it on their first day. Any leftover grant money will go into funding the actual interesting stuff the researcher would have liked to work on full-time in the first place, so everyone applies for way more money than they actually need for the experiments/travel/consumables described in the grant applications to make sure some can be spent on unrelated things. Since the base level funding for each lab tends to be minimal in most universities (I am currently studying at the richest uni in the UK and our lab gets £2000 per year without grants) researchers are unable to actually follow many interesting questions through and instead need to chase the whims of funding agencies and committees full of people in only vaguely related fields (unless you're in a giant field with thousands of people in it, like tumour suppressors or something). Needing to switch much of your research effort every three years to whathever the new grant says means in-depth research is really hard to finance, and it's often impossible to actually get an innovative and interesting project funded because the people deciding about where to allocate money have neither the inclination nor the qualifications necessary to evaluate it. In addition, funding incentives are such that PhD and postdoc numbers are still growing in many fields even though tenured faculty numbers are stagnating, so you get a lot of people who become really good in a particular field and then have to leave research to enter industry or become homeless or something, effectively wasting research money (except in fields where PhDs going into corporate actually makes more sense than MScs going into corporate, but then there should be extra industry money to teach these people instead of research grants). tl;dr: research funding is both hard to get (because every place you can get any is swamped by applications from every researcher in the country) and gets distributed according to dubious criteria and with dubious incentives to produce an arbitrarily-defined type of result. All this while being inefficient because despite tenure even profs don't have the job security to work on a hard but potentially worthwhile problem for as long as it takes, and because high turnover of supporting staff is basically unavoidable even when keeping on some staff long-term would be more efficient. IMO it would be better to provide a certain amount of base level funding so a lab can keep functioning between grants (even if it means less grants overall!), and improving the criteria by which research success is measured (this is really hard, and it may be necessary to raise the barriers to entry or rely more on peer assessment-style evaluation rather than "you need to publish 2.3 additional papers this year") suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 22:27
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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cheese posted:...I don't think hes got his own private flotilla of yachts quite yet.
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Mar 31, 2016 22:53
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WampaLord posted:The Scoutr app. an app that calls some guy to come and measure their power level for you. im disrupting the economy bitch
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Mar 31, 2016 23:19
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sbaldrick posted:They don't seem to understand that pretty much all major science historically is paid for by the government or semi-government entities (noblemen basically). Honestly I can't think of any major invention that basically isn't back by the government in some way in order to really exist. "Pretty much all" is too far by any reasonable definition. For example Bell labs inventing the transistor doesn't give the government credit for the cutting edge work Intel does to push their manufacturing process to the next level or the algorithm development that goes into google search or google cars. Certainly most R&D in the economy is privately funded. Here is a chart on medical. Government spending is significant but less than half. 
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Mar 31, 2016 23:37
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duz posted:Do you have a conscious? Apparently not, because I just came up with an idea that could be a horrifyingly efficient way to generate cash out of sheer guilt. I have no loving clue how to bring it to market, sadly, because I'm not that evil. Although I'm quickly refining it.
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Apr 1, 2016 00:35
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TACD posted:There's no ZipYacht boat-sharing service yet? I know how I'm going to make my first million! Worked for NetJets.
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Apr 1, 2016 01:28
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TACD posted:There's no ZipYacht boat-sharing service yet? I know how I'm going to make my first million! http://www.boatingmag.com/peer-to-peer-boat-rentals
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Apr 1, 2016 01:42
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Dirk the Average posted:What the gently caress do you need wifi for on a juicer? To make it tamper resistant so you aren't able to use 3rd party juice packets.
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Apr 1, 2016 02:23
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size1one posted:To make it tamper resistant so you aren't able to use 3rd party juice packets. If there's one thing WiFi just can't support, it's packet-switching.
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Apr 1, 2016 02:44
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silence_kit posted:I don't know if lack of resources is really what stifles applied scientific research. There's already a lot of junk science and research that is out there (a tonne of academic publications are never cited and only serve as bullet points on a resume) and it could be argued that funding applied science research more heavily would only attract more low value "me-too" research. That argument shouldn't be to hard for people in this thread to accept--we are in the thread where people constantly bitch about how the over-investment in startup companies leads to me-too companies which don't add any value. Not every piece of science has value, but some does. That means there's a return on investment for scientific research. It stands to reason that at some limiting point, the marginal return on this investment will start to decrease. What point is that? I think it's waay past the current level of investment. That is, I'd argue that we're in a phase right now where money invested in research will yield linear or even super-linear returns (because making a healthy research community increases collaborations and breakthroughs). The basis of this argument is that funding agencies cannot currently fund all grants that they believe are worth funding. In fact, they can't even fund all grant proposals that are indistinguishable from the very best grant proposals. That's right -- funding is so low that we are not just refusing to fund the second tier, we are randomly not funding a big chunk of the very top tier.
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Apr 1, 2016 03:46
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Europe at least had the excuse of not having recovered from WW1, France in particular among the big countries, since it had lost a ton of the men who would ordinarily be assisting in the production of babies. (On top of its already low fertility rate.) By the time Germany was gearing up for war, it had roughly twice the population of France with a greater proportion of men of fighting age. I mean, it was still the wrong decision in hindsight, but there was a clear reason why it was chosen. You can make a pretty similar argument for what we're seeing, though. In an era of less inequality than now, there's less scorekeeping-money chasing after returns. All the actual good ideas have their funding taken care of, leaving a lot of would-be high-scorers without a way to get that x5 multiplier target they were aiming for. That leads to desperate longshots like "Nobody likes to go out of their house for any reason, so we'll get you food with no human interaction" getting funded. Or $700 juicers. blowfish posted:It's a lack of resources magnified by the stupid way in which these resources are allocated. That's true on the VC side as well; I got a firsthand view of how dumb decisions are made. Biofuel startup firm that had a novel way of breaking up bacteria at a large scale using ultrasonic waves. Get a batch in a pool, hit it with the standing waveform and you start to see an oily sheen even before you put it into the centrifuge. Now, there's a hard cap on the price of biologically-produced oil: the price of the poo poo already in the ground. So you have to make biofuel economically. The numbers (which the funders agreed with) showed that they could make a profit on this. The funding bailed when the patent was rejected. I don't even begin to comprehend their thought process - they couldn't artificially jack up the prices because, you know, real oil. Someone else couldn't undercut them because the bulk of the cost-base is capital depreciation, but because someone else out there might be able to do the same thing they shitcanned the whole project. There were probably a number of valid ways it could have gotten rejected - insufficient ROI, worries about the price of oil going down (which would be justified, since it was still rising when this happened), concerns that it wouldn't scale as well as hoped without investing in a large-scale test first. Patentability, jesus. Harik fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 04:08
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Emacs Headroom posted:That's right -- funding is so low that we are not just refusing to fund the second tier, we are randomly not funding a big chunk of the very top tier. As blowfish described it, we're actually funding a bunch of second-tier and junk science because the actual breakthroughs don't meet the changing and sometimes arbitrary requirements of the people giving out the money.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:15
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Ccs posted:As blowfish described it, we're actually funding a bunch of second-tier and junk science because the actual breakthroughs don't meet the changing and sometimes arbitrary requirements of the people giving out the money. Does current fusion-work compare at all with the scale of the Manhattan project, or the moonshot? I know it's huge, but I have no idea how it compares to GDP relatively.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:26
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That juicer's natural environment isn't at home, it is in the company cafeteria where it lets you show your rockstar coders or sales staff how much you care about their health (and keep them from leaving campus twice a day to get their hangover recovery and brain superfood juice), without relying on them to clean the drat thing after they use it. Had it been released a few years ago I could see it being a thing. Still dumb though.
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Apr 1, 2016 04:50
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Harik posted:Does current fusion-work compare at all with the scale of the Manhattan project, or the moonshot? I know it's huge, but I have no idea how it compares to GDP relatively. As a percentage of GDP, it's nowhere near close. But that funding is going other places, and not just the ones folks like to demonize like DOD - it also funds biotech research, it funds massively enlarged welfare programs, things like that. I'm not sure if the problem is funding or science though - and I'd really like to hear more about that from someone more knowledgeable than me.
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Apr 1, 2016 06:38
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Emacs Headroom posted:Not every piece of science has value, but some does. That means there's a return on investment for scientific research. One of the biggest problems when it comes to getting funding for research is the fact that it's absolutely impossible to tell what the actual return on an individual piece of research will be. Right now America is in "everything must be profitable" mode. The rich that own everything want you to guarantee that your research will directly lead to a new profitable product. The problem is that science just doesn't work like that and never has. People also seems to think science works like it does in Civilization where you produce a certain number of research points and then new buildings come out the other end. Sometimes the only value of a piece of research is "well we were wrong but now we know more about physics" which then leads, a few decades later, to really incredible advances. Science also involves a metric gently caress ton of failure. America hates failure. Suddenly you are Tesla or you're a lovely scientist.
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Apr 1, 2016 09:18
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Ccs posted:As blowfish described it, we're actually funding a bunch of second-tier and junk science because the actual breakthroughs don't meet the changing and sometimes arbitrary requirements of the people giving out the money. Part of the solution has to be for really smart people capable of doing top-tier research to have enough continuous income to do that top-tier research however they want instead of being cut off halfway through due to the aforementioned whims of the funders. If you look at Germany, which is more and more becoming the centre of European academia (except for nuclear engineering), you have some aspects of this. Profs have a reasonable amount of base level funding in addition to their salary (used to be more, but still better than most other countries), where a chair of a random scientific field can expect to spend mid-five figures per year before grants even at a mid tier university nobody has ever heard of, and can thus employ an assistant and/or keep the lab running. In addition, the most successful institutes (Max Planck institutes etc.) tend to run on the principle of hiring directors capable of sensibly spending a several-million-euro budget however they want, with even the groups hired by the director often getting a yearly pile of cash to burn with a note saying "do something interesting", and produce a shitload of top-tier research. Note that the other half of the problem isn't solved in Germany, and due to high barriers to entry to the top tier academia actually sucks hard for early career scientists (see below). Another problem in academia is the one about essentially wasting money on training armies of PhD students and then forcing most of them out of research, frequently not even into industry positions where PhDs are actually useful, and thereby wasting all resources spent on their training. Academia has basically not woken up to the fact that it's not in a maximum growth mode anymore. Realistically, every professor's career path should on average do something like employ 1-2 permanent staff, produce 5-6 PhDs of which 1-2 become profs, 1-2 become permanent mid-level research staff, and 2-3 get a Real Job™ outside academia. In reality, there are no mid level research staff positions in most fields and countries, no Real Jobs™ for many fields, and most profs still produce 25 PhDs like it's the 1970s when most of those would get to be profs themselves. Fixing academia would require either cutting the bottom end of academia (PhD students basically) to balance supply and demand and eliminate waste, or doing another round of growth (but this would only kick the can down the road till funding growth slows again), in addition to implementing sane funding for improving ROI of that funding. For the latter, I'd argue that even after cutting out the blatant junk, funding some second tier science that is basically a job for scientifically competent if not actually brilliant people. We need a lot of grunt work that takes a lot of time but isn't interesting by itself so the super smart people with too much time and money (which they should have after funding is fixed) can notice how all that grunt work fits together, come up with some interesting theories, and test them at a large scale. This is particularly noticeable in biology or epidemiology (I'm a biologist so obviously I'm biased towards my field) where everything from museums collecting butterflies and putting animals in alcohol jars like it's still Victorian England to collection of blood samples from patients in third world shitholes that get analysed and put into tables nobody used to read or care about ends up being really really useful a few decades later when datasets get larger and some guy in Harvard or Cambridge puts it all into a computer and notices long term trends of biodiversity loss or pins down how flu moves across Asia and changes to evade immunity and infect half a billion people every year, leading to policy or further targeted research. The VC tech bubble is interesting, in that it's basically the polar opposite of academia in terms of money, but has the same problem of poorly distributing its funding. You get a bunch of highly trained engineers/compscis/whatever who have made the wise decision to never enter academia who instead enter an actually growing sector of the economy where there is easy money to get for your projects. Some end up doing interesting stuff with that money, but money is so easy to get from people who have absolutely no idea of why what you're doing is worthwhile (beyond "we want to get bought by facebook for a billion dollars before everyone notices we're actually poo poo"), and no peer review of whether you are actually an idiot with bad ideas exists, so lots of blatantly terrible ideas get funded just because. Eventually money runs out because poo poo is blatantly broken, and I wouldn't be surprised if actual interesting startups take a disproportional hit as well.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:24
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Shifty Pony posted:That juicer's natural environment isn't at home, it is in the company cafeteria where it lets you show your rockstar coders or sales staff how much you care about their health (and keep them from leaving campus twice a day to get their hangover recovery and brain superfood juice), without relying on them to clean the drat thing after they use it. The Internet connectivity is probably why it got 70 million in funding. The juicer itself is whatever but put together a nice set of slides about subscription revenue and how the internet connectivity will collect all of this data which can lead to targeted new products (or just be sold outright) and you will have VCs falling over themselves to write you checks.
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Apr 1, 2016 11:26
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Emacs Headroom posted:That is, I'd argue that we're in a phase right now where money invested in research will yield linear or even super-linear returns (because making a healthy research community increases collaborations and breakthroughs). The basis of this argument is that funding agencies cannot currently fund all grants that they believe are worth funding. In fact, they can't even fund all grant proposals that are indistinguishable from the very best grant proposals. True, hence the increasingly silly grant funding criteria that exist purely to provide an excuse to whittle down the pile of applications. Comparing the UK vs Germany, you have a higher government spend on research in the latter, and accordingly grant funding rates 2-5 times higher in the latter in addition to better base level funding at most universities, and guess where a lot of top scientists are going. This another place where the transition from full-on growth academia to steady state academia has been mismanaged in many countries, with funding stagnating without being redistributed from producing more PhDs to the actual employed researchers (quite the opposite in many countries) and grants being awarded according to increasingly silly criteria (~impact~, ~publication metrics~, even before getting into typos and fonts) due to the political reasons that led to steady state academia in the first place. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 11:32
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Harik posted:Does current fusion-work compare at all with the scale of the Manhattan project, or the moonshot? I know it's huge, but I have no idea how it compares to GDP relatively. Fusion has never been funded at a viable level. I think according to the original optimistic plans fusion would have been between one and two moonshots worth of money spent over 20-40 years, and now it's actually funded at such a low level that the current crop of big experiments like ITER is the stuff people imagined they would build in the 1980s. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 11:36
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fyi your posts own, blowfish
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Apr 1, 2016 12:50
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Ccs posted:As blowfish described it, we're actually funding a bunch of second-tier and junk science because the actual breakthroughs don't meet the changing and sometimes arbitrary requirements of the people giving out the money. I don't disagree with blowfish, but I think your interpretation suffers from hindsight bias. As ToxicSlurpee said: ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the biggest problems when it comes to getting funding for research is the fact that it's absolutely impossible to tell what the actual return on an individual piece of research will be. Right now America is in "everything must be profitable" mode. The rich that own everything want you to guarantee that your research will directly lead to a new profitable product. When funding grants, the scientists on the selection committees don't get to hop in a time machine to measure the breakthrough power. They have to give their best judgement on the scientific merit. Right now, there are lots of grant proposals that are equal in merit and promise to the ones being funded, but which lost a coin toss.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:11
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cheese posted:This must be what it was like living in 1930's appeasement Europe or the Antebellum south. More like late 90s Silicon Valley, really. poo poo was this silly back then too.
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Apr 1, 2016 14:37
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Emacs Headroom posted:Not every piece of science has value, but some does. That means there's a return on investment for scientific research. I'm saying that a lot of the research even at the very top tier is pretty bad and goes nowhere. Do we really need more of it? I'm not complaining about negative results--I'm complaining about like, if you had to explain the point and hopes of the project honestly, and not using advertising grant proposal spin, you'd have to conclude that it is a high risk, low reward project, or the project only sounds like a good idea if you don't have an understanding of the technical requirements that you need to beat the current technology (this stuff gets funded all the time!). I'm mostly talking about applied science and engineering projects. blowfish posted:The funding agency people get buried under a mountain of funding applications, and even after tossing out the stupid proposals for idiots that mountain of funding applications is still too large. The funding agency people now need to whittle down the mountain further, and start applying criteria like "what they're trying to do sounds like it might work" and "that prof has a history of producing results" and "I am only one person and can't realistically understand every single field of science and I have finite time so I can't actually evaluate anyone's results", so everything in a field too different from the overworked grant agency guy's gets tossed, everything that's too ambitious gets tossed, and everything from people who haven't produced results according to overly simplistic metrics like H-index, number of paper and which journal they went into, etc. gets tossed. If at this point the pile of remaining applications is still too large, everything from people who haven't previously gotten big grants from you or another well-known funder gets tossed. If the pile is still too large, really silly criteria get applied. Right now, there are funding agencies rejecting grant applications for a punctuation mistake or for using a slightly wrong font size. This doesn't mean much to me. Mostly what you are saying here is that getting research funding is competitive. I say that it should be, because a lot of the stuff which even makes the cut isn't that great. And I'm not saying that the research isn't great because it had a negative result--I'm saying that the research isn't great because the idea is high risk low reward, or the idea is predicated on a misunderstanding of current technology. The other thing that you are saying here is that it is hard to gauge what is a good research proposal and what is a bad research proposal, especially if you are not an expert. This is a good point. I guess because of this, if you can't find a way to better evaluate proposals, you are obligated to fund a tonne of bad research too to randomly stumble upon the good ideas. This, in my opinion, is the strongest argument for increasing research funding. You can basically always use this argument though, no matter the funding level. Also, you can always use it in support of increasing funding for tech startup companies, no matter what the funding climate is. blowfish posted:As a result, everyone applies everywhere to do research closely related to that year's strategic statements of the relevant funding agencies that they can pretend will have ~impact~ (by being applied/easy to commercialise, looking cool so it goes into clickbait articles, whatever) but isn't actually too hard, and aims to publish any barely-interesting finding in as high-ranking a journal as possible, i.e. a bunch of low value me-too research. Because nobody knows which grants will get funded, everyone writes a PhD student or postdoc position into every grant application who will be expected to janitor their experiments and computer with next to no help, instead of employing permanent mid-level research staff + permanent assistants who have a loving clue how to fix the equipment when the new guy breaks it on their first day. I agree that academic research should be done more by professionals rather than graduate students. Having graduate students do the work is pretty inefficient. You have to spend a lot of time training the student, and then after a little while, the student leaves, often to work in a field totally unrelated to what he or she was trained in, and you have to start the training process over again. Maybe there should be fewer Ph.D. students. Many Ph.D. students go on to jobs which do not really require a Ph.D. It is a pretty big waste. The types of industries which actually need Ph.D. level experts in a particular field can fund academic research themselves if they want to pay for the training of Ph.D. level experts to enter their industry. They'll know better than the government what skills could be economically useful. I agree with what you are saying regarding dumb funding incentives to some extent. However, alternately, you could explain the me-too research as, it is extremely difficult to come up with a totally original research idea which, when the proposal is carefully analyzed, has no major show-stopping flaws and could be promising. Since doing that is extremely tough, many professors, unable to generate their own ideas, instead put all of their effort into working on current fads in the research community or they put all of their effort into studying the same types of problems that they have been studying for the past 30 years with not much interesting coming out of it. blowfish posted:If you look at Germany, which is more and more becoming the centre of European academia (except for nuclear engineering), you have some aspects of this. Profs have a reasonable amount of base level funding in addition to their salary (used to be more, but still better than most other countries), where a chair of a random scientific field can expect to spend mid-five figures per year before grants even at a mid tier university nobody has ever heard of, and can thus employ an assistant and/or keep the lab running. In addition, the most successful institutes (Max Planck institutes etc.) tend to run on the principle of hiring directors capable of sensibly spending a several-million-euro budget however they want, with even the groups hired by the director often getting a yearly pile of cash to burn with a note saying "do something interesting", and produce a shitload of top-tier research. Note that the other half of the problem isn't solved in Germany, and due to high barriers to entry to the top tier academia actually sucks hard for early career scientists (see below). I have talked with someone who got a Ph.D. in applied science in Germany and went on to do a post-doc in America, and he said some things that kind of contradict what you say here. One of the things he said was that he was shocked at how American professors can over-promise results, applications, etc. in their proposals, continually under-deliver and still get funding. He said something to the effect that the research proposals in Germany were much more conservative and to underdeliver would basically get you blacklisted from future funding. He was in engineering/applied physics. Maybe it is different in biology. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 15:08
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German Chemistry is like 95% of all PhDs don't stay in university. Dunno about other fields. Chemistry is especially bad though, because it's a tradition and expected from you to get a PhD.
Lucy Heartfilia fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 1, 2016 |
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Apr 1, 2016 17:36
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The caveat I'd provide for the description blowfish gives is that it's really field dependent in some respects. This is because federal grant agencies and nonprofits both have centralized decisionmaking power to such a degree that individual differences in the associated grant officer change the approach to grant funding pretty dramatically. Problems with the quality of funded science (independent of grant-chasing) is also field (and grant officer) dependent in a pretty big way.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:17
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FYI the whole process of getting grants is becoming more and more professionalized; research institutions are starting to open field offices in Washington so they can hob-nob with the agencies and get a head's up on the kind of RFP's that are likely to come out.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:47
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What Happened When Venture Capitalists Took Over the Golden State Warriors http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/what-happened-when-venture-capitalists-took-over-the-golden-state-warriors.html?_r=0 quote:This season, Lacob’s sixth as majority owner, the Warriors are on pace to break the league record of 72 wins in a season (which is just 82 games long). He and his partners bought a team that already had Stephen Curry, Golden State’s best player and a transcendent talent who is having one of the most dominant seasons in league history. He would be hitting tongue-flick jump shots from 30 feet away from the basket no matter who owned it.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:54
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“The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident,” And on average, what is the ratio of successful companies to failures again?
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Apr 1, 2016 19:02
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Mozi posted:“The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident,” The trick is not to count the failures... 
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Apr 1, 2016 19:07
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It should be no suprise that we're selecting for researchers who are good at getting grants funded, not those who are necessary good at science.
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Apr 1, 2016 20:02
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Spazzle posted:It should be no suprise that we're selecting for researchers who are good at getting grants funded, not those who are necessary good at science. At this point it's not even that: it's researchers who lucked out to end up in institutions with the ability to sustain a whole grantraising (tm) infrastructure. Or at least that's where I see it heading in the next 5-10 years.
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Apr 1, 2016 20:11
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Mozi posted:“The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident,” It's even funnier than that because they're taking credit for having the best shooter in NBA history. In a league where just having the top talent is probably the most important attribute for winning. Of course the team is doing well. I guess it does fit in with VCs taking credit for other people's work though.
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Apr 1, 2016 20:19
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Yeah, coaching matters but basketball teams are basically 2 players away from being champions or dogs.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:03
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 what a load of poo poo. GSW's success has nothing to do with venture capitalists. How about the flipside with Vivek Ranadive and the Sacramento Kings?
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Apr 1, 2016 22:10
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Also, the hallmark of a good sports owner is that they hire qualified professionals to actually run the sports team, don't touch it themselves, and focus on things like marketing and revenue generation. Direct owner involvement in the selection of players and coaches usually leads to disaster.
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Apr 1, 2016 22:42
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The two things responsible for the success and failure of any basketball team (as an organization) are, in order, Luck, and the GM.
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Apr 1, 2016 22:56
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silence_kit posted:I'm saying that a lot of the research even at the very top tier is pretty bad and goes nowhere. Do we really need more of it? quote:The other thing that you are saying here is that it is hard to gauge what is a good research proposal and what is a bad research proposal Yes, as I said, there is a cost to research, and not all of it bears fruit. We don't have time machines, so we don't know with absolute accuracy which projects will work or which labs will have the most useful results. We have a stack of proposals, and say 20% of them will yield useful results and 1% will yield amazing results. We don't know which ones are which until we fund them to see. We can say "well let's stop funding stuff, because a lot of research is trash", or we can say "the only way we'll be able to get great results is to fund a lot of stuff that looks promising and accept the losses for the research that doesn't bear fruit, so let's do that".
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Apr 2, 2016 02:45
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silence_kit posted:I'm saying that a lot of the research even at the very top tier is pretty bad and goes nowhere. Do we really need more of it? I'm not complaining about negative results--I'm complaining about like, if you had to explain the point and hopes of the project honestly, and not using advertising grant proposal spin, you'd have to conclude that it is a high risk, low reward project, or the project only sounds like a good idea if you don't have an understanding of the technical requirements that you need to beat the current technology (this stuff gets funded all the time!). I'm mostly talking about applied science and engineering projects. To an extent competition can be good, but right now the situation is one where competition doesn't actually improve results very much. Forcing researchers to apply to every funding agency all the time is very time consuming because writing (sometimes short, sometimes very long and extensive) proposals takes up time that could otherwise be spent on research. You are essentially paying researchers salary to write applications to get more money while reducing the man-hours of research per unit of salary. Obviously research isn't factory work where results increase linearly with man-hours forever, but currently group leaders and professors are often shuffling around paperwork more than working in the lab or designing better experiments, so we've probably hit the point where professor man-hours are getting wasted on producing similar funding applications many of which meet the funding criteria of the relevant funding agency but only few of which can get actually funded because there are way too many funding applications getting sent everywhere. In addition, the thing where you can only work on most problems for the three years covered by a grant is bad because there are problems with difficulties inbetween "I can already see where this is going" and "This is a great problem of our time, our nation will build a big shiny institute specifically around that problem". Problems that could in principle be tackled by individual researchers or research groups with just a bit more effort than can be shoehorned into three years of grant-funded work become much more difficult to tackle, and so you get a lot of research that may be somewhat interesting but ultimately can't go anywhere unless it attracts disproportionate attention. quote:The other thing that you are saying here is that it is hard to gauge what is a good research proposal and what is a bad research proposal, especially if you are not an expert. This is a good point. I guess because of this, if you can't find a way to better evaluate proposals, you are obligated to fund a tonne of bad research too to randomly stumble upon the good ideas. This, in my opinion, is the strongest argument for increasing research funding. You can basically always use this argument though, no matter the funding level. Also, you can always use it in support of increasing funding for tech startup companies, no matter what the funding climate is. Again, compounded by the vicious circle of low funding rates -> more duplicate funding applications -> lower funding rates. IMO it would be more practical to evaluate if someone is good at research after an initial track record, than to evaluate if their research proposal is good. Really specialised fields or new fields that may grow and become very important tend to have so few people that you either don't have any evaluating a particular grant proposal or if you do, they tend to have competing interests/bias because there's only half a dozen people in the world in this field in the first place. You will always fund a lot of unsuccessful research, and also research that was never going to go anywhere (but more obviously in hindsight), because even corporate R&D departments where there's a direct link between results and profit tend to play with a lot of options most of which turn out to be terrible. The best thing to do IMO is to have some moderate barriers to entry as a well-funded scientist to avoid random idiots setting money on fire, but then award additional funding both as project-specific grants if you already wanted to fund this type of research beforehand and as higher base funding based on evaluation of the track record of the scientist. For the latter, you'd basically need an occasional peer review, ideally with people both within the field and from other fields (to get extra opinions where tiny fields might have ended up with three people all going "I'm great and everyone else sucks"), which could replace a large proportion of the busywork of people writing duplicate grant applications for minor basic research problems. quote:I agree that academic research should be done more by professionals rather than graduate students. Having graduate students do the work is pretty inefficient. You have to spend a lot of time training the student, and then after a little while, the student leaves, often to work in a field totally unrelated to what he or she was trained in, and you have to start the training process over again. Yeah, we definitely overproduce PhDs in many fields. Because PhDs also count as ~qualifications~ in the way that becoming a staff member doesn't, some countries' politicians/funders have latched on to the idea that producing more and more highly qualified people will be enough to put all these people into high-paid jobs where they can be super-productive, when in fact the proportion of high-paid jobs that require PhDs (or even BScs and MScs before that - having a degree doesn't make you a better janitor) can't grow forever. e:Perhaps the silliest example is the Netherlands: PhD students are salaried employees like in wider continental European academia. Because PhD students are also getting that ~qualification~, a national programme got implemented to give bonus subsidies to unis/institutes for each PhD awarded. Those subsidies cover most of the salary of an average PhD student. Every cash-strapped uni and institute is now falling over themselves to axe staff positions and turn them into PhD student positions. quote:I agree with what you are saying regarding dumb funding incentives to some extent. However, alternately, you could explain the me-too research as, it is extremely difficult to come up with a totally original research idea which, when the proposal is carefully analyzed, has no major show-stopping flaws and could be promising. Since doing that is extremely tough, many professors, unable to generate their own ideas, instead put all of their effort into working on current fads in the research community or they put all of their effort into studying the same types of problems that they have been studying for the past 30 years with not much interesting coming out of it. I'd say that to an extent this comes down to the fixed-term nature of grants, to an extent you would want to reassign these people to do scientific grunt work necessary for the top people to ever produce top results (some, but by no means all of which would involve chasing the latest fad and doing me-too stuff and some of which might even turn out to be very interesting after collecting enough data), and to an extent it's because many scientific ideas don't come about because someone sat down with a cuppa and a notebook to write the Next Great Scientific Proposal but because scientists are basically manchildren playing with expensive toys who occasionally notice they stumbled into an actually useful direction and then do some actual work in that direction (but it turns out you can't cut the manchildren part without also cutting the stumbling into an actually useful direction part). There is, of course, an idiot quota of people who will never ever do anything interesting or useful after a stroke of dumb luck in their PhD, but given that trying to make research more efficient or even any industry trying to slim down has not actually solved this problem I don't think it's productive to make a big fuss over it beyond basic measures to keep the idiots from taking over. quote:I have talked with someone who got a Ph.D. in applied science in Germany and went on to do a post-doc in America, and he said some things that kind of contradict what you say here. One of the things he said was that he was shocked at how American professors can over-promise results, applications, etc. in their proposals, continually under-deliver and still get funding. He said something to the effect that the research proposals in Germany were much more conservative and to underdeliver would basically get you blacklisted from future funding. He was in engineering/applied physics. Maybe it is different in biology.  chat (I should totally buy this as  )There exist somewhat different funding environments in Germany depending on where you work. The one I described is what you tend to get in the Max Planck Society's institutes, which is the 800 pound gorilla of German Science and on the same level as places like Harvard or Cambridge. Max Planck have a shitton of institutes including many specialist ones doing wacky basic research. The Max Planck Institutes receive most of their money as a big lump sum from the state and the federal budget, and the Max Planck Society will poach top people from across the world by offering to make them an institute director and then builds these people institutes to direct as they see fit (conversely, institutes sometimes don't outlast the retirement of their director beyond running out the clock on all existing contracts). You also have the more applied-science (both biomedical/chem/applied physics/tech etc. and environment) Fraunhofer and Leibniz associations also running their own institutes, which tend to get at least 2/3 of their budget from industry and regular grants. All of these societies run institutes with full-time researchers and research students only (no undergrads sitting in lectures except in cases where there's a joint position or cooperation programme with a university) and each have a research budget larger than most countries (typically around €1.5-2bn). e2: the MPIs are basically like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, except there's more of them in every field all over the place. There is also the world of universities, where in addition to the base level budget each full professor gets (may vary with how broke the state they're working in is) your main income is from grants from industry (mostly relevant for physics/chemistry/compsci/engineering - the best-funded university by grants is Aachen in moderately broke North-Rhine Westphalia because their top-tier engineering department gets drowned in industry money) or from funding agencies. The main funding agency is the German Research Foundation (DFG), which by itself doles out another €3bn, mostly in grants and a bit to primarily DFG-funded research centres at or in cooperation with universities. In addition to there being fewer duplicate grant applications because there's one main pot of money to fund basic science grants, grants are awarded differently from UK/US grants (iirc) in that you don't just get a yes/no decision for the money you requested, but that the DFG will also get someone to sit down and delete/downsize items in your proposed budget in line with what it thinks your base level funding and university-provided facilities should cover on their own. Larger grants involving multiple groups can require several-hundred-page applications. If you want another grant from the DFG, especially if that grant is supposed to extend your current DFG-funded work, you better mention some promising results in your new grant application. If you want to work on a problem long-term, that's what your base level funding is supposed to be for, notwithstanding shortsighted politicians who want to cut your budget in the name of copying America and scoring cheap points. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Apr 2, 2016 |
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Apr 2, 2016 09:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:FYI the whole process of getting grants is becoming more and more professionalized; research institutions are starting to open field offices in Washington so they can hob-nob with the agencies and get a head's up on the kind of RFP's that are likely to come out. . It would be sad but also hilarious if this turned into Congress 2.0: Corrupt and Dysfunctional, Too.Lucy Heartfilia posted:German Chemistry is like 95% of all PhDs don't stay in university. Dunno about other fields. Chemistry is especially bad though, because it's a tradition and expected from you to get a PhD. ...and people who in America or the UK might go find work with a university BSc in chemistry might have a Fachhochschul Discendo Vox posted:The caveat I'd provide for the description blowfish gives is that it's really field dependent in some respects. This is because federal grant agencies and nonprofits both have centralized decisionmaking power to such a degree that individual differences in the associated grant officer change the approach to grant funding pretty dramatically. Problems with the quality of funded science (independent of grant-chasing) is also field (and grant officer) dependent in a pretty big way. This is very true. Konstantin posted:Also, the hallmark of a good sports owner is that they hire qualified professionals to actually run the sports team, don't touch it themselves, and focus on things like marketing and revenue generation. Direct owner involvement in the selection of players and coaches usually leads to disaster. Yeah, it's the "don't be a micromanaging dipshit" school of management. Which, coincidentally, science funding could also use a good helping of 
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Apr 2, 2016 10:10
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