[wsxcde]

This is practical advice, but it also points to the reality of scientific funding today -- you can only get money to do things that you already know how to do. You must have an idea that is pretty much ready to go on day one. All that should remain are working out the details.

I can see why bureaucrats and government officials prefer it this way (accountability!) but I don't understand why we scientists put up with it.

[bonoboTP]

It stuck with me what a famous Hungarian ethologist (Csányi) said in a radio interview recently: you propose the things that you already discovered in the grant application and then use the money to discover new stuff.

He generally had a grim view of academia and is senior enough to afford to speak his mind.

[wsxcde]

I actually think it's not as bad as some make it out to be, provided grants are funded at a reasonable rate. What's changed over the last couple of decades or so is that funding rates are single digit percentages. This is the real problem. My advisor said that when he was a younger researcher, it wasn't quite so hard to get funding so he had more time to pursue independent ideas.

Even as a much younger researcher, I feel that at any point in time, I usually have a couple of worthwhile new ideas that are quite likely to pan out and will get funded someplace or another. But if I have to spend a multiple months of effort into getting them funded, I have a lot less time available to generate the next couple of good ideas. This doesn't mean that people just stop doing research, most researchers are competitive workaholics. Instead, we'll just rehash the same old stuff in a new bottle: we target newer applications and/or chase the latest fads (e.g. adversarial ML) with the goal of getting some of our old ideas reused in a new domain.

This creates a negative feedback loop because the quality of research gets worse and the people think this stuff is not worth funding and that in turn reduces funding rates even lower which causes research to get worse.

Unfortunately, scientists working on "useless" ideas wasting public money is a much too convenient bogeyman for politicians to give up.