[nl]

Not sure who downvoted this, but this is 100% on the money in my experience.

People here are writing comments like that funding should be tied to "how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is" as though these things are correlated to the existing criteria at all.

Much of the criticism here is like someone who knows how to build roads criticising agile software development because it makes it look like no one knows what they are going to build in the end. It's frustrating, and wrong, but the errors are subtle and aggregative.

[adminprof]

Yeah I have no idea how it got to -2, but maybe it was my tone. I was even trying to not call out any specific post or debate any single issue.

The thing about academia is it's full of people who love talking about ways to make it better, and rotate into positions of power where they can change things after a few years.

The solutions are complex, require convincing many different stakeholders (even if they're amenable to the change), nailing lots of detail to make it work right. Because peoples lives and careers are on the line. Reputations of entire fields, the way medical discoveries happen, billions of dollars of taxpayer money, major institutions, etc. are not things you want to hack and discover that whoops, you just incentivized the wrong thing and set back cancer research for a decade.