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Idk. There's a sweet spot when it comes to novelty and funding, and I'm not sure it's always where it should be. I also think there's a certain relativism about novelty, in that what is novel in a subfield might look pretty conservative to an outsider. All these studies of grants etc are overshadowed by this problem, which is that they typically use citations etc as some kind of metric of quality. The problem with that, in turn, is that over a reasonable study span, variation in those citations is going to be driven by self-seeking behavior. That is, what's popular is what's funded, but also what's cited. There's a certain bias in it, in that you don't learn about the novel studies that never were studied due to being too novel, and the truly paradigm shifting papers, which are cited at high rates, are kinda washed out by the hundreds or thousands of papers that just kinda creep along. It's difficult for me to put into words what's on my mind. But when I think of colleagues who are well funded, even those I consider friends and people I respect, I don't think of their work as being innovative. It's very much in the status quo. Very technically well done, but basically data generating machines within a status quo paradigm. The things that shake things up tend to come from elsewhere, from industry or accidents or secondary reanalysis of old data, or things that get funded off of miscellaneous sources scrounged together. It's as if true innovation happens regardless of grants, or in spite of it, and after everyone agrees it's the accepted thing, then it gets funded, after the fact. |