[p4ul]

I wish this was better understood more broadly. Grants aren't no-strings-attached gifts—far from it; they are contracts.

When a researcher at a university gets a grant, that's the federal government hiring that researcher and their team to complete a specific research project. The research team has a particular research question that the federal government has deemed important enough that U.S. tax payers would benefit from getting an answer.

[pandaman]

So there's some department in the US government, which plans all the important research such as children looking at Facebook food ads or whether lonely rats crave cocaine more than happy rats [1] and the scientists compete for these? And it's not the scientists writing these up themselves and then asking government to finance the proposed research?

1. https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REP...

[robotresearcher]

It’s a mixture of both top down priorities from government and bottom up opportunities from scientists. I suspect you know this and are being sarcastic because that’s cool. But I’ll describe it anyway.

The NSF, DARPA, DOE, NASA, etc etc have research program offices that set priorities. For example let’s have a DARPA program that pushes new stealth materials, or an NSF program on quantum computing (possibly partly motivated by another three-letter agency). The program managers understand the state of the art AND what the government (as the agent of the People) could really use Real Soon Now, or down the road for big bets. They write a Call for Proposals that describes what they’d like to see.

Researchers watch out for CFPs they might be able to contribute to, and propose a project where their work could help. Sometimes the fit is easy, and sometimes the researcher will modulate their work to fit better, because they want support from somewhere.

The proposals compete for a share of the targeted pot of money.

This is how the government influences basic research, while still giving researchers the opportunity to propose novel stuff the government hasn’t thought of.

It’s the system that built the Internet and CRISPR, RNA vaccines and the laser, microelectronics and IVF.

[pandaman]

For example, let's take cocaine rats, which is a real research paid by my tax dollars. Is it some kind of big government vision that created this? Can you locate a Call for Proposal that spawned this? How does it benefit me as a citizen and a taxpayer?

[robotresearcher]

You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people? You don’t see any way that the government, on behalf of the People, would want to understand wellbeing and/or drug abuse better?

It’s not about the fucking rats. You KNOW this. Everyone knows this. The ‘cocaine rats durrrr’ type argument is not in good faith. I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.

[pandaman]

>You can’t see any way that an improved understanding of happiness and/or drug use could help people?

I can't see how is this research helping anyone other than the researchers themselves. Also I can't see the Call for Proposal for that, I figure there was not any, as I expected.

[robotresearcher]

I am revising my belief.

[donkeybeer]

>I simply don’t believe people are that dumb.

Sometimes a spades a spade, some people are just fucking stupid, magas for example.