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by tikhonj
4660 days ago
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It's very difficult to predict ahead of time what will be useful and what won't. Given this limitation, there is already a reasonable amount of accountability: many different people in the field are involved in both deciding whom to fund and whom to publish. Moreover, people track how well past research does (based on citations as well as impact more generally) to evaluate any individual researcher. This is already more accountability than in some government departments or parts of large corporations! Since nobody can predict everything ahead of time, we have to take risks and explore possible dead ends. Moreover, we really want to avoid getting everyone stuck in the same mindset, so we need people to challenge the status quo occasionally. Think of research as a large search problem--you sometimes have to take seemingly bad moves in order to avoid local maxima. Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted. |
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Do you not see how this could be bad? You're implicitly subsidizing a select few - then who gets to be the gatekeeper that decides what is or isn't bad? Surely not, people who are selected because of their high training, where "high training" winds up also being indirectly judged as "people who were trained by the closed society of individuals who just happen to be the selectees"?
I mean, really, that's what we're doing. As the system becomes more closed and self-interested, and dependent on extracting funds from the government, the more the danger of becoming detached from reasonableness - and then you DO have to worry about people tickling their intellectual jollies.
Now, if we had the very same system, except it were funded as, say a private non-profit entity, it will for sure have the same problems. But - it's less morally suspect, because, at least the people donating their money into it should have known that risk beforehand - and can choose to directly defund their part in the rotten enterprise when they figure out what's going on.
> Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted.
You're absolutely right. But that choice is not one that government should be making, because of its conflict of interest (accountability). Incidentally, there are problems with transparency in government funding reviews (NSF and NIH panels are conducted in secret with 'anonymous reviewers'), too, but those are implementation details, not fundamental problems.
I'm not suggesting that the risk-taking involved in judging basic science should not be done. I am suggesting that it should not be done by government.