6 ms·
Quoting the last two paragraphs of the blog post (cuz I think that's where the gist of this post lies): > Research should never be driven by success, because t
by challenger-derp 4y ago
Quoting the last two paragraphs of the blog post (cuz I think that's where the gist of this post lies):
> Research should never be driven by success, because the pursuit of it either disheartens, or beguiles, even the greatest of men. An ideal Research should truly ever be ignited by curiosity. It should be fueled by the desire to know. And it should be done for the pursuit of truth and truth alone, no matter what it is. Feynman investigated the curious wobbles only for the pure joy of satiation. And the rest, as they say, is history:
> "I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”–working, really –with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."
- warkdarrior 4y agoThe implication of the quote is that anything "ignited by curiosity" is worthwhile. This is all fine and good, as noble ambitions go, but it does not answer the key questions for academia: (1) Which papers to accept for publication?, and (2) Which projects to provide with funding?. The context of course is that there is only limited room for papers in publication venue (journal and/or conference) and limited funding for science.
- musha68k 4y agoMaybe overly limited funding for science is the problem? On the whole it all seems to me as if capitalism and the general problem of the (projected by too many?) “Leistungsgesellschaft” might have invaded science to a much larger extent than it used to? It’s just a wild guess looking at it from the outside, I don’t have any experience with proper science at all. To me this stuff just always reads as “ah great so that’s how we killed the potential for that (classic/next-gen) Star Trek future”.
- melagonster 4y agocapitalism offer more money to scientists, but you right, we need more money on science.
- ablatt89 4y agoIt's a fair point, that there must be some criteria for some individual or lab to compete for funding. It might be worth creating a stronger distinction between truly novel papers, and general scientific papers, that goes beyond an informal understanding of which journals are prestigious. For example, going through Arxiv each week can be really tedious, with many papers being redundant or written that makes it hard to understand.
- bmitc 4y ago> Which projects to provide with funding? There's a somewhat old adage (?) that says: "Don't fund projects. Fund people." The gist of it is that by funding projects, you're funding a somewhat myopic view in that anything discovered adjacent to the project is now out of scope of the funding. By funding people with interesting ideas, you get a much more creative and free-flowing research program.
- mettamage 4y agoJust before I read your comment I came up with that idea "there should be a select few people based on their academic merits (whatever that means/however good that will go) that will have carte blanche." Then I read your comment. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree.
- magic_hamster 4y agoPreferring people over projects creates a situation where you are carried by your status rather than your work. If someone had a successful project, it doesn't necessarily mean their next project is going to work. A total newcomer could potentially solve a very important problem (but get their funding denied because they are still not the right "people" to invest in). This also makes it harder for new ideas to propagate. Funding should be a mix of track record with project consideration, not either exclusively.
- bmitc 4y agoThere’s a subtlety there. It isn’t suppose to be about who you are but what you’re about. Stopping caring about whether projects work or not is practically the point. Research isn’t about only tackling things we know will work. That’s effectively engineering and not research. A lot of the funding today is already about status. There just needs to be less funding given out to people based on status and funders’ pet projects and more funding based upon the people and proposals. Solid people and proposals should not be turned down via lack of status or not fitting into some box of “this will work”. A lot of topics are lumped into “that will never work”, but it’s often the case that they were never tried or even explored.
- Kinrany 4y agoAdministration has no clue which projects are good and which "scientists" won't spend the money on a sea of booze. Two mechanisms should be used: 1. Administration decides which projects had real world effect, years or even decades after the work is done. 2. A directed social graph is built from citations and from working together on projects. Money should be allocated to the network. Administration decides who did good work in the past; funding is allocated to everyone endorsed by those people; scientists vote with their grant money for projects that they believe in.
- derbOac 4y agoI'll just say that whatever it is, it has to be corruption-proof. And in the current environment, I regularly see gaming the sorts of things you're suggesting.
- mach1ne 4y agoI think this would lead to a hellpit of sycophantic behavior. And, genius or not, I would not trust any group of people to be immune to the influence of the sycophants.
- Kinrany 4y agoWould that be worse than the current disaster though?
- bluenose69 4y agoI've never known an administrator who had even the faintest clue what science was all about, let alone what previous was 'good' or what projects would have 'real world effect'. If they had insights on such things, they would likely be working in science, not administration. Indeed the mess we are in is because of administrators who think organizing academics is like organizing work on an assembly line. They find something quantifiable and insist on more of that. Papers are quantifiable, so they go for that. To try to get at quality, they count citations. Always it's counting, and I'm not sure if that's by analogy to the assembly or because the administrators are challenged to do much more than count.
- RobotToaster 4y ago>Which papers to accept for publication? That may have been a problem in Feynman's day, but today academic papers takeup negligible storage. The only limiting factor is the number of peer reviewers, I have no idea if there is a shortage of those or not.
- jfengel 4y agoAcceptance is less about storage space, but about gatekeeping for "quality". Which in turn is about what papers are going to get read, because nobody has time to read all of the papers. People rely on high-reputation journals to narrow down the time they spend reading. The number of peer reviewers may be one limitation, but I think the main one is the number of readers. The hard limit is how much time readers spend reading. Getting access to that is hard. Anybody can publish. You don't even need a journal; just put it up on your blog. But as with all blogs, the hard part is getting anybody to care that you've done it.
- aaroninsf 4y agoOne of the great promises of the Basic Income idea is that within many domains, it eliminates project funding as a constraint, with the anticipatable outcome that a great many people "waste" their time on uninteresting, incorrect, ludicrous, ideas, and a few people who might have been fundable today, do solid real work, and sometimes, a few people who would have NOT have been fundable (per OP), do work which Changes Everything, which might not have been done today otherwise. Those of us reading this, we live in a surplus economy. We could fund everyone. Indeed, we should, because it would over a reasonable time frame, pretty likely Change Everything. All it would cost is fewer 100m long yachts for a few thousand sociopaths.
- jjallen 4y agoHow do we capture external value from letting people stay in an environment where the ey can stay curious and work on whatever they want at the time? Does it always escape? Could everyone work like this? (Surely not) How can people that want to work like this do so while others sort of harvest the value that may not be harvested by those who are consistently curious and researching?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thfuran 4y agoI'm not sure I understand what you think the difficulty in capturing the value of research would be.
- jjallen 4y agoIf someone moves from one thing to the next without publishing and or producing something than the value is not captured
- thfuran 4y agoIf they don't produce anything, there doesn't seem to be any value to capture.
- jjallen 4y agoResearch and novel thoughts can have value to broader society. What I'm getting at is how can we keep the curious curious while also capturing value from them. Let some people stay in this state -- I am mostly one of them, and have others follow them around implementing their ideas. Some of us have too many ideas and good thoughts.
- smoyer 4y agoThe second (quoted) paragraph is from the book which is definitely worth reading.
- derbOac 4y agoThis was a memorable passage from the post for me: "This is because all efforts trivially lead to some results. It’s an entirely different matter whether it is an expected one or not. But such is the world we find ourselves in that anything short of a ground-breaking discovery is treated as an unacceptable embarrassment. And thus, every marginal increment is touted as ground-breaking, and every deviation is repackaged to look like an intended result (which is again touted as ground-breaking)." It's even worse than this in my opinion, as the reasons ground-breaking discoveries occur are generally not why the field thinks (or asserts?) they occur. So it's not just the results that are misrepresented, it's the whole chain of things leading to them, and what comes afterward: how they came about, who was involved in what capacity, who considers them ground-breaking or not and why, and so forth and so on.