It's fundamentally no different from what VCs are doing, except the timescales are longer. You expect that most startups are going to fail but some are going to be really successful. Because you can't predict the outcomes in advance, you fund a large number of startups, hoping to catch the successful ones. There are some heuristics that should help you pick the winners. Or at least you hope so. But you also know there is a real chance that your intuition is wrong and the heuristics just make your choices worse.
> Shouldn’t we be asking a similar question? Which research projects are going to deliver insight and value for the public?
Yes, we’ve always done that - and quite extensively. I would recommend learning more about this process: it’s run by people who care deeply about scientific progress - nobody gets into it for the low pay - and if there seems to be a simple improvement, the odds are high that someone made it in the previous century.
I have a number of friends and family members who are academics and they spend a lot of time on each grant explaining how their research will advance our scientific understanding and linking it to other benefits (e.g. low-level neuroscience isn’t going to lead to new medical treatments directly but it provides the foundational knowledge which those treatments are based on).
Echoing the peer comment, if you were to pick any flaw it’s that we probably spend too much money on betting relative to the savings. There’s a lot of good research which doesn’t get funded, so it’s not hard to fill your budget every year with qualified proposals.
All of that can be true, and yet there are simultaneously so many papers and projects that are not worthwhile being funded. How does our university system exist in the current set? Where is the money coming from?
> they spend a lot of time on each grant explaining how their research will advance our scientific understanding and linking it to other benefits
Do those come true? Or is this just an exercise in diligence.
> I would recommend learning more about this process
You’re right. I should learn more. I really want to understand.
Writing a grant application typically takes weeks of full time work, split between the prospective PI, their collaborators and trainees, and administrators. When the funding agency receives the application, there is administrative vetting to ensure that the application meets all formal requirements. Then there is vetting by internal and external experts, who evaluate the application for both scientific merit and whatever other values politicians happen to prioritize at the moment. If it looks like that the grant will be awarded (typical success rates are 20-25%), there is further administrative vetting to ensure compliance with various regulations. And this entire process typically takes anything from a year to a year and a half.
If anything, the process is inefficient, because there is too much vetting. Especially considering how small the individual grants are.
You’re telling me we know it’s quality because there are hoops to jump through to get the funding. But shouldn’t the results tell us that? Do we have a list of the most recent successes from these grants?
