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Let Researchers Try New Paths (nature.com)
Writing for Nature journal, scientists and professors Tolu Oni, Fabio Sciarrino, Gerardo Adesso, and Rob Knight, discuss an issue researchers have been facing a lot lately. The scientific enterprise is stuck in a catch-22, they say. Researchers are charged with advancing promising new questions, but receive support and credit only for revisiting their past work. They say that often times while examining one thing researchers are able to uncover several other important things, but deviating from the path is something frowned upon for various reasons among the industry. From the article (condensed): Most striking are the barriers to achieving impact. Our research often led us to questions that had greater potential than our original focus, typically because these new directions encompassed the complexities of society. We realized that changing tack could lead to more important work, but the policies of research funders and institutions consistently discourage such pivots. When reviewers assess grants or academic performance, they focus largely on track records in a particular field. Young scientists, who must focus on developing their careers, are thus discouraged from exploration. Our own experiences provide a glimpse of the well-intentioned forces that can keep researchers from trying other paths. This challenge is not new. Physicist-turned-structural biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who is president of the Royal Society, worked for several years in a job with funding that was contingent on a steady stream of publications. This forced him to ask safe but incremental questions. To pursue what became his Nobel-prizewinning work (on the structure of the ribosome), he moved to another institution where he could ask the questions that interested him, irrespective of the chances for publication. As he describes in his Nobel biography, the decision required an international move and a large pay cut.
Just like your coconut.
Time to try a new path
It's not my duty to give you money for whatever you want. Sell your ideas to me and if they pique my interest, I'll give you money. This is easier than ever now with Kickstarter and other online funding tools. So quit complaining and treat your work like a business (or if you are unable or unwilling to learn some business skills, hire an agent to do that for you).
Private entrepreneurs, hoping to profit from research by promising researchers should be the ones financing it. As long as the taxpayers pay for most of scientific dollars — and are represented by bureaucrats without personal "skin in the game" — the bureaucrats will be both subject to corruption and loath to appear corrupt, frivolous, or otherwise derelict of their duties and funding only "reliable" science.
At some point it must have seemed like a good idea to have financing-seeking scientists appeal not to the unscientific louts and their charitable instincts, but to fellow scientists charged with dispensing the dollars already confiscated from the louts at gun-point (as all taxes are collected, don't kid yourself).
As TFA suggests, fellow scientists may be too stifling as well. Go back to what works best — Capitalism. If it seems like there is a chance of it being useful, someone will pay for it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The every single deviation and sub-invention is separately filed for the corporate patent chest.
Look, I get it, everyone wants to come up with the next huge breakthrough. As you become an expert in a field, however, you find that the most value often does come from pushing the boundary forward a little bit. Everyone doing this together keeps a steady march forward. As you establish yourself as a competent researcher who knows your field, it becomes easier to push the envelope. If you do have a eureka moment, that's awesome, but you'll have to work extra hard to support it, and that involves greater risk. The problem with deviating from your hypothesis or grant focus to chase shiny is that those neat things are a little more likely to be outside your area of expertise (and not really shiny) or even worse, capitalizing on chance (opposite of shiny - it's a trap). In the age of big data, I would much rather researchers be a little frustrated than report on every single unhypothesized correlation in their matrix. Sorry to be a wet blanket!
Some time ago tenure system was devised to protect researchers who explore new paths. They could not be fired just because they seemingly accomplish nothing for years for a chance that they may suddenly revolutionize their field or something.
Nowadays universities in USA have turned into money making businesses which are all focused on whether a professor can bring grants or profitable patents disregarding long term benefits for exploring new paths.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Journals are partly a relic of the past, when sharing data and algorithms was far more difficult. If I develop a data set and a tool for creating and analyzing the data, sharing that with documentation is generally far more valuable to science than a publication. Peer review has a place, but it's fraught with problems. Let's make publications secondary and evaluate researchers based on the data and tools they release.
This is due to publish or perish mentality in academia, which is pervasive. Each university professor is required to publish a certain number of papers (as a first author or a corresponding author). Making a paper is in itself a time consuming task. If you are required to make at least three papers, plus teaching, plus mentoring, plus pro-bono service tasks, you're pretty much done with your time---let alone venturing toward "new and exciting" questions.
On top of that, most of scientists are heavily dependent on grant funding. Grant is typically highly conservative and one must show that the proposed grant is going to work by showing preliminary data and prior related experience. If you don't have prior related experience, make sure that you have a team member who do. If there is no preliminary data, chances are your grant will not be even scored (a.k.a., tossed outright as being non-credible).
What we're seeing is the result of capitalism's reach getting to scientists. The focus of institutions has moved from discoveries of research to the monetary benefits of research. The reason for this is plain as day, a lack of funds. The question is, who is restricting funds and what is their motive. If you find this, you'll discover the problem.
Capitalism has it's place but using it everywhere will lead to disaster.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The root problem (I speculate) is the same one that afflicts companies looking ahead only to the next quarter, schools teaching only prescribed and minimally challenging material, the slow strangulation of endless safety regulation, etc. We're short-sighted, and can't fathom even a slight risk of negativity. As long as the next increment turns out OK, we figure we'll be just fine. That works, so long as the path you're taking doesn't lead you off a cliff or to stagnation, but if you have to get over some barrier (financial loss, global competition with rising powers, new discoveries) to get onto the optimal track, the purely local gradient-based search won't work. Even if eventual failure of a system is demonstrated, we'll keep doing the same thing because we're too fearful of the unknown to do anything else.
On the other hand, the real breakthroughs have never been supported by conventional thinkers or their backers. Kuhn, etc. Would taxpayers accept 99% of research funding to add up to nothing for the remaining 1% to pay off 1000-fold or more? I doubt it. The angels and VCs might risk those odds, but not the standard research funding apparatus.
That is the single, most stupid take on research I have ever heard. If people like you were running the show, we would still be living in caves.
Not really, when that first researcher came along and proposed making an artificial man-made "cave" wherever wood could be found, it probably would have piqued the interest of the grant committee. :-)
By the way, the National Science Foundation is training researchers in marketing and other traditional business skills. They want to improve the success rate of moving research out of the lab and into the marketplace so they are teaching researchers to do customer discovery, an iterative product development cycle, realistic planning to move from early adopters to a more mainstream market, etc.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speci...
Private entrepreneurs, hoping to profit from research by promising researchers should be the ones financing it.
Not quite. The National Science Foundation provides an interesting "bridge" between basic research and an investible opportunity. The goal is to help NSF funded research "escape" from the laboratory. Sometimes a commercialization effort is too early or too high risk for the private investment community. This is where the NSF steps in with SBIR, to help scientists get from pure research to a point where private investors see opportunity. NSF SBIR is a bridge from the lab to Angels and VCs.
https://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sb...
And the NSF has a training program to make scientists more likely to succeed when they are nearing the "bridge". NSF I-Corp trains researchers in basic product development and business tasks so that they are more likely to succeed with SBIR or private investment.
https://www.nsf.gov/news/speci...
Back when you could look up at the night sky with a home-built telescope and make ground-breaking discoveries, you could argue that science was more pure in that the scientist was accountable only to himself. Now it costs billions of dollars to make scientific instruments that are capable of detecting phenomena past the boundaries of the possible. Mathematics has never been a turn-the-crank discipline. Biology is also harder than it was in the day of the gentleman-scientist because it's very capital intensive. Money doesn't grow on trees and you eggheads don't get to hike our taxes to fund your (statistically speaking) fool ideas just because you've come up with a more socially acceptable way of saying that you deserve everyone else's money because you're doing God's work.
Breakthroughs don't happen overnight, never have, not really. Most published science is not reproducible, especially in the life sciences. And you want to move from an incremental model to a fund-everything model and expect better results? Nope. Breakthroughs always come at the margins. Nose to the grindstone and stop complaining. Statistically speaking, not a single one of you special little snowflakes has an ego-to-competence ratio below unity. Given the tenor of this post, I'd surmise that it's somewhere several dB north of unity.
I totally agree that researchers should go down new and interesting paths, most of which will lead nowhere. The problem is the opportunity cost of letting them do so. Every $1 you spend down a dead end is $1 you haven't spent on something that will actually make a difference, like filling potholes in roads.
However I would say that a lot of funding is currently miss-allocated towards politically expedient research rather than something actually useful. About 90% of climate research funding, for example - a huge amount of money.
Please mod me down. Thanks.
Because I figured that I could actually get time to get some work done, because I wouldn't need millions in equipment, just a few computers.
Then I realized that you're expected to be a "small business owner" funding a posse of grad students, and I imagine if you didn't keep grinding the grant mill for that, you'd be forced out through all kinds of nasty subtle tricks that academic departments have to force people out these days, whether it's denying tenure track or doing a negative performance review process even after tenure.
It would just be no fun at all, in this day and age, so I went a different path.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
[Researcher] Give me your money, it's for sciency stuff, you wouldn't understand. [Politician] Oh, okay, I like you, here you go.
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So I propose a basic repository for these types of research avenues. Researchers submit their project and stay within their desired approved scope. Then as they find other interesting paths to branch they 'suggest' them to other research teams to peruse. That way work would not need to be repeated except to verify results. Of course this will probably never happen due to the ambiguity of the credit.
Academic researchers are primarily funded and promoted by (1) government and (2) other researchers. "Industry" has little to do with it.
Industrial researchers tend to work on whatever is actually important to their company and tend to be flexible in terms of research directions.
This article describes precisely my reason for not pursuing a tenure-track position. Choosing tenure-track – aside from the known committee obligations, teaching, and so on – almost always results in most of your ideas being still-born.
That is, you get a startup package, and eventually manage to build up a several million $$$ capability for a single, specialized purpose. Soon enough, you have tenure. Soon enough, you solve the Grand Challenge in your subject area. You can write funding proposals on just about anything and win, as long as those are very closely related to what you have already done, and also use the expensive system that you've built up.
But hey, you are smart, and often converse with professors in other Departments or Disciplines. You see new 'cross-cutting' opportunities to go after other Grand Challenges, only they are not in your main field of renown. Pity. If you are young, you try a couple of times to enter those new scientific arenas because you have valuable ideas in those areas. Your proposals are rejected, and you are eaten by a grue. Three years later, someone in that field you wanted to enter publishes results of a clone of your proposed concept, insight, experiment, or work. You were shut out, and learn that you have wasted your time.
With experience, you learn that your tenured position is regarded by the Regents of the University as, "We boast a world-renowned expert in topic *********." And then you are stuck. You've probably got a mortgage and family by then, too. You not only lack the time to do what a research-concentrated professor should really do, but are actively discouraged from it by the system.
So you spend the rest of your career proposing incremental advances in an area that by-then bores you. There is no advantage nor profit in expanding your skill-set to other areas where you would have otherwise done great science.