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joshuamcginnis | on: Cats are (almost) liquid
So what exactly is your criteria for when a study should or should not be publicly funded?
bayindirh | parent | next
Good question.

I think if there's a large corpus of research supporting a hypothesis, any research retrying that hypothesis in an insignificant way can be disqualified from funding. If you challenge the hypothesis, or adding something significant to the dark areas of that hypothesis, you could be funded.

Moreover, if your research fails to prove that hypothesis, or proves the exact opposite, that should be also printed/published somewhere, because failing is equally important in science.

In short, tell us something we don't know in a provable way. That's it. This is what science is.

This is what I think with about your question with my Sysadmin/Researcher/Ph.D. hats combined.

joshuamcginnis | root | parent
Thanks for your kind response! Are you familiar with the Replication Crisis? What happens when most of the "hypothesis" being challenged can't be rightly replicated in the first place?

And what happens when the primary means of funding is attached the volume of papers and not the quality or impact, as is what I believe to be the case generally here in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

bayindirh | root | parent
Hey, no problem. Yes, I'm familiar with it, and I work in/with projects which aims to create reproducible research (Galaxy, Zenodo, etc.). If you tell me that "I can make this unreproducible paper reproducible, but with a different process (or the same one), and share all the pipeline from dust to result", I'll tell you to go for it, and fund you.

At the end, if something is not reproducible, and you're testing reproducibility of that thing, it's illuminating a dark area of that hypothesis.

Measuring the quality of the research and its impact is not something I'm very familiar with to be honest, and I'm not from US, so I can't tell how universities push their people, however publish or perish is a real problem everywhere in the world.

We used to see citation numbers important, then cite-rings cropped up. We valued paper counts, then professors started to lend their names to papers in their areas for "free" advisory. Now we have more complex algorithms/methods, and now I'm more of a research institute person than an academic, and I don't know how effective these things are anymore.

But hey, I do research for fun and write papers now and then. Just to keep myself entertained to find reasons to learn something new.

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coldpie | parent | next
Why are you asking us? I'm not a research scientist/funding expert. There are people whose job it is to decide that, and they decided it was. I trust them to do their jobs, just like they trust me to do my job when they need my services.
joshuamcginnis | root | parent
Why do you trust these people when for the most part, they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests?
bayindirh | root | parent | next
Because it's not like that everywhere in the world. For example, here, to be able to get funding, you need to pass a panel interview of researchers who are experienced in the area of your research. Our system employs "hordes of research experts" to shake down most inadequate ones, and push the rest to the actual researchers to further filter them.

IIRC, many if not most EU countries employ similar methods.

coldpie | root | parent
> they are unelected bureaucrats serving their own self-interests

You seem to be pushing an agenda, not asking questions in good faith.

joshuamcginnis | root | parent
My agenda is that I think it's completely rationale to ask about the merits of publicly funded research and debate that topic. You may not like that question or my responses, but that is my assertion here.
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rootusrootus | parent
This whole thread started because you implied this study was worthless. Would be interested to hear your criteria.
joshuamcginnis | root | parent
It's entirely rational and reasonable for someone to at least ask and receive a decent response to the question, "Why should my tax dollars have been used to funded this research?" Academia should have great responses lined up which garner continued support from the public.

But the fact that we aren't even allowed to ask questions without immediately being shut down as dissenters of all publicly funded research is problematic.

Public research should absolutely be at least partially evaluated by the very people funding it to begin with.