Also, respectfully remind everyone about the "Science" governing Covid and the concerted efforts to silence and ostracize any dissent from the Party Line. Shameful episode in the history of scientific merit. Indeed, Biden labeled these dissidents as "disinformation" agents.......
All in all, cogent and indeed exemplary. When scientific research congeals in to "Science"...its a short evolution to orthodoxy, and thus the end of critical thinking and free inquiry. DEI only exacerbates this toxic trend in both selections of topics and researchers. Stalin and Hitler would surely approve of the selection of "scientists" for political advantage. When I see any paper on equity, I cringe....I can expect a diatribe on White Supremacy......
I have so many comments to make on this that I hardly know where to begin. I do sort of agree with some of it, but I think I have a much longer and more diverse background in R&D than the author.
I might have to step back to address them one by one.
I have thought about how we divide science into "pure" and "applied" parts quite a bit. I think it is oversimplified.
I also agree that although most advances are made by men and have been made by men, that does not mean that there are not opportunities for women. In the R&D startup I am designing, women will feature prominently. I know MANY women in STEM who contribute MASSIVELY.
Anyway, I will get back to this. It is a nice start, but the points it raises need to be addressed.
This is a great essay, but was marred by the fact that you just _had_ to make the point that, to date, many fundamental discoveries were made by men. How is that relevant to your thesis? It's all too easy for small minds to take your entire thesis and say that, given limited resources, we really should concentrate on funding basic research pursued by men. And FYI, I've been outspoken about the inappropriateness of DEI criteria, so I'm not writing this because I'm a postmodern feminist pissed off about men. I'm writing it because your comment indicates a lack of rigor in sticking to your main point. That is, unless you really think women should be excluded....
"Unfortunately, NSF far from favoring individual scientists has increasingly emphasized team research which has begun to lead to support for projects that are more political than scientific: for the study of “campus intersectionality” or “increasing diversity” in computing. The point is, the scientific-review process needs to be reexamined"
As an engineer, I’m very much in the applied camp. One of the takeaways from my time in R&D was that potential utility should be a consideration for the level of funding. Indeed, my daughter’s time thirty years afterwards only enhanced this view (300+ companies partnered at her university basically drove the bulk of research, and govt funding was minimal). It’s not to say that the theoretical realm is without value, indeed it often feeds the practical ahead of those applications, but you have plenty of hints about what is possible long before it is actualized.
At the end of the day, the truth is what is supported repeatedly by the evidence of consistent testing. Let’s aim for more of that.
I have a long history of doing blue sky applied research. That sounds like an oxymoron, but that is because the way we characterize research is too narrow and does not have enough categories.
How did Bell Labs do what it did? Because they gave the investigators a bit of freedom and support to do interesting things. There was NO pressure to do applied stuff, but everyone knew it was a commercial company. We were not stupid.
So, we did some commercial stuff. But we were able to deliver results orders of magnitude better than what "standard" engineers could do, because of the kind of talent and freedom that was unleashed.
If you want to hit a home run, you have to try. You cannot always try for a bunt. Because then you are guaranteed to always fail.
I sat for many years on a funding body. The problem is much more complex than you outline. First there are inevitably more applications than funds to disburse. Secondly, there is the amount requested in each of several dozen applications received. Do you fund 5 "cheap" projects or one mega project? Then there is the quality of the proposals. How likely is a proposal to achieve its stated goal and does it have wide stakeholder support? Do we fund a large well supported project and perhaps one or two cheaper "blue skies" projects?
All that aside, there is the calibre of the applicant and the track record for previous grants. The reality is that most applicants are simply after money to keep their lab team employed and the project is designed with that one goal in mind. Many teams are actually working on several projects funded by different bodies simply to pay the wages. Is that good science or "pedestrian science"?
Should we evaluate a proposal on whether it will retain staff? Is that a good use of resources? Do we fund "Me also" projects - seeking to replicate somebody else's published study? A good science principle but will that result in us getting fired for "wasting funds"? Other applications will lie - They already know the result as its a project written around work already done but not yet published. The "grant" is sought by them to actually fund new work bearing no relation to what is proposed in the project.
Being on a funding body means listening to the gossip, working the conferences, finding out what is really being done and by whom. The hardest part is saying "no" to really good projects that we simply cannot afford to fund because of the huge pile of equally impressive proposals and the unpublicised caveats around funding that are mandated by the fund provider for whom we work.
Anyone with half a brain knows you CANNOT tell the dopey government funding people what you are doing and what you have done. If you do, you have destroyed your career...flushed it down the toilet.
They normally are too incompetent to recognize real promise, in my experience. And I have done this for decades.
I am creating a startup to try to address this situation. One CANNOT tell the government people ANYTHING since the people sitting on these government boards are incompetent for the most part. We will do stuff on our own dime and then present the results to the people with money, without showing them how we did it. If they like it, they can buy it. If they do not, then we can go to their competition.
This essay addresses a key point about breakthrough innovation in pure science. Usually one or two insightful scientists conjure a new paradigm born of 1. tension in existing theory 2. a multitude of experimental hints that others hadn't connected, and 3. new opportunities in experimental equipment. Bringing those factors together is what we sometimes call "intuition" - but it is a talent that NSF needs to identify and fund.
NSF has really bad people who are administering their programs. In my fields, only the most stupid people possible took jobs at NSF. They made a terrible mess of things, as one would expect. Is this a surprise?
How would one expect NSF to find talented people? What? Even if they found them they would ignore them since the people doing the evaluation resent them, for the most part.
The average person cannot tell the difference between a talented and an untalented individual.
Consider the following quote:
"You can't expect the sheep to respect the best and the brightest. They don't know the difference, really. The vast majority of them [humans] do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn't a really good scientist. That is the main problem with science, in this century.
Science is being judged by people, funding is being done by people, who don't understand it." -- Kary Mullis
I pretty much agree with Mullis. I might have been more skeptical or quiet when I was younger. But now, decades later, I have seen enough.
I agree with your assessment. The culture in academic science—including at top-tier universities—has shifted markedly from decades past. What once emphasized curiosity-driven inquiry and deep collaboration has increasingly given way to a hyper-competitive environment where egos, self-promotion, and risk-aversion dominate. Faculty (and their Ph.D. students) now invest significant mental energy in avoiding being scooped, curating personal brands via websites and social media, chasing conferences. They pad their CVs with incremental papers rather than pursuing profound, open-ended questions. Brilliant scientists who attract genuine accolades and private funding often face quiet resentment rather than admiration. Mistakes in experiments or theory are hard to catch amid the noise, so the incentive is to publish often. Physics, especially high-energy/particle physics, illustrates this disease vividly. NSF and DOE together give out $1.5 billion per year. Yet the fundamental insights since 2001 have been strikingly limited. Even the Higgs was well predicted. The contrast with the 1960s–1980s—when the core of the Standard Model itself was built on far smaller budgets—is stark. Similarly in astrophysics, the discovery of dark energy and exoplanets came from small groups - doggedly pursuing their curiosity.
I am shocked by what I observe. I am not the only one.
I decided to push all the distractions aside for a few years, about 5 years ago or so, during the pandemic. I cranked out about 10-15 novel results...staggeringly better than what is publicly available. One after another.
I had "proposed" to work on these very same projects repeatedly at an FFRDC for 10 years or so. I was ALWAYS turned down because the managers (who had never produced a single thing in their entire lives) wanted me to do nonsense instead (sort of like what the managers of Cowan and Reines said after they discovered the neutrino while working for what became DOE, inventing a bunch of useful technologies still in use to this day along the path).
The FFRDC could have owned these things I did. The US government could have owned them, or had a piece of them, and years earlier. But in their "infinite wisdom", they made life so unbearable that I left.
Before that, AT&T (the original company, before it went bankrupt; the new one is Southwestern Bell which just bought the name) could have owned some of this stuff, since I was contemplating it there. The managers at Bell Labs were sure it was all nonsense, just like they thought Voice over Internet Protocol calling (VOIP calling) was stupid and the person who created it was an idiot. He was with me at Bell Labs and they drove him out. He made 840 million dollars 20 some years ago at the first public offering of Skype, based on his ownership of only 20% of the shares.
So we let our least able people decide what projects to work on, and who should be allowed to have a job. One sees the predictable result. It is a disgrace.
Between 2008 and 2014, I was a member of the NASA "Kepler" telescope Science Team, that included 10 brilliant postdocs. One by one, they became disillusioned and left academia - usually to lead a finance, Wall Street, or hedge fund group - where their brilliance appreciated. They were all males, and thus couldn't get a faculty job offer. All of the female postdocs got faculty jobs.
Also, respectfully remind everyone about the "Science" governing Covid and the concerted efforts to silence and ostracize any dissent from the Party Line. Shameful episode in the history of scientific merit. Indeed, Biden labeled these dissidents as "disinformation" agents.......
All in all, cogent and indeed exemplary. When scientific research congeals in to "Science"...its a short evolution to orthodoxy, and thus the end of critical thinking and free inquiry. DEI only exacerbates this toxic trend in both selections of topics and researchers. Stalin and Hitler would surely approve of the selection of "scientists" for political advantage. When I see any paper on equity, I cringe....I can expect a diatribe on White Supremacy......
I agree with this essay 100%. Which doesn't solve the issue of how to evaluate the promise of scientists.
You are correct. I am working on that. I have pages of notes on it.
I have so many comments to make on this that I hardly know where to begin. I do sort of agree with some of it, but I think I have a much longer and more diverse background in R&D than the author.
I might have to step back to address them one by one.
I have thought about how we divide science into "pure" and "applied" parts quite a bit. I think it is oversimplified.
I also agree that although most advances are made by men and have been made by men, that does not mean that there are not opportunities for women. In the R&D startup I am designing, women will feature prominently. I know MANY women in STEM who contribute MASSIVELY.
Anyway, I will get back to this. It is a nice start, but the points it raises need to be addressed.
This is a great essay, but was marred by the fact that you just _had_ to make the point that, to date, many fundamental discoveries were made by men. How is that relevant to your thesis? It's all too easy for small minds to take your entire thesis and say that, given limited resources, we really should concentrate on funding basic research pursued by men. And FYI, I've been outspoken about the inappropriateness of DEI criteria, so I'm not writing this because I'm a postmodern feminist pissed off about men. I'm writing it because your comment indicates a lack of rigor in sticking to your main point. That is, unless you really think women should be excluded....
"Unfortunately, NSF far from favoring individual scientists has increasingly emphasized team research which has begun to lead to support for projects that are more political than scientific: for the study of “campus intersectionality” or “increasing diversity” in computing. The point is, the scientific-review process needs to be reexamined"
Case in point!
All parts of the process should be re-examined. We are not covering ourselves with glory, to be honest.
As an engineer, I’m very much in the applied camp. One of the takeaways from my time in R&D was that potential utility should be a consideration for the level of funding. Indeed, my daughter’s time thirty years afterwards only enhanced this view (300+ companies partnered at her university basically drove the bulk of research, and govt funding was minimal). It’s not to say that the theoretical realm is without value, indeed it often feeds the practical ahead of those applications, but you have plenty of hints about what is possible long before it is actualized.
At the end of the day, the truth is what is supported repeatedly by the evidence of consistent testing. Let’s aim for more of that.
I have a long history of doing blue sky applied research. That sounds like an oxymoron, but that is because the way we characterize research is too narrow and does not have enough categories.
How did Bell Labs do what it did? Because they gave the investigators a bit of freedom and support to do interesting things. There was NO pressure to do applied stuff, but everyone knew it was a commercial company. We were not stupid.
So, we did some commercial stuff. But we were able to deliver results orders of magnitude better than what "standard" engineers could do, because of the kind of talent and freedom that was unleashed.
If you want to hit a home run, you have to try. You cannot always try for a bunt. Because then you are guaranteed to always fail.
I sat for many years on a funding body. The problem is much more complex than you outline. First there are inevitably more applications than funds to disburse. Secondly, there is the amount requested in each of several dozen applications received. Do you fund 5 "cheap" projects or one mega project? Then there is the quality of the proposals. How likely is a proposal to achieve its stated goal and does it have wide stakeholder support? Do we fund a large well supported project and perhaps one or two cheaper "blue skies" projects?
All that aside, there is the calibre of the applicant and the track record for previous grants. The reality is that most applicants are simply after money to keep their lab team employed and the project is designed with that one goal in mind. Many teams are actually working on several projects funded by different bodies simply to pay the wages. Is that good science or "pedestrian science"?
Should we evaluate a proposal on whether it will retain staff? Is that a good use of resources? Do we fund "Me also" projects - seeking to replicate somebody else's published study? A good science principle but will that result in us getting fired for "wasting funds"? Other applications will lie - They already know the result as its a project written around work already done but not yet published. The "grant" is sought by them to actually fund new work bearing no relation to what is proposed in the project.
Being on a funding body means listening to the gossip, working the conferences, finding out what is really being done and by whom. The hardest part is saying "no" to really good projects that we simply cannot afford to fund because of the huge pile of equally impressive proposals and the unpublicised caveats around funding that are mandated by the fund provider for whom we work.
Anyone with half a brain knows you CANNOT tell the dopey government funding people what you are doing and what you have done. If you do, you have destroyed your career...flushed it down the toilet.
They normally are too incompetent to recognize real promise, in my experience. And I have done this for decades.
I am creating a startup to try to address this situation. One CANNOT tell the government people ANYTHING since the people sitting on these government boards are incompetent for the most part. We will do stuff on our own dime and then present the results to the people with money, without showing them how we did it. If they like it, they can buy it. If they do not, then we can go to their competition.
Done.
This essay addresses a key point about breakthrough innovation in pure science. Usually one or two insightful scientists conjure a new paradigm born of 1. tension in existing theory 2. a multitude of experimental hints that others hadn't connected, and 3. new opportunities in experimental equipment. Bringing those factors together is what we sometimes call "intuition" - but it is a talent that NSF needs to identify and fund.
NSF has really bad people who are administering their programs. In my fields, only the most stupid people possible took jobs at NSF. They made a terrible mess of things, as one would expect. Is this a surprise?
How would one expect NSF to find talented people? What? Even if they found them they would ignore them since the people doing the evaluation resent them, for the most part.
The average person cannot tell the difference between a talented and an untalented individual.
Consider the following quote:
"You can't expect the sheep to respect the best and the brightest. They don't know the difference, really. The vast majority of them [humans] do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn't a really good scientist. That is the main problem with science, in this century.
Science is being judged by people, funding is being done by people, who don't understand it." -- Kary Mullis
I pretty much agree with Mullis. I might have been more skeptical or quiet when I was younger. But now, decades later, I have seen enough.
I agree with your assessment. The culture in academic science—including at top-tier universities—has shifted markedly from decades past. What once emphasized curiosity-driven inquiry and deep collaboration has increasingly given way to a hyper-competitive environment where egos, self-promotion, and risk-aversion dominate. Faculty (and their Ph.D. students) now invest significant mental energy in avoiding being scooped, curating personal brands via websites and social media, chasing conferences. They pad their CVs with incremental papers rather than pursuing profound, open-ended questions. Brilliant scientists who attract genuine accolades and private funding often face quiet resentment rather than admiration. Mistakes in experiments or theory are hard to catch amid the noise, so the incentive is to publish often. Physics, especially high-energy/particle physics, illustrates this disease vividly. NSF and DOE together give out $1.5 billion per year. Yet the fundamental insights since 2001 have been strikingly limited. Even the Higgs was well predicted. The contrast with the 1960s–1980s—when the core of the Standard Model itself was built on far smaller budgets—is stark. Similarly in astrophysics, the discovery of dark energy and exoplanets came from small groups - doggedly pursuing their curiosity.
I am shocked by what I observe. I am not the only one.
I decided to push all the distractions aside for a few years, about 5 years ago or so, during the pandemic. I cranked out about 10-15 novel results...staggeringly better than what is publicly available. One after another.
I had "proposed" to work on these very same projects repeatedly at an FFRDC for 10 years or so. I was ALWAYS turned down because the managers (who had never produced a single thing in their entire lives) wanted me to do nonsense instead (sort of like what the managers of Cowan and Reines said after they discovered the neutrino while working for what became DOE, inventing a bunch of useful technologies still in use to this day along the path).
The FFRDC could have owned these things I did. The US government could have owned them, or had a piece of them, and years earlier. But in their "infinite wisdom", they made life so unbearable that I left.
Before that, AT&T (the original company, before it went bankrupt; the new one is Southwestern Bell which just bought the name) could have owned some of this stuff, since I was contemplating it there. The managers at Bell Labs were sure it was all nonsense, just like they thought Voice over Internet Protocol calling (VOIP calling) was stupid and the person who created it was an idiot. He was with me at Bell Labs and they drove him out. He made 840 million dollars 20 some years ago at the first public offering of Skype, based on his ownership of only 20% of the shares.
So we let our least able people decide what projects to work on, and who should be allowed to have a job. One sees the predictable result. It is a disgrace.
Between 2008 and 2014, I was a member of the NASA "Kepler" telescope Science Team, that included 10 brilliant postdocs. One by one, they became disillusioned and left academia - usually to lead a finance, Wall Street, or hedge fund group - where their brilliance appreciated. They were all males, and thus couldn't get a faculty job offer. All of the female postdocs got faculty jobs.
The current system is in trouble. The signs are everywhere.
Is anyone paying attention?
In the U.S., no. During trips to China, I saw young people excited about science - motivated by a culture that encouraged and rewarded accomplishment.