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Carly Sagan

I was wondering how much time scientists spend applying for funding - & *wow* - I found a SciAm article saying that a 2007 study found that faculty spent 40% of their time looking for funds (!!). Obv., worse now. The article goes on to say that it’d be cheaper in some cases to award funding to everyone bc of how expensive the reviewer process is. Makes me feel better about not having funding, but omg, academia needs serious mental help? scientificamerican.com/article

Scientific American · Dr. No Money: The Broken Science Funding SystemBy The Editors

@carlysagan Yup. Your job as a professor is to get funding and hire PhDs and postdocs with the money. Then they do the actual research research.

(I'm exaggerating a bit, but not that much.)

@carlysagan and in some institutes scientists should also care for the paperwork off the funds... And in some cases it's hell just to justify spending 10 bucks for buying supplies!

@carlysagan It would be better if there was random awards. A lot of the costs of reviewing would actually go to researchers. A lot of reviewing is just to show there is a process to do it, that is, more ass covering and making paper trails.

@profdc9 yeah there’s another article I saw somewhere arguing that every fund needs to be a lottery system. Bc so many ppl apply, it is like winning a lottery anyway lol. Worse is that so far in my career I’ve seen scientists/panels reviewing proposals that they have no topic expertise in whatsoever and I don’t know how common that is - but it makes the review process just utter BS imo

@carlysagan I think a way to do it that's fair would be to rank proposals very coarsely into quartiles, and then assign randomly within the top two quartiles with the fraction awarded depending on the quartile. And the ranking would be based on a one or two page abstract.

@carlysagan @profdc9 It's so much BS that a proposal entirely written by a LLM has probably a good chance of getting funded.

@hannorein @profdc9 lol… i have spent SO much time agonizing over every word written in my proposals & now that I’ve seen review panels who probably understood nothing that I wrote at all - ok, LLMs all the way - let’s go! 😅

@carlysagan @floe enough money for a bit of travel + 2 PhD RAs for every research active tenure track faculty member, and then perhaps a competitive system for funding beyond that would be so much better than what we have now

@carlysagan
"Fixing the system can no longer be put off."
Hahaha, 'no longer' on what timescale?!