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A comment on What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics?. Parent comment

Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by naasking on Monday February 13, 2023 @11:13AM (#34775406)
> But the bigger issue is that all she's saying is that there is a problem (which everyone in the field knows) but doesn't offer any solution.

The solution is to stop pretending there's a problem to solve when there isn't. That's literally what she's saying.

The obvious corollary is, "work on real problems instead of pseudo problems and stop trying to take funding away from people working on real problems".

It seems perfectly obvious that we've passed the point of diminishing returns and it's time to focus on other things until we have a compelling reason to revisit this.

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Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by hackandthink on Monday February 13, 2023 @11:51AM (#34776056)
Something seems to be rotten in the state of science.

Who decides about the money?

I would give every scientist a yearly budget to distribute to Research Organisations / Research Projects. Let's try democracy instead of oligarchy (and maybe ending up in populism or anarchy).

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Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by naasking on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:07PM (#34776379)
I kind of both like and dislike the idea. I suspect this would just become a popularity contest, where the big, prestigious names get all the money and other worthy projects starve. I'd rather the voting be blinded based on project descriptions, and then something like 20-30% of it is lottery based to fight entrenched dogma.
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Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by davrosthedalek on Monday February 13, 2023 @03:12PM (#34779667)
The reviews and funding decisions are normally based on project description. It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research. What's the prior experience, etc. It's impossible to give that information without essentially unblinding the personal information anyway.
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Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by naasking on Monday February 13, 2023 @04:24PM (#34780779)
> It's normally not blinded, and while that has many problems, I think the advantage is very real: You need to know if that person has a real shot at performing that research.

Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.

However, I do agree that some plausibility metric relating the funding requested to the difficulty of the proposed research would be valuable to weed out overly ambitious projects. Moonshot programs can then rely on the lottery.

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Re:What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics? by naasking on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @12:23PM (#34807283)
> Your claim that this advantage exists is based on an assumption that you've accurately evaluated the likelihood that the people who were rejected would not have been able to do the research. I don't think you have reliable data to draw such a conclusion. As such, I don't accept this claim to advantage.

Coincidentally just came across this thread which discusses exactly how much of a fiction this is:

https://twitter.com/ThomasVanRiet2/status/162540854754145894...

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