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.

> 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.

> 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...