Most research is funded through grants. Many different federal agencies provide grants, as well as private organizations. When applying for a grant, you have to indicate what you're going to spend the money on. And your grant may be rejected if the organization funding the grant thinks you're not going to spend the money well. And if you can't find someone to give you a grant, you probably can't do the research, even if you have tenure.

There are problems with this system. Researchers often have to spend a lot of time writing grant applications, and grants can be rejected for any number of bad reasons. And there are cases where research was funded that probably shouldn't have been funded. But research funding isn't given willy-nilly to whoever asks, and taxpayers wasting money on kooky ideas isn't a particularly big problem.

I understand your reasoning, but our efforts to prevent this is part of why professors spend so much time writing grants and filling out other paperwork these days. It’s better in my opinion to just accept reasonable risk.

I would add that weird ideas can be surprisingly useful; nobody expected research on gila monsters to lead to our most successful weight loss treatment to date.

the fucking gila monster story is pure revisionist history. back in the late aughts after the human genome got sequenced and qpcr started picking up it was pretty obvious from islet alpha cell proteomics that glucagon would be an interesting drug target.

Researchers were exploring GLP applications in the 90s

researchers don’t receive unlimited funding for life, even if they made it into a permanent position. they have to regularly apply for grants, and those applications are reviewed by experts and have to be grounded properly in previous work. it’s just that potential for profit is not a criterion for evaluation, as it is in the private sector

have you actually done work in science? 8/10 actively working scientists will disagree that the system works in the idealized way that you imagine and the 2/10 that don't disagree are the ones who have made it.

I've worked and still work in science, and his description of grant proposals and research focus is correct.

youre in the 2/10, or aspiring to be in it, "temporarily embarassed PI". be more cynical. a bit of professional advice, if you're still at the postdoc level. don't do what i did, which was to do good science. the best way to get a facilty position is to have a PI boss that will play politics for you.

Why would I take professional advice from an anonymous HN poster? I don't work in academia.

That's why when you apply for grants, they are reviewed by the panels of experts and then you have to report the results/progress. Nobody will just give you money for something crazy.

> Nobody will just give you money for something crazy

string theory.

Anyways, it's very naive to think that "panels of experts" is a sustainable way to judge scientific quality. Eventually, those panels start awarding grants more on the basis of "pattern matching" vs "good science" and then the grant awardees who have been cargo-culted in, start serving on panels.

Who should judge scientific quality, if not individuals familiar with the methods used to generate the results? We are living the counterfactual right now, where political opportunists with axes to grind have replaced the pattern matchers you describe.

nobody is saying this is not the least worst way to fund science in general. the point is that use of taxpayer money demands a higher level of accountability that this method cannot satisfy.

The problem is that 1) accountability creates bureaucracy and 2) accountability currently means "aligns with a political ideology".

And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.

what a tired old argument. you dont know what would have happened if DARPA did not fund ARPANET. we might have had something better. we don't live with access to reasonable counterfactuals.

Au contraire, this is a tired armchair reasoning argument.

We don't know what could've happened, but we do know what did happen. It's like those people that say that the New Deal was bad, actually, and if we did nothing that would be the same or better!

Right... but no. Because the New Deal did pull us out of the depression. It's one of the most potent and effective pieces of policy in American History. We can play armchair economist all day. But we have to face what we know worked and think about why it worked.