Post #1831315

2026-04-20 06:50 UTC

Option #3: New funding mechanisms Give the money out in different ways. Is the proposal dead? One suggestion from Galdin & Silbert (https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/when-trusted-signals-collapse) is that employers (i.e. funders in my context) need to trial more short term contracts, so they can collect reliable signals from workers before committing to longer jobs More radical is push funding - rewards for research achievements rather than plans https://goodscience.substack.com/p/the-case-for-pull-funding-at-the There must be others. Let me know! /7

Replies (1)

@emjonaitis@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-20 10:52

@tomstafford I found your essay thought provoking. The first place my brain went was yes, moving back to old signals, but the anti-meritocratic kind: sticking to the people you know, or the people who are the most similar to the people you know, with all the crassness that implies. An extension of this to research funding which ?might? be less dysfunctional, judging by the fact that it had already been proposed anyway for other reasons -- fund people not projects. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/funding-people-not-projects This still has potential for anti-meritocratic problems but I'm not sure that it is worse on that count than the status quo for public science funding in the US (well... status quo ante, anyway, prior to the present political situation). I *don't* think awarding grants based on already-completed work will solve the issue, because I'm afraid research productivity is not much more difficult to fake than a grant application -- since it is also evaluated mainly via longform text. Ultimately it could be that "people not projects" founders on the same shoals.

Open ##1831316