Post #1863647
2026-03-02 23:17 UTC
@Canageek Yes, I sometimes wonder about things like that. Even just having much shorter grant applications and review processes where everything gets a "is this basically sane, OK, it goes in the pool and then it's a lottery" would probably produce basically the same outcomes as now with considerably less work for everyone.
I fear academia is so desperate to believe in the possibility of absolute scientifically (or rather, scientistically) ranked meritocracy that it's killing us sometimes.
Replies (1)
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@Canageek@wandering.shop 2026-03-02 23:19
@JubalBarca I think we'd actually get significantly better results because what we're testing right now is how good you are at writing a grant which... might not be orthogonal to how skilled you are as a researcher, but I don't think the two skills have a strong correlation. plus, there's such an emphasis on arguing for real world impact in your grants that I feel a lot of important lines of research are ignored