This is cool! Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this. I think this would be a cool experiment. I wish it wasn't tied to being a professor, since every step toward being a professor is also hacked.
In your system, how do you measure success? This has come up a lot in discussions I've had about this idea (see DoctorDT below). Publicatio…
This is cool! Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this. I think this would be a cool experiment. I wish it wasn't tied to being a professor, since every step toward being a professor is also hacked.
In your system, how do you measure success? This has come up a lot in discussions I've had about this idea (see DoctorDT below). Publications and citations are both pretty dismal. Valuing science seems easier decades later––for instance, everybody now pretty much agrees Kahneman and Tversky did something pretty useful in the 70s––but valuing it before it's done or shortly after seems hard, at least when we all have to agree to a number.
While not exactly the same approach, I see something similar successfully happening at work with funding awarded to more applied technology oriented projects.
We have a heuristic where we basically implement this: first time funding requesters will be told up front that they can only expect moderate funding amounts. If they “successfully” (success being an elusive concept in itself, I know) run that project, win some more funding in open competitions and generally prove their worthiness of the funding awarded by making progress and convincing others with their progress to invest as well, the funding awarded will increase.
It’s not exactly personal trust as with the agents, but given the repeated and very direct contact over the years, is getting close.
We even deliberately designed some “entry level” funding schemes to have a facility to test this more systematically with newcomers.
We are quite open about this process and what we want to achieve so there is inevitably attempts at “grant hacking”. But usually it’s so obvious we can call it out even if done via those in power, and in the rare case of a bad choice, the requesters will fail at the next attempt b/c of non-performance.
It also helps to understand that in order to find the truly outstanding raw diamonds, you must be ready to sift through a lot of sand. If you can do the latter with smaller entry level projects, chances are you’ll still have substantial amounts for the diamonds once uncovered. ☺️
The definition of success is obviously the important implementation detail. I envision it as potentially a sliding scale depending on how much funding is requested, where the lower end of the scale could just be an accepted conference submission or journal publication (not even considering impact or citations). The handling of null results could follow some of the related ideas from https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping-sciences-paradox/. I don't have a solid idea yet on how to scale this up for research that needs larger amounts of funding, where a more stringent definition and level of success would be desired in practice.
This is cool! Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard of this. I think this would be a cool experiment. I wish it wasn't tied to being a professor, since every step toward being a professor is also hacked.
In your system, how do you measure success? This has come up a lot in discussions I've had about this idea (see DoctorDT below). Publications and citations are both pretty dismal. Valuing science seems easier decades later––for instance, everybody now pretty much agrees Kahneman and Tversky did something pretty useful in the 70s––but valuing it before it's done or shortly after seems hard, at least when we all have to agree to a number.
While not exactly the same approach, I see something similar successfully happening at work with funding awarded to more applied technology oriented projects.
We have a heuristic where we basically implement this: first time funding requesters will be told up front that they can only expect moderate funding amounts. If they “successfully” (success being an elusive concept in itself, I know) run that project, win some more funding in open competitions and generally prove their worthiness of the funding awarded by making progress and convincing others with their progress to invest as well, the funding awarded will increase.
It’s not exactly personal trust as with the agents, but given the repeated and very direct contact over the years, is getting close.
We even deliberately designed some “entry level” funding schemes to have a facility to test this more systematically with newcomers.
We are quite open about this process and what we want to achieve so there is inevitably attempts at “grant hacking”. But usually it’s so obvious we can call it out even if done via those in power, and in the rare case of a bad choice, the requesters will fail at the next attempt b/c of non-performance.
It also helps to understand that in order to find the truly outstanding raw diamonds, you must be ready to sift through a lot of sand. If you can do the latter with smaller entry level projects, chances are you’ll still have substantial amounts for the diamonds once uncovered. ☺️
The definition of success is obviously the important implementation detail. I envision it as potentially a sliding scale depending on how much funding is requested, where the lower end of the scale could just be an accepted conference submission or journal publication (not even considering impact or citations). The handling of null results could follow some of the related ideas from https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping-sciences-paradox/. I don't have a solid idea yet on how to scale this up for research that needs larger amounts of funding, where a more stringent definition and level of success would be desired in practice.