The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

The academic funding model was long overdue for a change. As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries. Rather, the bulk of the funding was being secured by careerists and ideologically driven researchers. It's good if those two groups lose interest, science overall will benefit as a result.

Research is inherently risky. If we don't take risks and tackle the big problems, we cannot make progress as a species.

> As others have pointed out, there was no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists, the ones responsible for ground-breaking discoveries.

Who explained this to you? In this thread (I haven't read it all yet)? There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.

And you say "careerist" as if people looking to start a career in research are somehow bad?

I think maybe you have to expand this comment because it's throwing out a lot of negativity without much substance to back it up.

Every genius I met in tech had a story about how they couldn’t get any funding or time to research their own ideas, but had to follow the instructions of some cabal of geezers who control funding in their field.

If you want to look up the age discrimination or age distribution of scientific grants in America. You’ll clearly see that the funding apparatus doesn’t serve early career scientists as well as it did. Accordingly, the government is less valuable and people are correctly perceiving that resources could be better allocated.

> There's a lot of money in academia for curiously ambitious people just starting their careers so it's an odd thing to say.

No, there isn't. As a new researcher, if your proposal challenges an established line of reasoning from a prominent source, it is overwhelmingly rejected.

> Who explained it to you?

How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread. Who are you to challenge it?

It's true that most grant money goes to go to the largest projects, and the largest projects are run by the most well-connected people with the most established research agendas.

But that doesn't mean there isn't money for new researchers who are challenging the establishment. New faculty are afforded a startup package which these days can be in the millions if the research agenda is solid and ambitious.

For those "tech geniuses" who can't get funding, their proposals usually (IME) go like this:

  Do you have any experience leading a large research project of the scale you're proposing -- I was a research assistant once, does that count?
  Have you ever managed a budget this large? -- I've never seen that much money in my life, no.
  What kind of team are you putting together to accomplish this? -- Doing it all myself
  What are the risks of failure and how will you mitigate them? -- No risks, I've already accounted for them all with my perfect plan.
  Why is your method better than the ones in the literature? -- Those idea are old. My ideas are new and clearly better.
  How will your research benefit society? -- Just read the title again, it's self evident.
  How will your research benefit your community? -- Why do I even have to articulate this??
  What's your long-term funding strategy? -- I figured you'd give me all the money I need, forever.

Funding decision: denied

But when you ask them, they'll tell you: "I wasn't funded because they're a bunch of old geezers who didn't appreciate my genius!"

> overwhelmingly rejected.

As they should be. We shouldn't be spending a lot of our very limited and precious funding on counter science.

Some, sure. But if you're not rejecting an overwhelming number of proposals that go against established science, one has to question how established the science really is. How many flat earth researchers should we be funding each year? Or string theorists for that matter?

But you've moved the goalpost, I had responded to this:

> no room in the current model for the curiously ambitious scientists

You said "no room", implying it's not possible. My reply was that actually it's very possible and happens all the time. Is it the common case? No. But in my experience it's quite possible if you have the ability to reasonably articulate a plan. A lot of these "pie in the sky, go against the grain" proposals are also hopefully naive just from a project management and feasibility standpoint. Often times people will get denied funding and feel it's because their idea was just not appreciated, but really it's not the idea but the execution surrounding it that people don't have confidence in.

> How rude. My opinion is informed by my extensive personal experience and echoed by those in the thread.

Please read my reply in the context of your comment; you had not sourced your opinion to yourself; instead you had cited "others have pointed out", so I had wondered who those people were so I could post on their threads. If you had cited your personal experience, I would have taken you at your word.

> Who are you to challenge it?

FWIW, I also have extensive personal experience getting funded for projects which buck traditional norms, so we can kindly put our dicks away. If someone is not getting funded I consider it a persuasive skill issue. Sometimes it's just a luck issue. But lots of people, especially early career researchers, have a good idea but lack the ability to even articulate a clear vision of what their ideas are, and then blame that on others' inability to be persuaded.