Yes they absolutely are in principle, but I suspect his experience/view has been that they overlap very considerably

I would have thought the opposite? He may have learned that following proper legal process commonly gets the right outcome. So wrong outcome implies bad process

As I read it, the claim is that in some fields, your chances decline each year you don’t get a faculty job (because committees sometimes infer “undesirability”)

Which could be true

I may be misunderstanding, but the post doesn't say ppl outside academia apply to academic jobs. It says that your chances of getting an academic job are much reduced, perhaps gone forever, if you don't find the right thing within a pretty short window. I don't think these two claims are the same

Relatedly, people forget (or never knew) that Dawkins did not develop the idea of a meme as a theory of cultural evolution. It was rather a (flawed) pedagogical device to help explain the idea that design will emerge whenever you have selection, inheritance and a source of variation

Dawkins wrote an intro to Blackmore's The Meme Machine, and in it he writes something like, "Every theory deserves its best shot" — which isn't a ditching but it is a cautious, "I'm not actually sure about this"

Blair was a vain evangelist, which is why we went into Iraq. Cameron was always complacent and that led to Brexit. Johnson always thought the rules didn’t apply to him and that led to partygate. And so on

I have this pet theory that with all PMs, the trait that causes their eventual downfall is fully visible from the beginning. The trait can be more damning or less, but you can see it at the beginning, you just have to look

Photo of Ed Miliband wearing a t-shirt that reads "I voted for chaos with Ed Miliband"

Hey, I voted for it 11 years ago, better late than never

Yes. Just, I know many EU countries are much weaker on this. There is not just precarious teaching faculty but also post-docs with many years experience

Something much better can be imagined, but it requires ppl willing and able to be very disruptive to the sector

The problem is widespread in the sector. Postdoctoral positions often follow the letter but not the spirit of EU law. The laws need tightening, imo. This would get a lot of pushback from research intensive institutions, but could create a sector genuinely different to the US

Fatal flaw: Keir Starmer’s leadership vacuum threatens to swallow him up The PM’s current and former colleagues say the Mandelson scandal has exposed the hollowness of his hands-off style.

This is an excellent and very depressing analysis

www.politico.eu/article/keir...

Gary Stevenson (I know, I know) has this story about how at LSE he had a scotch egg for lunch each day because it was cheapest way to fill his tummy. And then the moment he got his first bonus his first thought was, "What was the point of eating all those scotch eggs?"

Poor in absolute quality? I don’t buy it

EPL had five of the top eight in the CL group stage

What has happened is the middle and even bottom of EPL is much stronger than it used to be, so top clubs still have to play hard every game. By this stage of the season the quality is not as it could be

Lots of comments in the quote posts about what can be done about this problem

Another idea. Remove PhD posts as a legitimate cost. (1) Focus ERC on delivering the science, not training as such. (2) One of the key long term sources of the problem is too many PhD graduates

Yeah. I do think some of the systemic problems we face that seem unrelated on the surface (publishing costs, too many applicants for grants, inequities of career progression, degenerate research programs, etc) are actually deeply interrelated. It will take decades to untangle the mess

There’s a palpable “mob” mentality surging across social media in the aftermath of the Orbán era. Former power brokers, propagandists, and loyal enablers are being dragged into the light - facing demands for accountability and public shaming.🧵

Péter Magyar’s real coup was winning over loyal Orbán voters – not preaching to the converted He is no progressive but unlike the old opposition, the Tisza leader listened to Orbán’s rural base, says Nóra Schultz, podcaster and political theorist

Lot of non-Hungarian commentary on the recent election has the wrong lessons. This article gets things right

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"Magyar has been accused of not showing sufficient support for progressive causes... but we must consider this win through a strategic political lens"

Something like this could tackle it at the appropriate institutional level. Make the ERC grant less a golden ticket and more driven by actual research demands.

Haven't thought about it much, I admit, and of course could come with other side effects.

bsky.app/profile/thom...

4 Days After the Elections: Péter Magyar has begun dismantling Orbán’s legacy Tisza’s victory has redrawn Hungary’s political map.

Very good short summary of the aftermath of the Hungarian election

"Among Tisza’s MPs there is no one who previously held a mandate in either opposition or governing parties... it is civilians who have entered parliament... closely resembles the situation in 1990"

substack.com/inbox/post/1...

This would generate (many) more applications. CES can afford this because it is relatively small, but it seems ERC cannot

As I see it, the problem is that these grants have value to individual careers way out of proportion to what they could contribute to science, and therefore people want them

Yes, many institutions have a business model to run itself on overheads, leading to these limitations. But if funders at large chose to stop paying those overheads, institutions would have to move to a different model that does not incentivise grants for their own sake. You would have a lot to gain

Hot take: many contemporary fields aren't progressive. Far more than we like to pretend

Hyper-specialisation and intense competition (ERC etc) mean that researchers have strong incentives to keep turning the wheels regardless, and this includes giving positive review of peers

My suggestion would be something like:

Brief application: 3 pages of text, CV, list of 10 relevant publications

Reviewers skim through and select top 50%.

Followed by an honest-to-good lottery.

Would allow for actually brave ideas, still select for merit (somewhat), waste less time for all.

I also like this idea. It has nuance. Demand for big chunks of money should not be institution-driven, but based on real needs and prospects of good ROI. "Money as a merit in itself" is a corrupt road in recruitment policy.

bsky.app/profile/thom...

ERC could instead just make indirect costs ineligible

That would get a lot of pushback from infrastructure-heavy institutions, but it’s justifiable on it own terms (“we fund the projects themselves, not the costs of running a place”) and it would certainly reduce the number of applications

My career experience has been that delivering excellence on the cheap doesn’t get rewarded. Delivering average but funded does

Actually thinking more, ERC could simply make indirect costs ineligible. That would get a lot of pushback but it’s justifiable on it own terms (“we fund the projects themselves, not the costs of running a place”) and would certainly reduce the number of applications

I blame university leaderships as much as any other stakeholder. So long as they treat funding in general, and ERC in particular, as a goal in and of itself (in promotions etc), oppt costs will still be worth it

They should be rewarding the science itself, not acquiring the means to do science

Got them! Thank you