universities aren't so bad imo! i can say from experience that you don't know what you're taking for granted until you suddenly don't have it

i can't comment much on the situation in germany. that kind of competition does not sound helpful, though, i agree

in any case i would think that researchers would benefit, sometimes indirectly. it is hard to accomplish much without institution around to allow you to do it

part of the reason i make this suggestion is that i work at a research institution with almost no unrestricted funding. these conditions are very harsh for innovation, and i am forced to spend huge amounts of time just raising money to cover team costs

in my view, institutions should get a chance to use the money based on the conditions they face. if that means competitive grant schemes with a smaller pool of eligible resources, fine. if that means something else, also fine

However institutions can use this money in a variety of ways, some of which don’t suffer the same competitive dynamics, hence the suggestion

If the money at institutions is used to open new lines for researcher positions and those are advertised nationally or internationally, that can also induce waste in a similar way as big competitive grant programs

Within institutions, project based funding doesn’t have this same problem because the pool of competitors is much smaller

Project-based funding is prone to waste because the amount distributed is often low relative to the number of competitors

Well again my argument is not that competition will disappear but rather that some forms of competition are more destructive than others, either because they induce gaming or because it ends up wasting resources

On this day in 2019, I witnessed one of the coolest things ever. A lenticular cloud lit-up by a setting sun over the Perito Morena Glacier in Argentina.

If anything these facts illustrate the unintended side effects of competitive grant schemes that I was talking about. But of course I agree that constrained resources creates a lot of hard choices and no easy ways out

However, winning competitive grants brings substantial prestige, and some departments expect faculty to submit proposals to advance their careers

This likely differs substantially by field. In social psychology, in which I was trained, it is possible to do research without any external funding as long as salaries are covered and the department has basic arrangement in place for participant recruitment

Doesn’t this indicate though that prestige has been coupled to competitive grant schemes and therefore work as an argument for my thesis that competitive grant schemes have lots of unintended side effects?

I agree with that. My central point is that competition has more unintended side effects in some parts of the system than others, and we have good reason to believe that the funding of scientific projects is one of those points

Are highly centralized scientific funders transparent? Some are, sometimes, but I don’t think that’s an inherent feature of scientific funders

You change quality through other mechanisms. The point is that the distribution of funding might not be the right place to encourage quality because of the many ways unanticipated side effects can happen

That is one solution, but given limited resources (as is the current situation), it is prudent to think of other structures for distributing resources to fund science

It disrupts the incentive to overinvest in grant prep.

If you invest in people you don’t need to select for the most productive. You can select for potential and/or diversity

This phenomenon does not depend on quality being impossible to assess

Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that t...

No, if funding rates are low it creates an incentive for researchers to overinvest in grant prep, resulting in, potentially, more resources spent on this than are distributed under the scheme. See pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Another option would be to funnel more money through research institutions directly rather than through competitive grant schemes

See the full thread

I’m not against downvotes but in my view these don’t directly address the basic competitive structure on which many scientific funders operate

The only way to remove these incentives is to change the basis of funding: implement partial lotteries, invest in people not projects, use funding to encourage diversity in the scientific ecosystem, etc

I think the problem is more the competitive grant scheme. As long as this is the funding structure, you will always have incentives to over-invest into proposal prep and/or game the system, especially if funding rates are low or if you are a lab that requires funding for continued survival

an adult and child shoebill in the grass looking at the camera, they naturally have a mean look so it looks menacing

yo, u in the wrong neighborhood

This was a fun exercise. For the non-philosophers, here's a thread briefly describing the ridiculous views that we philosophers are pretty sure we could find seven experts to agree to.

If you read one of them and think "What?!? I must be misunderstanding" you probably aren't.

Six-panel composite figure. Caption: Interactive artifacts always rely on people’s interpretive and interactional practices. Rowwise from top left to bottom right: A. Aegeus consults the oracle at Delphi (cup from Vulci, 440-430 BCE). B. Byzantine mosaic depicting the zodiac, from the floor of the 6th century CE Beth Alpha synagogue. C. One-sided sense-making in an experimental psychotherapy session, (McHugh 1968). D. Still from a BBC documentary showing a person interacting with ELIZA via a computer terminal, late 1960s. E. Researchers interacting with the PARC copier (Suchman 2007 [1987]). F. Screenshot of large language model chat interface, 2026.

New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Why do Anthropic engineers talk to Claude as a witch-doctor to his potions? How is prompt engineering like spider divination? Can one reason without reasons?

ft. Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman, Weizenbaum & many more ☺️