One of the downsides I've noticed writing grants is that, while I'm spending time thinking about science, it's often in a very narrow frame of what the particular grant is asking for and/or the goals of the funding agency. As opposed to a more general frame of "what would advance science" or "what would advance health technology", which I might be doing when I am, for example, writing a review paper or having a discussion with colleagues. Perhaps the issue with this is that compromises on what you really want to work on are terrible: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdDt5NXkfuxAnAvGJ/changing-the-world-through-slack-and-hobbies#How_can_hobbies_compete_at_all_with_jobs__My_theory__compromises_are_terrible
So I think one way to optimize the usefulness of a competitive grant writing procedure is to make the application review process very open-ended as opposed to narrowly defined.
This is good feedback. Maybe our model at New Science was effective for the summer/one-year fellowships because our main criteria was simply: High-risk, basic research in the life sciences. The proposals we received were all very different from one another, and many applicants had really good ideas (many proposals were also incremental or focused on a specific thing).
Sorry, I'm having a little trouble following the citations -- where is this quote mentioned?
> In a 2018 survey, scientists said that “at least one third of the effort spent on applications is scientifically useful,” Myers says. And "for each additional hour scientists report spending on fundraising, they report spending 6 minutes less engaged directly on their research,” Myers says.
The 2018 survey is from Schneider, not Myers, and doesn't have the mentioned quote (unless it's not verbatim?) Also, I couldn't find the second quote in Myers' preprint. Am I missing something?
Hey Chris, thanks for your question. To be clear, the quote is taken verbatim from an email sent to me by Kyle Myers. His quote is based on evidence presented in Schneider 2018. The second part of the quote is directly from Kyle Myers, in an email, again; not sure that it's been published. Apologies if my writing was confusing.
Ah, okay, no worries. The reason I ask is because the next claim made ("...more fundraising does not mean less research") could actually lead competition design in different directions.
If we're trying to reconcile Myers' quotes with the belief that we can really only perform four hours of deep work a day (e.g. Poincare, Newport, https://forimpact.org/4-hours-deep-work-day/), then grants right now are mostly shallow, administrative tasks. And that could be a good thing! Having many grant competitions that require deep work could more significantly impinge on actual research time; PIs might have to think deeply about multiple grant proposals, leaving less time to actually execute grants awarded.
Myers' quotes also provides some justification for this belief of a cap on deep work. Consider the statistic about teaching: intuitively, teaching places greater pressures on research time because it requires deep work, as professors may need to reteach themselves material outside of their domain.
More broadly -- it's challenging to say what activities are beneficial / antagonistic for research. For example, at IAS, scholars aren't required to teach classes, which some would celebrate as being integral for research productivity. But Feynman would disagree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#Criticism), saying that the lack of student interaction is actually a detriment to research. So, should we consider the 24 min lost because of teaching to actually be closer to breakeven?
I'm presuming you've done more reading of the determinants of scientific productivity -- if you're aware of any survey papers, it'd be great to learn more!
Hey Chris, not immediately aware of relevant papers on determinants of scientific productivity, but you raise several interesting points that I think we should be cognizant of. Let me know if you'd like to get on a call sometime: niko@newscience.org
One of the downsides I've noticed writing grants is that, while I'm spending time thinking about science, it's often in a very narrow frame of what the particular grant is asking for and/or the goals of the funding agency. As opposed to a more general frame of "what would advance science" or "what would advance health technology", which I might be doing when I am, for example, writing a review paper or having a discussion with colleagues. Perhaps the issue with this is that compromises on what you really want to work on are terrible: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdDt5NXkfuxAnAvGJ/changing-the-world-through-slack-and-hobbies#How_can_hobbies_compete_at_all_with_jobs__My_theory__compromises_are_terrible
So I think one way to optimize the usefulness of a competitive grant writing procedure is to make the application review process very open-ended as opposed to narrowly defined.
This is good feedback. Maybe our model at New Science was effective for the summer/one-year fellowships because our main criteria was simply: High-risk, basic research in the life sciences. The proposals we received were all very different from one another, and many applicants had really good ideas (many proposals were also incremental or focused on a specific thing).
Sorry, I'm having a little trouble following the citations -- where is this quote mentioned?
> In a 2018 survey, scientists said that “at least one third of the effort spent on applications is scientifically useful,” Myers says. And "for each additional hour scientists report spending on fundraising, they report spending 6 minutes less engaged directly on their research,” Myers says.
The 2018 survey is from Schneider, not Myers, and doesn't have the mentioned quote (unless it's not verbatim?) Also, I couldn't find the second quote in Myers' preprint. Am I missing something?
Hey Chris, thanks for your question. To be clear, the quote is taken verbatim from an email sent to me by Kyle Myers. His quote is based on evidence presented in Schneider 2018. The second part of the quote is directly from Kyle Myers, in an email, again; not sure that it's been published. Apologies if my writing was confusing.
Ah, okay, no worries. The reason I ask is because the next claim made ("...more fundraising does not mean less research") could actually lead competition design in different directions.
If we're trying to reconcile Myers' quotes with the belief that we can really only perform four hours of deep work a day (e.g. Poincare, Newport, https://forimpact.org/4-hours-deep-work-day/), then grants right now are mostly shallow, administrative tasks. And that could be a good thing! Having many grant competitions that require deep work could more significantly impinge on actual research time; PIs might have to think deeply about multiple grant proposals, leaving less time to actually execute grants awarded.
Myers' quotes also provides some justification for this belief of a cap on deep work. Consider the statistic about teaching: intuitively, teaching places greater pressures on research time because it requires deep work, as professors may need to reteach themselves material outside of their domain.
More broadly -- it's challenging to say what activities are beneficial / antagonistic for research. For example, at IAS, scholars aren't required to teach classes, which some would celebrate as being integral for research productivity. But Feynman would disagree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#Criticism), saying that the lack of student interaction is actually a detriment to research. So, should we consider the 24 min lost because of teaching to actually be closer to breakeven?
I'm presuming you've done more reading of the determinants of scientific productivity -- if you're aware of any survey papers, it'd be great to learn more!
Hey Chris, not immediately aware of relevant papers on determinants of scientific productivity, but you raise several interesting points that I think we should be cognizant of. Let me know if you'd like to get on a call sometime: niko@newscience.org