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  1. Apr 2022
  2. Jan 2022
    1. Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.

      These are usually incredibly political questions that aren't always done logically.

      See for example Malcolm Gladwell's podcast episode My Little Hundred Million.

  3. Dec 2021
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  9. Jan 2021
    1. Ways will be found to make communities sustainable,

      Ways will also be found to legibilize the deliberately inscrutable. With biomed funding so centralized, forces can be applied to increase the adoption of practices like data sharing and open science.

  10. Oct 2020
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  15. Jun 2016
    1. In some domains, path-breaking work is nec-essarily the outcome of collaborative activity rather thanindividualistic scholarship, a fact reflected in the modestproportion of federal research funds which is allocated toindividual investigators rather than teams. Collaborationsare a necessary feature of much, though by no means all,contemporary scientific research.

      in some domains, collaboration is necessary. Hence the preference for team grants

  16. Apr 2016
    1. . Referees ofgrant proposals agree much more about what is unworthy of support than about what does have scientific value. In

      Grant referees are better at agreeing on inadequate work than adequate

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    1. A system that assumes a "quite good" institution is unable to get better, and thus denies them the funds that would enable them to get better, is probably not an optimal system for promoting merit. A system that rewards in proportion to merit would at least be able to recognise and reflect the dynamism of university research; research groups wax and wane as people come, go, get disheartened, get re-invigorated.

      On the importance of funding middle-ground

    2. it could be argued that we don’t just need an elite: we need a reasonable number of institutions in which there is a strong research environment, where more senior researchers feel valued and their graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to aim high. Our best strategy for retaining international competitiveness might be by fostering those who are doing well but have potential to do even better

      capacity requires top and middle.