From my shott experience within the eu R&D funding bubble it's more nuanced: There are simply way(!) too many good proposals for the limited finances to distribute. So they also take unrelated criteria to decide. Like having women as PI's are a new trick to get the funding among equal competitors i recently heard. Existing research clusters with industry also get priority. Not just evidence based approaches. Politics play a bigger role in this vacuum of indecisiveness than one thinks.
Maybe we should track all research proposals and the peoples careers behind them for a while to show that it's simply not enough money? And then we can think better of evidence for distributing limited resources better.
Nice diagnosis of a serious problem. Your recommended solution - 'finding talent', but how do we find it, if not by peer review? One comment: "We need political cover for all funding agencies (not just DARPA) to take calculated risks." Calculated? - rather uncalculable.I appreciate that you raise these issues.
From my shott experience within the eu R&D funding bubble it's more nuanced: There are simply way(!) too many good proposals for the limited finances to distribute. So they also take unrelated criteria to decide. Like having women as PI's are a new trick to get the funding among equal competitors i recently heard. Existing research clusters with industry also get priority. Not just evidence based approaches. Politics play a bigger role in this vacuum of indecisiveness than one thinks.
Maybe we should track all research proposals and the peoples careers behind them for a while to show that it's simply not enough money? And then we can think better of evidence for distributing limited resources better.
Nice diagnosis of a serious problem. Your recommended solution - 'finding talent', but how do we find it, if not by peer review? One comment: "We need political cover for all funding agencies (not just DARPA) to take calculated risks." Calculated? - rather uncalculable.I appreciate that you raise these issues.