New Science January 2022 updates
Hi everyone,
Updates for January:
New Science
- We’ve been heads-down reviewing the applications for the summer fellowship and preparing the one-year fellowship.
- We have now confirmed that we’re going to have a bunch of bio benches in the new shared lab space at The Engine starting September for the one-year fellowship.
- We published a new essay: How Software in the Life Sciences Actually Works (And Doesn’t Work) by Elliot Hershberg. See Twitter discussion (>200 retweets and 700 likes) here.
- The Atlantic interviewed me and profiled us alongside Arcadia and Arc Institute.
- We are looking for an editor of a monumental essay about the history and the structure of the NIH. Please reply to this email if you are interested or let us know if you know someone great at this kind of thing.
- We are looking to fund more writing in the style of Elliot’s piece, the NIH piece, and Rishi Kulkarni’s piece and more special projects.
Also:
- Adam Marblestone et al in Nature about FROs: Unblock research bottlenecks with non-profit start-ups
- We updated the Interesting Jobs page, with 28 jobs currently open at FROs, Arc, Astera, and Arcadia.
- We were mentioned in an Endpoints piece on new funding efforts in science and in Sam Arbebesman’s We need to create and foster new types of scientific organizations (Sam maintains The Overedge Catalog)
Miscellaneous
- The joke of self-correcting science: The Andero lab and Nature Communications
- Adam Marblestone on Twitter: “Why MOST research should NOT be objective-driven. To get to any one objective, you have to build on a library of stepping-stones that were discovered based on subjective interestingness unrelated to that or maybe any objective.”
- An experiment in having a biology supplement of my Best of Twitter
On funding rates and lotteries in funding
In the last couple of years, people have been spending a lot of time discussing low grant funding rates, sometimes even arguing that so much time is spent applying for grants that instead research funding should perhaps just be distributed by a lottery (a recent example from Nature Human Behaviour). A few thoughts on this:
- If there are lots of people who want to get grants but only a small number of them getting the grants would actually be good for society, most people should not get funded.
- Lots of applicants is not necessarily bad for people who should be getting grants if they are able to demonstrate to the funding agency that they are indeed good, since they should get funding anyway.
- Issues only start when (1) there are too many applicants who really do deserve to get funded and/or (2) the evaluators are unable to distinguish quality of applicants (the linked article argues that this is the case right now)
- You can deal with grantmaking issues by improving the application/evaluation process or you can give up and do a lottery. Not popular to state publicly but the majority of grant applications evaluated by funders like the NIH are just not very good and the fact that the funding rates are low does not imply that the system is broken and that a lottery is the way to go.
Stay Frosty,
Alexey
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