A new paradigm for the scientific enterprise: nurturing the ecosystem

[alex.lancaster]

@Gavin

I enjoyed reading this paper a lot, nice work @alex.lancaster and Ronin co-authors. It almost feels like a ‘scientific ecosystem’ manifesto (a la GNU ).

Yes, I did have GNU in the back of my mind a little when writing this. The history of this is that it actually started it’s life as a somewhat rant-y letter-to-the-editor response to a Nature news&views piece (The “The future of the postdoc.” by Powell that we cited). I submitted it to Nature, Science and PLOS Biology, and got knocked back from all them, maybe it was too radical for 2015. (PLOS did send it out for review, and but for reviewer #3 it might have actually got published). It sat around for a while, then I started sharing my draft, and got some co-authors interested, and we began to flesh it out more, bringing in some more perspectives than just me. We figuring that laying a positive vision could be more useful in the long-run than a rant (although some of it comes through, as you probably picked up).

I tend to agree with that starting change from outside the existing system will be easier (see also Inadequate Equilibria for a game-theoretic discussion of how academia is stuck in a Nash Equilibria maximising for prestige). While I expect that alternate/independent academic movement that Ronin and IGDORE are part of seem primed to lead this change, I’ve also seen strong interest in alternate research formats from NGOs (particularly from orgs in the Effective Altruism space, e.g. Rethink Priorities, Centre on Long-Term Risk, ALLFED - I wouldn’t be surprised if some disease-specific and environmental charities were also moving in this direction). As former industrial laboratories (e.g. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) apparently had quite strong connections to universities (described in Cycles of Invention and Discovery ), it could also be possible that companies with a long-term R&D outlook could move back towards an integrative research model. I suspect that traditional Universities may be among the slowest and most resistant to join a broader scientific ecosystem.

Thanks for the links to those other organizations and ideas. We are supposed to at some point do a v2 revision, so I may incorporate them into that! That Inadequate Equilibria looks very interesting! I agree that universities will be the most resistant. The corporate model most of them run on means that in order to maintain their expensive and top-heavy administration, they need to maximize their grant money, and are likely to view any other organizations as being participants in a zero-sum game. It’s a vicious circle too: the more they get grant money, the more they need admin to manage/obtain it, which means that admin gets larger and more expensive, which needs more grant money…

While MMT is a strategy applied at a national economic level, I wonder if there are ways that similar strategies could also be used to provide income security for scientists? Scientific development is generally recognised as being a major (if not the largest) contributor to economic growth, and so it actually surprises me that isn’t a wider array of economic mechanisms to fund scientific research. @surya, can you comment on this further?

MMT (and other related ideas) do seem like the way to go. I’m also relatively new to this. My sense is that there are two issues. (1) getting enough income to individual scientists so they can continue to do what they do, (2) getting funding for equipment, facilities etc. Right now, grants are often used for both, especially as permanent tenured-positions become much rarer, and many places (especially medical schools run on “soft money”). We need to decouple those things. A UBI would (partially) solve (1) and then funding would be about money to actually do the research (2). It’s my understanding that is what grants used to be mainly for (say 20-30 years ago), before institutions figured out that they could get most of the people doing the work (grad students and postdocs) run on precarious short-term contracts by dangling a (false) promise of a permanent job. I don’t think this was done maliciously by uni administrators, it’s a been a slow process over decades, and largely driven by the incentives which starved the public sector since neoliberalism took hold in the 1980s.

What excites me most about a UBI is that it could potentially release a huge latent pool of creativity that would be good for science and society as a whole. All the incentives in hiring and promotion are towards those who will get more grant money, which means a lot of interesting ideas are left on the table (or in the desk drawer). Science requires a long-tail, but the pursuit of fundable projects means that the tail gets truncated. UBI could release that long-tail again. And more small-scale research becomes possible, meaning that we could explore more of the knowledge “landscape”.

I think that I was quite lucky in that after moving internationally, I quickly realised that I didn’t need to have a formal academic position to do research, and so I just tried to start doing it. However, I think many ex-academics do feel like they essentially feel that they need the ‘legitimacy’ of a University position to give them permission to do research. As noted in the article, this may largely be due to the restricted range of careers that senior academics currently promote to their students, and I think that the main way that this can be overcome is by independent researchers demonstrating that non-traditional research paths are both viable and competitive options compared to mainstream academia.

Yes, giving people permission is part of the “show-not-tell” aspect of Ronin and IGDORE, I think. Buckminster Fuller said it beautifully:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”