# In focus: Dan Cleather
**URL:** https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906
**Category:** IGDORE
**Tags:** open-science, new-academia, igdore, philosophy, blog
**Created:** [October 15, 2020, 7:48pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906 "2020-10-15T19:48:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Gavin](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/Gavin)
#### Post date: [October 15, 2020, 7:48pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906/1 "2020-10-15T19:48:44Z")
A new blog post from IGDORE: find out more about @Daniel_Cleather
> **[In focus: Dan Cleather](https://igdore.medium.com/in-focus-dan-cleather-2a0213561919?source=friends_link&sk=4b42398b3aec937c9e148871270cc122)**
>
> From biomechanics to anarchism.
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### Author:  [@Gavin](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/Gavin)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2020, 12:55am UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906/2 "2020-10-21T00:55:15Z")
@Daniel_Cleather, it looks like Subversion has a long history of association with open science! I don’t think you mentioned this in your book?
> **[Subversive Proposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_Proposal)**
>
> The "Subversive Proposal" was an Internet posting by Stevan Harnad on June 27 1994 (presented at the 1994 Network Services Conference in London ) calling on all authors of "esoteric" research writings to archive their articles for free for everyone online (in anonymous FTP archives or websites). It initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were collected and published as a book in 1995: "Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing".\[ The prop...
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### Author:  [@Daniel\_Cleather](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/Daniel_Cleather)
#### Post date: [October 21, 2020, 10:06am UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906/3 "2020-10-21T10:06:46Z")
Wow - this is so cool. I don’t know how I have never seen this before.
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### Author:  [@Gavin](https://onscienceandacademia.org/u/Gavin)
#### Post date: [October 24, 2020, 7:05pm UTC](https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/in-focus-dan-cleather/906/4 "2020-10-24T19:05:09Z")
I was watching the interview with Sussana Hariss that’s in the In Focus post. The discussion on random grant allocation was interesting, I don’t recall if that was discussed in the book?
It reminded me of a PhD I’d seen that modelled the effects of random granting and came to quite favourable conclusions about it.
> **[Breaking the grant cycle: On the rational allocation of public resources to...](https://www.shaharavin.com/publication/breaking-the-grant-cycle/)**
>
> Agent-based simulations of hypothetical research communities show random allocation can outperform selection by potential merit under certain conditions.
> The thesis presents a reformative criticism of science funding by peer review. The criticism is based on epistemological scepticism, regarding the ability of scientific peers, or any other agent, to have access to sufficient information regarding the potential of proposed projects at the time of funding. The scepticism is based on the complexity of factors contributing to the merit of scientific projects, and the rate at which the parameters of this complex system change their values. By constructing models of different science funding mechanisms, a construction supported by historical evidence, **computational simulations show that in a significant subset of cases it would be better to select research projects by a lottery mechanism than by selection based on peer review**. This last result is used to create a template for an alternative funding mechanism that combines the merits of peer review with the benefits of random allocation, while noting that **this alternative is not so far removed from current practice as may first appear**.