[aleks224]

I believe the culprit is the assumption the grants/tenure-track systems make about applicants/assistant professors. That assumption is negative, as if new hires will try _not to do research_. It's also about the number of grad school offerings, it just seems so huge at the moment, which again forces introducing such metrics on what is considered "success" in academia.

[auggierose]

Of course researchers will want to do research. The question is, how do you select for those whose research will ever amount to something truly interesting, and avoid giving resources to those whose research will not?

You can try looking at the past, and derive criteria for it from that, via machine learning for example, but I would be hesitant to leave something like that up to a machine. Also times change, so criteria that worked in the past might not work now. Also, if you learn those criteria once, and then fix them, people will just game them.

[aleks224]

>The question is, how do you select for those whose research will ever amount to something truly interesting

You can't, as "truly interesting" is context dependent, changes over time and something that everyone deems as futile may become interesting - that's the point of research. You just increase the bar of entry to get people who work very hard and leave it to them to decide.

[Jensson]

Current system is like measuring programmer productivity by lines of code so I think it is hard to do worse than what we currently do.