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cturner | 7 months ago

I want to ask about the bureaucracy aspect. I have never written a science grant application, but expect that some of it comes about because the applications want to ensure good governance around the proposals. Do you agree? For the fluff that genuinely has no productive value, do you have any explanation for why it is there?

Could LLM participation be blowing holes in good-governance measures that were only weakly effective, and therefore a good thing in the long-term? Could the rise in the practice drive grants arrangements to better governance?

discuss

order

Al-Khwarizmi|7 months ago

These are very good questions, and I only have vague answers because it's not easy to understand how bureaucratic systems come to be, grow and work (and not my speciality), but I'll try to do my best.

Indeed, some of the fluff is due to the first reason - for example, the data management plan (where you need to specify how you're going to handle data) has good intentions: it's there so that you explain how you will make your data findable, interoperable, etc. which is a legitimately positive thing; as opposed to e.g. never releasing the research software you produce and making your results unreproducible. But the result is still fluff: I (well, Gemini and I) wrote one last week, it's 6 pages, and what it says can be said in 2-3 lines: that we use a few standard data formats, we will publish all papers on arXiv and/or our institutional repository, software on GitHub, data on GitHub or data repositories, and all the relevant URLs or handles will be linked from the papers. That's pretty much all, but of course you have to put it into a document with various sections and all sorts of unnecessary detail. Why? I suppose in part due to requirements of some disciplines "leaking" into others (I can imagine for people who work with medical data, it's important to specify in fine detail how they're going to handle the data. But not for my projects where I never touch sensitive data at all). And in part due to the trend of bureaucracies to grow - someone adds something, and then it's difficult to remove it because "hey, what if for some project it's relevant?", etc.

Then there are things that are outright useless, like the Gantt chart. At least in my area (CS), you can't really Gantt chart what you're going to do in a 5-year project, because it's research. Any nontrivial research should be unexpected, so beyond the first year you don't know what you'll exactly be doing.

Why is that there? I suppose it can be a mix of several factors:

- Maybe again, spill from other disciplines: I suppose in some particular disciplines, a Gantt chart might be useful. Perhaps if you're a historian and you're going to spend one year at a given archive, another year at a second archive, etc... but in CS it's useless.

- Scientists who end up at bureaucratic roles are those that don't actually like doing science that much, so they tend to focus on the fluff rather than on actual research.

- Research is unpredictable but funding agencies want to believe they're funding something predictable. So they make you plan the project, and then write a final report on how everything turned just as planned (even if this requires contorting facts) to make them happy.