
NSF grant changes raise alarm about commitment to basic research - mellosouls
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02272-x
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rmrfstar
"[B]ills introduced to both houses of Congress... increase the NSF’s budget by
US$100 billion over five years. The bills... would... allocate the new money
to technology development, rather than to basic science."

Quantum computing is described as "applied" rather than "basic" research. A
lot of serious "basic-but-applied" chemistry/physics research happened at Bell
Labs. If NSF is using a similar heuristic for the next 5 years, that might be
a good thing.

I just hope NSF doesn't interpret the change as a mandate to "de-risk"
research.

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g_p
> I just hope NSF doesn't interpret the change as a mandate to "de-risk"
> research.

I fear this has happened already elsewhere in science, and it will inevitably
happen for the NSF at some point. Too many people who don't understand science
and the subject of the research are trying to measure the effectiveness of
individual projects, as well as funding programmes overall. Government loves
to measure how effective things were, and put a number on it.

In the last 5 to 10 years, anecdotally, I'm seeing less adventurous bids, and
more "safe" bids which have more defined outcomes. In a way, science has moved
to a system where you "bootstrap" ahead, test and de-risk something, then bid
for the money to do what you quietly bootstrapped, knowing yourself it will
succeed. You then use that funding to bootstrap the next step of the research,
and deliver the de-risked work you already did. In essence, I think many
researchers are quietly working on the next thing on their current bid, to be
able to de-risk it going forward.

When there a pressure to define outcomes of a project for funders or
stakeholders, that means projects do and don't succeed, and that's often
attributed to the researchers, rather than the underlying research hypothesis
simply not working out.

My fear is this will get worse if these changes come through, as the focus
will push even more onto measuring outputs, and on knowing the outcome before
the work is done, to avoid funding an unsuccessful project. We need to
remember that moon-shots are good to fund, and shouldn't be considered as
failed projects, but unfortunately they are generally less interesting due to
the funding body focusing on its own metrics.

