Should grants use a lottery approach? 🎟️
"Research shows that, barring a minority of outstanding projects, grant winners and losers are not decided by a precise and objective identification of worthy and unworthy projects. Instead, the luck of the draw — who reviews what proposal and the opinions they hold — generally determines these outcomes."
"It is excessively wasteful in terms of researchers’ time."
https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/21/research-funding-broken-lottery-approach-could-fix-it/
@erinnacland @academicchatter I generally agree with this approach. I use the time sharpening a proposal to do a lot of the actual testing and work. For me this implies that the time isn’t entirely wasted for some of us and that we’d need to figure out if that process is valuable enough to replicate elsewhere
@erinnacland @academicchatter the overall point certainly stands though. Heaven give me the confidence of a physicist rejecting a proposal…