Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering

People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible

Manufacturing is important and often ignored

The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia

All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism

Running list of relevant science news?

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

Academic culture prizes individual recognition

Younger professors have to spend more time getting money

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup

The idea that academia is for crazy exploration and companies are for low risk exploration is bullshit

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

What was the real incentive for people to work on the DARPA Grand Challenge?

NS Notes on Officers Techniques

Three myths about scientific peer review

A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility

Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

Wolfgang Merkt conversation 12 Oct 2021

There are very few senior individual contributors in academia

Is it more impactful to find and train undiscovered diamonds or to unlock well-positioned but constrained researchers?

The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

An institution riffing on the ARPA Model could enable paradigm shifts that are not happening

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Funding structures lead to several layers of indirection on what even gets proposed

Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?

# §Academia Constraints
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

- [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]
- [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]]
- [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]
-  [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]
- [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]]
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]]
- [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
- [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]
- [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]]
- [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]
- [[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]]
- [[Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]
- [[A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility]]
- [[Physical experiments are expensive]]
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]
- [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]]
- [[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]]
- [[Going outside of the approved process can be a black mark against people in academia]]
- [[People proposing work that they have already done is a sign that feedback loops are broken]]

### Related
- [[§Startup Constraints]]
- [[§Corporate R&D Constraints]]
- [[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]]
- [[Market Failures in Science]]

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§Academia Constraints

The number of researchers has exploded

How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers

Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII

Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

Mark Johnson Conversation 4 Jan 2021

Human capital theory of stagnation

The university is being unbundled but nobody is taking on the research part

People are incentivized to work on nodes higher up the tech tree

Nobody will admit that a field is stuck

Research scout network

What is the history of Universities with respect to research?

Second Lieutenants at AFRL are like graduate students in universities

Another downside to importing graduate students to work in labs is that it makes papers less intelligible

There is a group of people who are capable interested in science and the current institutions are not working for them

# Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering
Modern science needs a lot of skilled labor to do not particularly exciting jobs. Pipetting, building devices, coding, running tests. Arguably they are creating a lot of value for the PIs they work for: progressing their careers, bringing grant money to the lab and the university, creating  knowledge for society. 

Grad students provide this labor much more cheaply than the value they create. Graduate students are paid around $40k a year but it’s much much less than the same smart ambitious people would be making in a real job. The explicit deal is that you get non-monetary compensation. You do get a credential at the end of grad school. The assumption is that this credential is incredibly valuable but that deal has broken down.

This system is problematic for several reasons. 
- Imagine trying to run a company building a problem that demands a ton of [[Tacit Knowledge]], but you could only hire people with almost no experience who would never stay more than five or six years. This constant retraining is an unescapable tension if your labor is students.
- The amount of money you need to support a grad student is actually quite similar to the amount of money you need to support a high-skilled employee at a company, but about half of it goes to the university for administrative overhead and student fees. The university is actually getting a student’s worth of money from grad students to “teach” them but it comes out of grants instead of undergrads pockets. 
- Most graduate students’ incentive is to publish as many high impact papers as possible and generally do work that sounds good to a faculty hiring committee. These incentives are often aligned with their professor and lab. However, if a project requires many people’s worth of work a grad student either won’t make it onto the paper or will be last in a massive list of authors which nobody wants because a finite amount of credit is distributed among all the authors. It’s also not appealing for a grad student to work on a project that won’t produce paper-worthy results on a timescale that aligns with graduating. There’s the obvious case where the timescale is longer than the grad student expects to be in grad school. The more subtle case is that the project takes a few years but is risky enough that it’s not clear that it will produce a paper-worthy result, possibly leaving a PhD student high and dry several years in. This incentive selects against long-term engineering-heavy projects. 
- Hiring committees care about potential professors being able to do novel work. [[The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia]]. This criteria means that grad students need to start doing work that stands out from work that has been done before in the lab if they want to get a faculty job. This incentive puts pressure on projects that need a lot of focus over a long time.  [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]
- Graduate students are primarily funded through grants. Grants are typically renewed on a yearly basis (with exceptions.) So even regardless of what the grad student is ok with working on, there’s a tight coupling between grad students and doing work that can hit paper-worthy milestones on a yearly basis. Additionally, funding grad students through grants effectively ties them to a specific project. Project-coupled grad students make it near impossible to shift effort away from projects that are going poorly towards projects that are going well. Imagine if a startup couldn’t abandon things that weren’t working in favor of things that were.  [[Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors]]. 
- You can’t really fire grad students or hire them whenever you need them. For the most part, new graduate students join labs at the beginning of the academic year so if a project needs a lot of labor halfway through the year you either need to plan that out and have a grad student underutilized for half a year or you need to postpone that project until the beginning of the next year. Once you’ve taken on a grad student you’re stuck with them until they graduate or give up - this is a terrible situation for both sides.

There are several theories about how this system came about. Like any [[Complex System]], the real answer is probably “a bit of each of them.”
- It is easier to get grants (especially government ones) that are primarily earmarked for grad students as opposed to lab technicians or labor-saving automation. Why? Some combination of tradition, incentives on the part of the university because they get more fees from grad students than other spending, and the idea that money towards grad students is building up the country’s STEM workforce. 
- [[How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers]] actually argues that the system was set up on purpose to keep wages for high skilled scientific workers low. 
	- Universities get more money when professors bring in larger grants. Because its easier to get big grants for grad-student-heavy projects universities are incentivized to hire professors who do more grad-student-heavy projects, perpetuating the cycle. [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]]. 

### Related
- [[§Academia Constraints]]
- 
- [[Stagnation]]
- [[Stagnation and Scientific Incentives]]



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How does money work in PARPA?

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

Marissa Convo 1/5/2020

Accounting can be a tool to unlock innovation

# Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors
### Related
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]



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Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors

NSF Program officers can have multi-decade tenures

Lee Ricketson conversation 6/5/20

The money from SBIR is barely worth the money

Program Managers have the ability to deploy money without much overhead

Governments are well suited to funding research but effective research management is in tension with other government mandates

National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research

Peer review is a great system for preventing waste

# The government grant process depends on politics and committees
Roughly, the [[National Science Foundation - NSF]] and [[National Institute of Health - NIH]]  get some of the ‘top people’ in a field together in a room and ask them “what programs should we pursue?” This process depends first on being able to identify the top people in a field and convince them to stay in a shitty hotel in Washington. So the agenda is being set by ‘the top people in a field who are willing to come to Washington and stay in a shitty hotel.’ Additionally, who entails the ‘top people’ is up to the program officers and since [[Professors have long term relationships with their NSF program officers]] chances are that the professors who have put the work into those relationships are going to be the most salient. 

All the incentives are set up so people probably push for their lines of research. Even if they are being completely intellectually honest, researchers probably think that their area of research is the most important thing to fund. If they are slightly less intellectually honest, they realize that they’re more likely to be funded if their priorities line up with the NSF’s. 

The process is inherently conservative [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]] because if you’re consulting the top people in a field on what to fund, the chances they’ll suggest the weird new thing are low. This is another reason why [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]].

### Related
- [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]]



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Ben's working notes

Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors

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