# National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research * [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]] * Promotions and raises are done by the management stack ranking everybody and putting them into bins based on: * Papers * Talks * Grants * Peer opinions * Milestones hit * The promotion process screws over people working on long-term projects because even if they hit milestones, it looks better to actually complete a project * [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]] Notice that “quality of research” is not on this list. It means that the national labs are totally dominated by proxy games. [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]. A system where promotions and raises are done by management stack ranking and judges you on peer opinions and milestones hit encourages you to try to get everybody to like you and set easily hittable milestones. [[Stake vs Rank]]. [[The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank]]. ### Related * [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]] * [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]] * [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]] <!-- #stub --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/National+Labs+don’t+foster+efficient+or+long+term+research) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/National+Labs+don’t+foster+efficient+or+long+term+research)