Fixing science via a basic income

I agree that trying to treat the symptoms without a thorough analysis, modeling and testing would likely be a wasted effort. To start, I'd ask questions like "When did the problem first appear? How did research work before p-hacking, publish-or-perish and fight for tenure become a staple of academic life? What worked then, why did it need to change, what changes were introduced, what effects they had.." This is not a simple problem to solve, so obvious simple solutions are unlikely to just work.

Too many people want a job that is interesting or meaningful, and nobody is willing to support all of them financially

Meaningful is an interesting word here. Most PHD students don't do work that has very much meaning or potential to have impact on the world.

If people want to work on jobs with a lot of meaning, why did Hamming need to as them why they didn't work on the most meaningful problems?

For the most part it seems to me that people are scared to work on problems that are actually meaningful.

In some disciplines, like working in an Amazon warehouse, intrinsic motivation is low and both cheating and legitimate but zero sum efforts are unlikely. There, ever greater competition for economic and social rewards generate ever better results. In other domains, like the creation of knowledge and especially the evaluation of knowledge, intrinsic motivation is relatively strong, cheating is easy or likely to succeed or zero sum situations are the default. In those domains, competition leads to the displacement of necessary activities by highly optimized forms of fraud. At the extreme, nobody argues that we need profit maximization by judges or by generals. Unfortunately, using pharmceutical companies to produce medical innovation isn't very much better and ever more commercialized and competitive academia isn't much better than that.

Nobody is confused about this. We don't have incentives this terrible by accident. Rather, there are constituencies in favor of accurate shared information and constituencies against. The latter, unfortunately have been working unopposed for a long time

France does this, at least in mathematics. Many people go straight from PhD to a permanent CNRS research position with no responsibilities. Short term postdoctoral funding was only introduced in 2005, but before that a lot of people did foreign postdocs. Alain Connes talks about this here.

But mathematicians are cheap. What can you do in other fields? What does CNRS do?

UBI is a fascinating and likely hugely beneficial idea to improve individual welfare by decoupling choice (and ability) of work from being able to eat. I do worry that it reduces the incentive to choose professions which are in demand.

The fact that we have far more people who want to do academic research than we have an appetite to pay them to do so is a fact that UBI won't change, it will instead only obscure it, making it easier for people to do this as a semi-hobby.

I do worry that there's an efficiency loss in letting people be less productive as an academic subsidized by UBI than they would be if they went into the private sector and used their skills and knowledge to more directly meet paying customer needs.

I'll also point out that it's _REALLY_ hard to distinguish luck from talent in cases like this (tenure, film stars, drug kingpins, other winner-take-all labor markets with a whole lot of entrants and very few big winners). My model of the publication->tenure path isn't that it's selecting the lucky ones whose papers worked out, but for the talented ones who sniff out more likely topics well. Sure, there's luck involved, but there's also a very-hard-to-test-separately talent. Treating it as a pure lottery is likely to lead to very wrong policy decisions.

Is there enough research to go round all who would like to do it? A quote attributed to Dirac in various forms, speaking of the early days of quantum mechanics, says, "It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work."

It is easy to list the big problems one might work on. Which of them offer opportunities for all of the first-class people to do first-rate work on them — opportunities that look promising for actually solving them, rather than merely working on solving them?

Very interesting thoughts Kaj, thank you for your post. The part about skill measurement was very instructive.

I was recently wondering about UBI (universal basic income) and why it seemed to be an increasly important idea. Considering technlogicals advencement in automation and AI, jobs are just moving away from human's skills.

Humanity is loosing the job interview to machines.

Of course, theses advencements create new jobs, but they're the first in line to be replaced by algorythms.

My point was that research jobs (not particularly PhD level jobs, even very simple tasks i.e. counting birds, pick up metheorologicals data, grow plants, whatever), may be a major source of jobs in the future, if fuel by UBI.

This is not a deeper root to the actual science issue of course. But it may be a good way to fight raising inegalities and induce massive progress in spreading rationality. Plus, collecting data in fields like biology are still a major obstacle to scientific breakthrough. Mostly based on volontarism, theses task could be soon funded thus allowing people to focus on science.

Isn't a "researcher's basic income" just another word for, um... tenure? I think the proper solution is to tighten standards for what's considered "good" research (fix the replication crisis) and to increase the status of other sorts of scholarship which aren't highly valued at present (at least in STEM) but are very much needed, such as review articles and in-depth monographs. These things don't have the problem where only an unambiguously "positive" result demonstrates the value of one's scholarship, and reaching positive results is largely a matter of luck.

The author does suggest a system where "academic researchers are rewarded for running high quality studies with these sorts of attributes, regardless of outcome", but, barring highly-selective preregistration, I'm not sure how this can work - other things being equal, an unambiguous outcome does signal a higher-quality study, so researchers will always prefer clear (i.e. "positive") outcomes.