💡 5 Quick Questions for ... Stuart Buck on generating better federal science research

"If most research projects are expected to succeed, then the result is that most researchers will propose incremental projects."

Better technology policy isn’t just about funneling lots more taxpayer money toward more federal R&D, as the pending “chips and science” bill in Washington would do. It’s also important to institute reforms that would generate more bang for our bucks — especially more high-reward, frontier-pushing results. One analysis of this issue that I’ve frequently mentioned in Faster, Please! is the 2020 paper “Are ‘Flows of Ideas’ and ‘Research Productivity’ in secular decline?” by Peter Cauwels and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich. The researchers conclude that there’s currently an unhealthy imbalance between three key drivers of technological progress: “the efficiency of the low-risk, mostly incremental, exploitative innovation, the serendipity of the medium-risk creative invention, and the boldness of the high-risk explorative discovery.” Too much incremental advance, too little bold discovery.

Fixing that R&D imbalance is one goal of Stuart Buck, executive director of the Good Science Project:

Our mission is to improve the funding and practice of science. Funding agencies should engage in bold experimentation to reduce bureaucracy, fund new ideas, and speed up innovation. Moreover, they should make much more data available so that independent scholars can evaluate the results.

Buck is also a senior advisor to the Social Science Research Council. Formerly, he was vice president of research at Arnold Ventures, where he was involved with many efforts to improve scientific reproducibility. In addition, Buck has a Substack, The Good Science Project Newsletter:

Stuart Buck @stuartbuck1

goodscience.substack.comWelcome to the Good Science Project Substack...Hello world! This is the Substack newsletter for the Good Science Project. I intend to publish occasional newsletters summarizing the Good Science Project’s activities and publications, along with additional thoughts. Why Substack? It seems to be a far better way to handle email subscriptions and re…

Here is a lightly-edited email chat between Stuart and me.

1/ How significant is the bureaucratic burden for scientists getting funded by government?

Official surveys of thousands of federally-funded scientists show that they spend upwards of 40 percent of their research time on administration, compliance, bureaucracy, etc. Maybe we could quibble with this, the response rate to the survey wasn’t anywhere near 100 percent, so perhaps the most aggrieved researchers are the ones who responded. So let’s discount it to 30 percent of researcher time. That still seems like an awful lot. It’s why scientists regularly say things like this on Twitter: 

To be clear, the actual burden varies across disciplines, across departments, and across scientists. Some senior scientists are able to afford enough administrative staff that they are less affected. But even some senior scientists say the burden is way too high. As Nobel Laureate Thomas Südhof of Stanford told me, “The biggest problem is that administrators who do only administration simply do not understand how much the bureaucratic work takes away from the science. They seem to think that just filling out another form or writing another report is nothing, but if you have to do hundreds of these, that is all you have time to do.”