Genuinely I think the world would have much better scientific outcomes if a decent portion of grants were just straight-up randomly allocated (from a pool that meets a minimum standard I guess). Everyone wants to fund ‘almost complete’ research but there’s such little money for the early-stage ‘high risk high reward’ basic research, which is what basically all applied research is built upon.
Genuinely I think the world would have much better scientific outcomes if a decent portion of grants were just straight-up randomly allocated (from a pool that meets a minimum standard I guess). Everyone wants to fund ‘almost complete’ research but there’s such little money for the early-stage ‘high risk high reward’ basic research, which is what basically all applied research is built upon.