Björn BrembsWow, the one critical review (the other was over the top enthusiastic) of our latest grant proposal beats everything I have seen in 25 years of grant writing:
1. Already the summary of our proposal is not even close
2. Proposes experiments that are already in the grant
3. Criticizes experiments we don't propose
4. States that we lack expertise (which we have) for the experiments we did not propose
5. Knows the results of our research even before the experiments are funded
Dan Goodman@brembs ah yeah, I've had this one. Actually criticised me for proposing the exact opposite of the idea I had. It was about neuroscience and ML, and I was saying we needed to use ML algorithms in neuroscience, and they said that everyone keeps proposing that ML has to learn from neuroscience but that it doesn't work. Sigh.
Sigh, yes!
I guess this is what the agencies (and by extension we applicants) have to deal with when nobody wants to do reviews any more?
@brembs I think you'll always have some stupid reviews. I think the problem is rather that science is so squeezed, funding is so competitive, that there'll always be enough uncontroversial applications that there's no reason for agencies to risk ignoring a review, even if they know it's a bad review.
In other words, the real problem is that the funding model is no longer appropriate for science (perhaps never was).
That is, in fact, precisely one of the aspects I just tried to tell our funding agency. Sent them a list of papers proposing a lottery-based approach.
@brembs Good luck! Some are trying out a few experimental things, very slowly and cautiously.