Maximilian Kiebs
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
Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆
bk@brembs Did they also use ChatGPT? 😏
At least no obvious giveaways that I can tell.
Laurent Gatto@brembs I hope you are allowed a rebuttal before final decision!
We only get them after the final decision. I'll just re-submit the exact same grant with a rebuttal, then they'll dismiss both previous reviews and it starts again (usually a 6 month turn-around time).
@brembs sorry to hear that. 🤞for the next round.
Bill Hooker
Mike Taylor 🦕@brembs I assume there is a channel to push back?
Yes, I can explain why this was a bad reviewer and in this case it is so obvious that they will not use them again. Then it get's re-reviewed (again, 6 months as the first round) and if then both reivewers are equally supportive as the other one now, the exact same grant can get funded 12 months after first application.
@brembs Ugh. It's rather shocking that the delay here is a full six months.
In general it's not a bad turnaround time, but in such a crystal clear case it seems like 5 Minutes should do the trick 😆
@brembs Exactly. I wonder if you can get onto a fast track?
I'll certainly try, but have little hope it'll work.
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.
El Duvelle Neuro
Eli Roberson (he/him)@brembs I've seen something like that before. Friend received terrible scores for their grant. Critiques were clearly mixed from another grant. Wrong disease. Wrong mouse. Wrong experiments.
Response from NIH: they clearly mixed up grants. But the score they gave you is the score you get. Too bad.
That somehow adds insult to injury, omfg!
😱
@brembs it's just infuriating that you can get the kind of critique you got and there's no recourse. Knocked down for things you didn't say. And told to do things you already were going to.
What can you do? Not a thing.
"Infuriating" is the adjective I was looking for!