José Luis Ricón
Engineer and writer at Nintil, where he has spent years reading the empirical literature on how science is funded and organised — grant peer review, funding lotteries, whether ideas are getting harder to find — and reporting what the evidence does and does not support.
José Luis Ricón did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsIf we know the invariants of the problem at hand we can make assertions about the best way to solve that problem now and in the future.
- 14 months earlier
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Their wordsI have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.
↗Fund people, not projects IV: Scientific egalitarianism and lotteriesnintil.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe way I see this is that reviewers can identify what's obviously not great and what is obviously great (Perhaps identifying the latter is easier than the former). But there is a "messy middle" where it is unclear what to fund.
↗Fund people, not projects IV: Scientific egalitarianism and lotteriesnintil.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe cost of peer review is largely dominated by applying for grants, not peer reviewing.
↗Fund people, not projects IV: Scientific egalitarianism and lotteriesnintil.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 days earlier
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Their wordsThis is a fortunate conclusion, because it means that it's possible to use bibliometrics to select a candidate set of sufficiently good scientists, and then use human reviewers to select among them.
↗Fund people, not projects II: Does pre-grant peer review work?nintil.com
- 7 months earlier
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Their wordsA given field or paradigm will yield a sigmoid-like pattern and eventually it will be exhausted.
↗Science — The Ending and Endless Frontier(s)nintil.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsI admit I lean towards the bounded view because the former sounds overly optimistic.
↗Science — The Ending and Endless Frontier(s)nintil.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 12 months earlier
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Their wordsI'm of the view, though this would take another post to explain, that the problems that science suffers have more to do with how science is done (funded, organized, produced) rather than how much money is gets, in general.