Gold Standard Lysenko

and my conflict of interest

Former NIH official Elizabeth Ginexi shares some disturbing aspects of some proposed changes to U.S. government science funding.

There are so many bad things here it’s hard to know where to start--basically, the plan is to replace the current flawed system with something close to flat-out corruption. It looks like it would worsen the major problems with the current system while offering no real improvements.

According to Ginexi, “The rule also requires that discretionary awards must ‘. . . demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.’”

This seems really bad! On one level, sure, this is government funding so it should advance government priorities. But the president is not the same as the government! Also, grants are multi-year. There will be new presidents. It is a mistake to confuse national priorities with the priorities of the party in charge.

There’s also the bit that “The rule repeatedly invokes a concept called ‘Gold Standard Science’ . . . without defining it in any concrete or measurable way.” As we’ve discussed earlier in this space (see also here), this “gold standard science” thing is pure 24-karat bullshit, given that the same people who are advocating it have been energetically pushing junk social science such as unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and junk biological science such as, most notoriously, a discredited paper on vaccines and autism. Just disgraceful.

And the policy is not even coherent on its own terms! According to Ginexi, “The risk factors agencies may use to deny a grant application are expanded to include an applicant’s membership in or affiliation with organizations that ‘advocate for the overthrow of the United States Government’ or ‘undermine public safety or national security.’”

This flat-out contradicts the earlier statement that the awards must “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” I say this because one of the president’s main policy priorities seems to be support for the 6 Jan 2021 insurrectionists, who were directly advocated for the overthrow of the United States Government, and in doing this they were undermining public safety or national security.

Ginexi summarizes:

Since World War II, the United States built the world’s preeminent scientific enterprise on a straightforward principle: federal dollars should fund the best science, as determined by independent experts rather than politicians. Peer review, open competition, and institutional autonomy were the pillars of that system. This proposed rule dismantles all three, simultaneously, government-wide, and binding on every federal agency by October 1, 2026.

What OMB is proposing is not a reform of grants management. It is a complete political control apparatus layered over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.

This plan should be very satisfying to the Trofim Lysenkos among us.

Conflict of interest statement

I do have a dog in this particular fight, having received many million dollars of federal funds over the past forty years to support my research.

I think this money has been well spent! In my view, the U.S. taxpayers have got more than their money’s worth from research contributions such as R-hat, posterior predictive checking, the Bayesian formulation of exploratory data analysis and model checking, the optimal acceptance rate for the Metropolis algorithm, expected squared jumped distance, the Nuts algorithm, type M and S errors, the explication of the garden of forking paths and the backpack fallacy, the multiverse, weakly informative priors, zero-avoiding priors, MRP, splitting a predictor into three parts, simulation-based calibration checking, path sampling, PSIS-LOO, ADVI, . . . ummm, I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few important things. Also Stan! And R2Winbugs, and BDA, and ARM, and a few zillion applications, and a bunch of things with causal inference, and . . . etc. For reals, I think this government money was well spent, and I’m not saying this in a bullshit “each citation is worth a whopping $100,000” sort of way.

So, yeah, I’m not an unbiased observer here. I think the apolitical disbursal of federal research funds has worked pretty well. I’m also on the record as criticizing a lot of publicly funded junk science, and I’m open to reforms of the scientific funding, publication, and publicity process. I’d start by making Marc Hauser, Brian Wansink, Dan Ariely, etc., pay back the government for the research fraud they’ve been involved with. Also I’d be ok with a moratorium on funding for anyone who’s ever described Wansink’s experiments as masterpieces. OK, just kidding on that last one. I mean, I’m on not kidding that I’d be ok with that moratorium, but I’m not suggesting it as a serious policy.