Julian and Minz discuss Science and Humanities funding
Me: Suppose you struck the lottery tomorrow. Could you quit and set up your own lab?J: [chortling] That wouldn’t buy me one MRI machine! Do you even know how much the lottery is?
Me: How would I know? I’ve never even bought 4D in my life!J: Well it’s not actually a lot. It’s [amount I forget]. There’s not a lot of equipment you can get with that you know.
Me: Hey I’m an literary scholar by training! I think anything with more than 2-zeros in it is a lot of money!
J: Okay, okay.
Me: Basically for an English major if you give me an unlimited supply of pencils, coffee and enough money to pay for all the high quality colour reproductions of manuscripts from whichever archive I’m working at I’d think I’m rolling!
~~Me: What could you do with [10 times larger sum] then?
J: I could set up a very modest lab with one MRI machine and pay my staff for maybe one or two years before we’ll have to shut down. You realise that most of grant money in science funding goes to paying salaries right?
Me: Oh. Is that how it works? Haven’t we got to the point you spend the money on super-intelligent and practically sentient computers, and you just pay a student minion to wipe them down carefully and turn them on and off?
J: Unless you are building the Large Hadron Collider, trust me, it’s not equipment that takes up all your grant.
~~
Me: Hey so there was a meme hypothetical going around on FB the other day amongst some academics I know. Supposing you had X amount which you can spend on any single project in your special field. What would you use it for and why?Julian: How much?
Me [evasively]: You know, some…. large amount.
Julian: But that question is meaningless. It would depend on exactly what the X amount is!
Me [sighing]: Okay look, it was a Humanities person who asked that question, so it has a lot fewer zeros in it than you are used to! I don’t know how to scale that up in science funding!
~~Me: I mean, the whole point of the hypothetical is that it would be vastly more money than you can hope for(which, in the original hypo, the sum actually was, for a Humanities person.) But if I told you scientists the actual sum you’d say it doesn’t even pay for a dustpan to sweep up the ashes of all the subjects whose brains you accidentally fried! You just… imagine a massive amount of money relative to an impressively big grant in your field and tell me what you’d do!
~~Julian: Ok so if I had that money I would [long scientific explanation]
Me: Huh, but isn’t that sort of thing already being done?
Julian: But I would be doing it better!
Me: But that’s not the point of the exercise! In this hypothetical, this windfall money would be divorced from any grant agency, so you should do something you think is exciting and could be the next big thing, but which no one else would fund you for because they don’t see the point yet! You’re just doing what is already being done but with more expensive equipment!!
Julian: [haughtily] Novel work doesn’t always require a lot of money being poured down it, whereas expensive work does.
Me: OUCH.
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