https://twitter.com/drsteveu/status/1510650260992929796
Of course academia is not equal, but his real problem is that he's an idjiot.
Utych here. Why don't you insult me publicly?
Yeah I imagine you’re here a lot.
Pray tell what did academia lose by allocating this money to BK instead of you? The purpose is to learn things , not for you to prove you’re as smart as the big kids.
Ask me on twitter and I'll respond
I don't know if S.U. actually comes here. In case he or anyone who behaves similarly see this:
I agree with some of your observations about the discipline. BUT Twitter is not good therapy. 99.9% of your Twitter followers -let alone others who see your tweets- are not your friends and do not think better of you because of your whining. If you have 2 or 3 REAL friends in this life, you are very lucky and even real friends would get sick of it, -no one except your mom cares about you THAT much. If you need therapy get it. Maybe take a Twitter hiatus. If you want to leave the discipline, that's your business. But you are not helping yourself with this in any way.
I'm not sure I see what the complaint here is. The author's institutions didn't just give them money, they got grants. Anyone is allowed to apply for those same grants. So I'm not seeing how this isn't a level playing field.
Like it or not, part of being a good scientist is securing funding. People who are good at that part of the job are rewarded by the discipline. I think it's problematic that securing funding is part of being a scientist, but so long as it is I'm not sure I see the problem with the discipline rewarding it.
It's not a level playing field because advantages cumulate over the course of a career. Being high status helps you get grants. It breaks ties at journals. It does lots of things. But whining on Twitter is not going to fix it.
I'm not sure I see what the complaint here is. The author's institutions didn't just give them money, they got grants. Anyone is allowed to apply for those same grants. So I'm not seeing how this isn't a level playing field.
Like it or not, part of being a good scientist is securing funding. People who are good at that part of the job are rewarded by the discipline. I think it's problematic that securing funding is part of being a scientist, but so long as it is I'm not sure I see the problem with the discipline rewarding it.
It can be simultaneously true that K&B do good research and that there are obscene inequalities in how an average TT professor gets funds and how K&B get funds. The problem is we can't have a real discussion about it because a certain subset of people want to keep their funding exclusive, and the other subset of people are way jealous. If you look at who likes the SU tweets as opposed to something like Jake G's defense of K&B, there is a very obvious divide in between the haves and have-nots.
I'm still trying to decide whether this is a big deal or not, but it does strike me as strange that K&B's biggest funders are ones that the average political scientist would have no chance at even "applying" for. I'm not even sure these groups do applications. K&B have these industry connections that are basically self-reinforcing, they go from one interest group to the next, running big expensive experiments. Of course, they are politically aligned with the missions of these interest groups. K&B have made their name initially through uncovering fraud, so I doubt they'd ever do something sketchy in the name of results. But if this "funding model" were expanded and became the norm, honestly I don't trust most political scientists to do political research with political groups and come out with non-sketchy results.