Having a lot of tabs open seems to be so widespread that it has transcended being a Dawkinsian meme (Just a habit that people have and notice, and perhaps gets normalized and spreads) to become a regular meme1 where people are amused at the phenomenon. This state of affairs is generally not liked by those that suffer from chronic tabitis, citing various reasons like Makes the computer slow A crash can make them disappear, losing those bookmarks forever Their sheer number makes it hard to even read them any…

One of the hottest topics right now in the world of meta-science is using lotteries to fund research. In a nutshell, the rationale is that it's hard to tell who or what will be successful, and it is very costly to try to do so as well. A system that relies on peer review demands of researchers time to write grants and to review them. I 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 …

In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following situation: Imagine that only a handful of scientists at every point in time are able to –if given the time and means–lead revolutions on par with the work of Darwin, Einstein, or Galileo (This is an extreme case admittedly because most of science does not look like this; most of science is more incremental and less memorable). I recently found two au…

In a previous post I reviewed the evidence behind the effectiveness of two awards targeted at promising researchers, funding them more and for longer. The conclusion was that the evidence is not very strong and that the extent to which "Fund people" makes sense depends on other factors that we should also investigate. Both the HHMI Investigator and NIH Director's Pioneer Award are targeted at scientists that are expected to perform well. The each require applicants to have shown success already. U…

Though I'm right now not employed as a software engineer I have been writing code under various hats for the last few years (As a data scientist, ML engineer, and software engineer). Naturally me being me I have not just done the thing but also reflected about the thing. Questions like what's good software, what does being a good software engineer mean, how should meetings be ran, and so on. Here are some thoughts on that. Organizational issues The cost of disagreement In many cases a disagreement may be ov…

I started the year in London, attending later in in early March a private conference in Jackson Hole. Near the end of the conference the travel ban UK->USA was announced but I continued without paying much attention to it. Other than advances in science and technology I tend to pay little attention to current events (noise that repeats itself) and Covid was just the last of them. In a few years I'll look back and see exactly what Covid did in its proper context. So instead of reading and thinking about t…