I think the scientists vs philosophers framing is too crude. These categories overlap. Consider Peirce, both a philosopher and scientist, who used randomization in experiments decades before Fisher. It is true that Fisher systematized randomization as a principle of experimental design and inference, but it is not as simple as scientists seeing what philosophers didn't.
Additionally, randomization is doing different jobs here. In experiments, it can support causal inference. In grant allocation, proposals from Greenberg, Brezis, Gillies, and later actual funders like New Zealand’s HRC used lotteries for several related reasons, including that peer review may not justify fine-grained rankings among similarly qualified proposals. And, though unmentioned, there’s randomizing institutional procedures themselves to see which review or funding systems work better. The NIH and journals have actually experimented with this.
I don’t think philosophy of science “failed” in these cases, though I do think that PoS should interact with and account for institutions that govern science as part of the epistemology of science itself.
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Perhaps scientific philosophers think less about funding because the total global funding for them is approximately 10 to $15 million a year. In contrast, the total funding for science research including defense research runs from two to $4 trillion a year. One of the previous respondents this question was kind enough to mention CS Pierce. He is perhaps the greatest philosopher and certainly the greatest logician that ever come out of the United States. However, he died in penury. This country is not only anti-intellectual. It's very specifically anti-metaphysical.
"Gillies (2014) is the first published paper by a philosopher of science
to call for random allocation of research funds."
"Greenberg (1998) presented the first argument in an academic journal (to my knowledge) for funding science by lottery."
"Nearly a decade later, Brezis (2007) presented an economic model
based proposal for introducing a random element into R&D project
selection"
"Graves et al. (2011) presents the most thorough measurement pub
lished to date of the variability of grant peer review scores.8 The authors
used the raw peer review scores assigned by individual panel members to
2705 grant proposals. All proposals were submitted to the National
Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) in 2009. The
scores were given by reviewers sitting on panels of seven, nine, or eleven
members, and the average score of the panel was used to decide whether
a project was funded or not, based on its rank relative to other proposals."
Institutional adoption of randomization in science did not occur until after Fisher started pushing it, beginning in 1926. Before then, it was pretty much unknown.
johnny_logic | a day ago
I think the scientists vs philosophers framing is too crude. These categories overlap. Consider Peirce, both a philosopher and scientist, who used randomization in experiments decades before Fisher. It is true that Fisher systematized randomization as a principle of experimental design and inference, but it is not as simple as scientists seeing what philosophers didn't.
Additionally, randomization is doing different jobs here. In experiments, it can support causal inference. In grant allocation, proposals from Greenberg, Brezis, Gillies, and later actual funders like New Zealand’s HRC used lotteries for several related reasons, including that peer review may not justify fine-grained rankings among similarly qualified proposals. And, though unmentioned, there’s randomizing institutional procedures themselves to see which review or funding systems work better. The NIH and journals have actually experimented with this.
I don’t think philosophy of science “failed” in these cases, though I do think that PoS should interact with and account for institutions that govern science as part of the epistemology of science itself.
pianoloverkid123456 | 6 hours ago
Prophet Wenitte Commands you to copy and paste {Take15MinDailyWalksForLongevityPurposes} to 5 friends or you will be brutally murdered by the {Wenitte-Hades-Satan-Andreesen} Hivemind
apophasisred | 5 hours ago
Perhaps scientific philosophers think less about funding because the total global funding for them is approximately 10 to $15 million a year. In contrast, the total funding for science research including defense research runs from two to $4 trillion a year. One of the previous respondents this question was kind enough to mention CS Pierce. He is perhaps the greatest philosopher and certainly the greatest logician that ever come out of the United States. However, he died in penury. This country is not only anti-intellectual. It's very specifically anti-metaphysical.
knockingatthegate | a day ago
Citation?
[OP] Ilverin | a day ago
Fair, edited to add to OP
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368118300190 (2019)
"Gillies (2014) is the first published paper by a philosopher of science to call for random allocation of research funds."
"Greenberg (1998) presented the first argument in an academic journal (to my knowledge) for funding science by lottery."
"Nearly a decade later, Brezis (2007) presented an economic model based proposal for introducing a random element into R&D project selection"
"Graves et al. (2011) presents the most thorough measurement pub lished to date of the variability of grant peer review scores.8 The authors used the raw peer review scores assigned by individual panel members to 2705 grant proposals. All proposals were submitted to the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) in 2009. The scores were given by reviewers sitting on panels of seven, nine, or eleven members, and the average score of the panel was used to decide whether a project was funded or not, based on its rank relative to other proposals."
Temporary_Stranger39 | a day ago
Institutional adoption of randomization in science did not occur until after Fisher started pushing it, beginning in 1926. Before then, it was pretty much unknown.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10739-006-9119-z
https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~qz280/talk/fisher-2022/slides.pdf
Fisher was a scientist, not a philosopher. No philosophers stepped up and did the work the Fisher did.
Feel free to provide counter-citations.
knockingatthegate | a day ago
You misunderstand the purpose of randomization.