Isn’t a “researcher’s basic income” just another word for, um… tenure? I think the proper solution is to tighten standards for what’s considered “good” research (fix the replication crisis) and to increase the status of other sorts of scholarship which aren’t highly valued at present (at least in STEM) but are very much needed, such as review articles and in-depth monographs. These things don’t have the problem where only an unambiguously “positive” result demonstrates the value of one’s scholarship, and reaching positive results is largely a matter of luck.
The author does suggest a system where “academic researchers are rewarded for running high quality studies with these sorts of attributes, regardless of outcome”, but, barring highly-selective preregistration, I’m not sure how this can work—other things being equal, an unambiguous outcome does signal a higher-quality study, so researchers will always prefer clear (i.e. “positive”) outcomes.
Isn’t a “researcher’s basic income” just another word for, um… tenure?
Tenure means doing it successfully the wrong way for years, and afterwards as a reward being allowed to do it right. The proposed researcher’s basic income is to allow people doing it the right way much sooner.
Isn’t a “researcher’s basic income” just another word for, um… tenure? I think the proper solution is to tighten standards for what’s considered “good” research (fix the replication crisis) and to increase the status of other sorts of scholarship which aren’t highly valued at present (at least in STEM) but are very much needed, such as review articles and in-depth monographs. These things don’t have the problem where only an unambiguously “positive” result demonstrates the value of one’s scholarship, and reaching positive results is largely a matter of luck.
The author does suggest a system where “academic researchers are rewarded for running high quality studies with these sorts of attributes, regardless of outcome”, but, barring highly-selective preregistration, I’m not sure how this can work—other things being equal, an unambiguous outcome does signal a higher-quality study, so researchers will always prefer clear (i.e. “positive”) outcomes.
Tenured professors have a lot of responsibilities like holding lectures and supervising PHD students that don’t allow them to focus on research.
Tenure means doing it successfully the wrong way for years, and afterwards as a reward being allowed to do it right. The proposed researcher’s basic income is to allow people doing it the right way much sooner.