Simpler answer

Denyse notes an article showing that research grants are already being written by ChatGPT:

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A 2023 Nature survey of 1,600 researchers found that more than 25% use AI to help them write manuscripts and that more than 15% use the technology to help them write grant proposals.

Some people might see the use of ChatGPT in writing grant proposals as cheating, but it actually highlights a much bigger problem: what is the point of asking scientists to write documents that can be easily created with AI? What value are we adding? Perhaps it is time for funding bodies to rethink their application processes.

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The simpler solution is to get rid of grants. Fund the entire lab or department on a reliable consistent annual basis, allowing accumulation of unused funds. This is how industrial labs have always worked, and several countries run academia this way. Real development doesn’t have specifically defined projects; the entire company has an overall theme or purpose which leads to improvements in the products or manufacturing methods. Academic labs are similar. Each lab has a historical direction and an internal body of achievements and skills, smoothly spawning new developments.

The academic system of one grant per project forces short-term thinking and wastes a tremendous amount of money. Each project buys its own equipment, duplicating equipment already available, and each project must use up its grant before it’s done, leading to extra purchases of even more redundant equipment. If the problem needs more time than the contract duration, too bad. It has to stop whether done or not.

Of course the worst part of per-project grants is the enforcement of orthodoxy. Granting agencies are foundations or federal bureaucracies, and ALL such entities have the same monstrous globalist agenda. They will reject a grant that doesn’t conform rigidly to this year’s monstrosity. When each lab or company can move its own money between projects without arbitrary time limits of federal interference, an original idea has a somewhat better chance of success.