By Bob Beattie
I had a professor who once said that if you want people to believe your argument, it is best to be accurate in the presentation of your facts. It seems to me that almost every statement George Musser makes in this recent SCIAM article is inaccurate. Is George taking a view of writing that if you tell a big enough distortion, people will believe it?
In the article, George asserts that IBM, Adobe Systems and the U.S. federal government have created technology that “retards human progress” by creating Grants.gov. He claims that “no one would have thought that the process of applying for scientific and scholarly grants could be made any more unwieldy and wasteful than it already was,” but that the joint effort of these three has “managed to achieve exactly that.”
I recently wrote a rebuttal you can find here and here is my drift:
I will be the first to say that Grants.gov has growing pains and I have done so at meetings of research administrators, including at FDP. Yet I do not mindlessly attack the process but try to focus on specific, fixable problems that I know about from using the system and talking to others who have done so. The Grants.gov staff and some agency users such as NIH are very responsive to suggestions.
George, on the other hand, makes inaccurate statements one after the other. Has he ever used the system, does he make any positive suggestion, what is his purpose?
Is there anything useful in George's commentary? I cannot find any truth in it. I have been using Grants.gov for 3 years and I have taught some 60 groups at Michigan on how to use it. Michigan folks have prepared, and our grants office has submitted, some 1000 applications during that three years. We feel Grants.gov is a useful system. It has processed some 100,000 applications in three years so they must be doing something right.
So read my article and tell me what you think.
