The academic incentive structure is "funny". If I wanted to maximize academic success, I would spend almost all my time on grant writing, a minimum of time on teaching and PhD student supervision, and no time on reviewing, outreach, writing papers or even doing research myself.
It goes without saying that this is not how I approach my job. I spend about half of my time managing research activities in my lab, a decent amount of time writing and reading (and just thinking), and I take teaching, reviewing, and outreach seriously.
Obviously the current incentive structure is not in anyone's interest. We want people who are most experienced with research to spend much of their time being closely involved with research. We want good teaching and qualified peer review.
In contrast, more grant applications written benefits no-one. Especially as most grant applications are rejected. Most of grant writing is almost all wasted effort. Even for applications that are successful, the time would have been better spent actually doing the research.
There is the argument that writing grant applications is useful as it makes you plan your research better. Those who say that have probably never written a grant. It's more like selling research than planning research. Also, the actual research will never follow the plan.
So how did we end up here? I think it is partly due to that grant money is a zero-sum game. If you get a million dollar grant, that means that someone else did not get that grant. This is as opposed to publications and citations, which can keep increasing boundlessly.
Therefore, people with a very competitive view of science see grant income as a more reliable signal of academic success. Despite that the connection to how good influential the underlying research is is tenuous at best.
The reason research grants exist at all seems to be that politicians want to think that they can somehow control research by strategic allocations. And that prominent scientists/scholar acquiesce with this vision, knowing that they will get an outsize portion of these grants.
What would an alternative incentive structure look? I don't have a firm answer, but it should definitely be one that incentivizes scientists to spend their time actually doing research, as well as doing their duties to their scientific communities, including peer review.
In general, I'm in favor of more anarchic models, minimizing individuals' power over each other, while allowing stable and predictable work conditions. PhD students and postdocs should preferably choose who to work with themselves. I think this better for both people and science.
Ok, time to return to writing those AAAI reviews. Bye for now.
