4/Pragmatic Fairness:
Customary Rules of
Deliberation
It’s just very pragmatic. You put twelve pretty smart people in a win-
dowless room in [some city] for two days and you expect them to re-
main sane. They’re pretty professional people, so they do their best.
They have very different tastes so there’s a lot of potential for conflict.
They stay cool-headed and they have to make these heroic efforts to
agree across big disciplinary differences on what constitutes a good
proposal... We spend so much time on it and... there’s so many
people focusing at once on this proposal... This year particularly,
there was a lot of movement: You had a lot of situations where some-
thing was ranked relatively high [prior to the meeting and] weak-
nesses were discussed and people in favor were convinced [not to
fund]. And conversely, something [ranked] quite low, [but] the more
you talked about it, the more it looked like you should give it a
chance, that it had some promise... It would be sort of self-congrat-
ulatory to say that cream rises to the top and that we picked exactly
the right set. I don’t think that happened. But I think we chose on av-
erage the better proposals.
EconomistAcademic excellence? I know it when I see it...IfIdidn’t, I couldn’t
honestly do all of the selecting and advising I do. I would even go far-
ther and say I’m extremely confident in my own judgment and con-107