Thanks! Be great to expand the team again 👍

Thanks for sharing this - utterly chilling.

Next time, Andy!

On the plus side, it gave me an extra day to settle into ESA's visitor office at Space Telescope, and to meet with some of the team working tirelessly to keep Hubble and JWST at the top of their games, despite <<waves hands at everything>>

I'll be back on this side of the Atlantic before too long, so hopefully I get to visit under happier circumstances.

Oh, there's definitely uncertainty +/- a few places in the list. We do pairwise comparisons to test the decision making process, especially at the "line," but its still going to be a bit subjective. But I don't believe there's enough to justify a lottery for hundreds of proposals in each sub-panel.

And with a lottery you still need to establish a quality threshold with a TAC, and it incentivises people buying lots of tickets with "just good enough" proposals. Just another system to game, so I actually prefer current or ESO approach. Sure this'll be a topic of discussion on JSTUC!

I was super impressed with the TAC for JWST. I think their ranking was good (def not random), it's just that there are lots of very good projects that fall below the line. Very careful discussions, and thoughtful TAC members. But the workload is enormous, and proposals come back every year...

One effect of ESO's distributed peer review (which I'm not necessarily advocating, but I prefer to a lottery) is that it reduces the number of submissions, because people get 10x that number back to review! And they just went from 6-month to 12-month calls...

Yep, didn't say there weren't downsides, sadly. STScI keeps stats on new PIs and could maybe allow someone to model that sort of impact? But doesn't fix the "rich get richer" problem. Love to hear a solution that doesn't restrict applications.