Is it something I said?

I had a grant application turned down and wrote the following polite email to the program director:

Dear Dr. ***,

I am sorry to hear this. In particular, I can’t understand how the panel could’ve thought that the methods are “not in themselves new.” Clearly we have more work to do in explaining our proposal.

But I will look on the upside, which is that ** must have received some excellent proposals to fund that were even better than ours! So congratulations on that.

Yours
Andrew Gelman

I was surprised that he did not respond, but when I related the story to my colleagues, they explained to me that the director might have thought I was being sarcastic in my email. I was actually sincere. But intonation is notoriously difficult to convey via email.

13 thoughts on “Is it something I said?

  1. On first reading it certainly looks sarcastic to me. But I'm the sort of person that believes life would be so much easier if I didn't have to deal with other people!

  2. I am non-sarcastic myself, and prefer to avoid the sarcastic interpretation – I would find this a likeable e-mail, it would make me want to write back, "Yes, we rather did, but do not hold it against us!"

    (Your exclamation point in the second paragraph is the signal that it is a non-sarcastic observation…)

  3. Well, it came across as quite snarky/sarcastic to me – in fact, I guffawed out loud before reading the last paragraph, as I really thought it funny to send such an *obviously* sarcastic mail to a program director… But then, I'm no native speaker, and I do have a dirty mind.

    But this kind of underlines why I'm always painstakingly careful to word my mails in a way that (hopefully) minimizes misunderstandability.

  4. And there are litigation concerns.

    Apparently so much so at **** that they withdrew from studying new ways to make funding fairer as it might imply past funding was not fair…

    In any case the agency staff do need to be very careful in their replies and no reply is a very careful one.

    My favourite reply (which was demanded) was
    from …. explaining that although it was unfortunate that that reviewers thought we should do a randomized study on age effects (i.e. randomize patients to be young or old) that in no way affected the appraisal of the merits of the proposed study.

    Keith

  5. Please allow me to translate:

    I am sorry to hear this. In particular, I can't understand how the panel could've thought that the methods are "not in themselves new."

    Yeah, you're retarded. It should be intuitively obvious how great this work would be

    Clearly we have more work to do in explaining our proposal.

    Now I have to dumb down my proposal to hope to have any shot at getting money from you. This will obscure the intuitively-obvious-amazingness of it

    But I will look on the upside, which is that ** must have received some excellent proposals to fund that were even better than ours!

    How did you get to be in charge of money? Monkeys throwing darts pick better projects than you do

    So congratulations on that.

    Picking projects is hard, and you are clearly not up to the task. Good luck wit' dat

    That's a particularly dim interpretation of you note. What I can't tell from what you wrote was what your goal was. Are you asking for some guidance to better prepare in the next funding cycle? Are you dropping a friendly "Hey, we think this is great and will keep working on it, keep us in mind when you have more money," note? Or are you just trying to make an imprint of yourself in his head so he remembers you next time [did you sign it, GELMAN with 32-pt font?]

  6. David,

    I didn't have a particular goal when writing the email. I think it's just that I have a habit of responding to emails and so I tried to respond in a polite way. I didn't really have an instrumental goal here.

  7. I think your introduction to the post "I had a grant application turned down and wrote the following polite email to the program director" contributes to the impression of the readers here that this is a sarcastic email. Reading the email itself (and nothing more) might be different.

  8. Andrew,
    It happens to me all the time. It is frustrating thinking how to write an email trying not to offend the low self-esteem person on the other side.
    Human communication should be easier.
    Just giving my opinion.
    bests

  9. I can see the sarcasm interpretation. Breezy emails can very often come across differently than intended. Written communication is a dismally awful mode of thought transfer. English especially is fraught with risk, because there is no standardized way of writing things. After reading your blog for more than a year I would not have interpreted your language as sarcasm, but given the intense self-centeredness of many academics, it wouldn't be hard to find that in your unfortunate phrasing if I were to read it completely cold.

  10. Did the rejection letter include references to work that shows (perhaps erroneously) that the methods are "not in themselves new"? If not, it would seem worthwhile to ask about that.

  11. Keith: Good point. I can see how the directors of these programs could open themselves to all sorts of criticisms if they start engaging in email conversations with PI's about accept/reject decisions.

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