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Comment by 1971genocide | Hacker News Reader

1971genocide

Science and modern capitalistic thinking do not work well together.

Most people in business view any sort of rigorous research as a "cost" center. And this thinking has diffused into government too.

On the other hand marketing and advertising produces the most value for dollar. Why ?

In a market those activities generate new demand - something that a capitastic system needs in order to survive.

Why spend 20 years doing research while we could spend 1 year aggressively expanding our market. Even a 1% growth would he worth it given a 0% growth if the money was spent doing research.

I like that rather than villify a single person Nate silver points the finger at the system. This type of thinking is where we should all be heading towards.

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It is worrisome that you were here downvoted for this view; as it is one that I believe (as a working scientist) is one of the larger issues that has been left out of this discussion. For example, public universities used to be fairly unconstrained in their support of grant research. Now most, if not all, have an office devoted to the commercialization (patent protection) of their own publicly supported research; quite often subsidized by private interests. So if a researcher wanted to study the effects of cell-phone usage on the developing brain, (which didn't involve me, but rather a colleague), then suddenly several large companies were going to "lamentably" pull out of supporting the athletic department with its "amateur sports" endeavors. And the list of subtle control of "public" research continues. Science and commercialism can mix productively, but it should never be done covertly. Unfortunately corporate thinking is nearly always covert.

On the contrary, only free markets generate enough surplus capital for it to be invested in long term research. Planned and managed economies don't generate enough production to even feed and supply their existing populations well.

It's a false dichotomy to say that you can only choose between 20 year research and 1 year marketing. Plenty of private money goes into research with long term payoff. There are private companies engaged in fusion research, because the payoff is huge if it is achieved. Even the public money that goes into publicly funded research comes from private earnings in the first place. So science and free markets are absolutely suited to each other. That's before we even start discussing corruption of objectives in totalitarian states, based on leaders whims (ie, Nazi science research, Lysenko etc)

"Planned and managed economies don't generate enough production to even feed and supply their existing populations well."

Sorry to tell you but capitalist society as it exists is planned and managed economy. Large corporations are command economies.

You should see what science has discovered about the brain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

If you truly believe that you live in a planned economy there is absolutely nothing more I can add.

What do you think copyright, IP and patent law is? AKA you have the money to change the rules of the game.

That is not true and the problem is that private capital usually expects certain results, or it cuts funding.

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