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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. So much of neuroscience is still in "unknown unknown" phase, and the idea of just doing this massive interdisciplinary project to simulate a full human brain, built on the pile of sand that is any sort of "theory" of full-brain simulation ... it's like dedicating $1 billion to some dude's unpublished idea of proving P = NP. Bullshit should have been called before this ever got off the drawing board.

Sure seems like the EU has it's fair share of incompetent technocrats if you can throw $1 billion at some nonsense any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense if you'd just picked up a phone.

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Sounds like most VC firms nowadays.

> any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense

The problem with groundbreaking work is often that any handful of experts can tell you that it's nonsense. E.g., look at the reception that Barry Marshall got when he proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infection. [1] All the experts "knew" it was caused by "stress, spicy foods, and too much acid" in the stomach. Eventually he got the Nobel prize, but you have to wonder what else we're missing out because whoever discovered it wasn't as dogged or as lucky as Marshall.

[1] http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/mar1int-1

Examples of this type are not a good guideline for policy decisions, almost by definition. For every Marshall, there's a million cranks whose ideas are rejected by the establishment and rightfully so. At the outset, all these ideas appear equally wild. But resources are scarce -- we can't just fund everything.

So what to do with a billion Euros? Obviously, we shouldn't put everything in a single pot. Particularly not in one crazy pot. That's why people complain about Markram's ego trip and enabling politicians. If you got a certain amount of funding, diversify: fund a couple of cranks, sure, but 90% should go toward what's often called normal science where small steps add up to comparatively predictable progress.

(In Markram's/the HBP's defence: Ultimately, the project will yield a metric tonne of normal science, especially in terms of infrastructure etc. However, everybody will be disappointed at the end...)

I think examples like Marshall can't be the only guideline for policy. But they are excellent examples for policy. Marshall made lives better for millions of people.

Anybody responsible for science funding should be keenly aware that the machine they steer is much better at responding to obvious failures like Markram than silent failures that ulcer treatment was for decades.

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