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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

As a former professional scientist (I will always be a scientist, just not one who earns a living from science), the problem is not money directly, but the encouragement of students into becoming professional scientists when there is no money to support them when they finish their training.

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I studied physics. I wanted to pursue research. The only tenable (I needed income - not everyone has parents who will pay their way through school, buy them a house, buy them a car - mine left me high and dry and paying both my and my brother's living and school costs) job options that involved research involved making weapons. Actual research jobs pay so little you need to have parents or a spouse subsidising you.

So I went and worked in finance instead.

I never really understood it, what's so wrong with making weapons?

The jobs are in making a particular kind of weapon.

Obviously that depends on your personal ethics. A lot of the professional ethics training for structural and automotive engineers, for example, stresses the fact your products shouldn't kill people.

Obviously some people make weapons so not everyone believes they have the same obligations.

Well, I work in weapons industry (I wasn't able to do a thesis because public labs doesn't have money).

So what's wrong with it?

First, things I work on are sold to both sides, in my case to a country well known to shit on human rights... And a few GUI/feature tweak later it's sold to another more respectful one.

Also, in a more general way, the main purpose of it is to kill or fear peoples, peoples with different/unaccepted ideas, peoples who disagree with the weapons owner.

Does it sound right to you?

Of course it's approved by the government, but it sounds way more like a money driven decision than a smart one. And when I ask people how they feel about it, nobody cares, typical responses:

"We are not working on a weapon, we are working on --any subsystem that doesn't sounds like a weapon--"

"I'm not the one who sell it!"

So it's nobodies fault, like during the WW2, "I'm just driving the train, I have nothing to do with deportation"

Without weapons you cannot have an army, and without an army you are instantly conquered by some raging lunatic despot who happens to have one. Having more advanced weapons than the loonies is a blessing IMO.

OK now justify selling weapons to the loonies like 90% of arms manufactures or their customers do. For last 50 years, US enemies fight using US provided weapons.

And what happens when the conquering despot is my country (Dick Cheney's team)

That's foreign policy, that doesn't have much to do with the manufacturing of weapons. Weapons manufacturers just provide weapons to their country and it's the country's (politicians) job to make wise use of it.

Saying "I don't feel comfortable doing X" is not the same as saying "no one should do X". I'd feel the same about not wanting to work for a casino, or a lab that makes better tobacco products, but oddly enough not a brewery.

Mostly that it's a zero-sum endeavor that in the aggregate, doesn't make the world a better place.

Imagine if worldwide knowledge of science regressed to 1900 levels. Imagine if worldwide engineering capabilities regressed to 1900 levels. Imagine if worldwide educational opportunities regressed to 1900 levels. We would consider any of these things to be disastrous.

Now imagine if worldwide weapons technology regressed to 1900 levels... that doesn't really seem all that bad, does it. You could even come up with a strong argument for it being a good thing.

Investing money and effort into making weapons is the literal definition of an arms race. A zero-sum game. If everyone does it, everyone loses. This would obviously never happen but if every single engineer in the world refused to work on developing new weapons, the world would be a better place tomorrow.

The exact same thing can be said about marketing and advertisting - it's a zero-sum arms race game that consumes tons of resources and doesn't contribute anything. And yet, people don't have that much moral reversations about working at Google or Facebook.

Among creative folks, there actually is a strong aversion to working in marketing/advertising. Most writers/artists consider such a career to be "selling out." It's their equivalent to engineers working on weapons technology.

Regarding Google: They work on a ton of products that genuinely make the world a better place. Gmail, google search, google news etc etc. That does give the company as a whole a halo.

Regarding Facebook: I somewhat agree with you that social media in general is overrated, but many others do genuinely believe that it improves their quality of life. I may not buy it myself, but Facebook can make a strong case for how they are making the world a better place by better connecting people.

That's a negative sum race, not a zero sum race.

Ideally, we would want essentially everyone interested in pursuing science to do so, and succeed. No?

You seem to be saying that we should rather limit the number of scientists than pay for the ones we can train.

In an ideal world yes I would love to see everyone who has a talent and interest in science pursue it.

The amount of money is mostly outside of the control of science, but encouraging students to become professional scientists when you know there is no funding to employ them at the end of their training is immoral. Until the funding situation changes then we need to stop misleading students about what to expect.

It's been known for at least 20 years that there is no money in non-corporate non-engineering science. But perhaps that advertising doesn't reach young student.

> You seem to be saying that we should rather limit the number of scientists than pay for the ones we can train.

This is still an open question. At least in biomedical sciences, there's been an explosion in the number of PhDs awarded. Biomedical postdocs get paid ~$40k/year on average, and it's increasingly likely they'll be stuck in that position for 10+ years (or you'll leave for a non-science job). I luckily won't have to go through that, but most of my friends are.

An alternative is produce less, better paid, better trained scientists.

Very few areas outside of computer science and some applied mathematic fields have anything other than very dismal job prospects.

Even if you manage to grab the brass ring and get tenure after 15 to 20 years of low paid study, this is hardly secure. If you fail to bring in large amounts of grant funding you will soon find yourself on your own in the basement broom closet or made redundant in the next departmental reshuffle.

I'm sure comp sci could use some of them. Hopefully we can start attracting the same amount of women as Bio* fields, that would do a lot to redistribute STEM labour towards better compensation and alleviate supply issues in the market (on both ends).

The amount of STEM PhDs is a mere blip compared to software engineer demand.

> Ideally, we would want essentially everyone interested in pursuing science to do so, and succeed. No?

This isn't obvious to me. What if that was everyone?

I would love to live in a world where everyone wanted to be a scientist.

Would you like to live in a world where everyone actually was a practicing scientist? Who would build houses? Where would lab equipment come from?

Yes I would. Being a scientist is about the way you view the world and what you understand rather than the job you do day to day. I still consider myself a practicing scientist despite no longer earning a living being one.

A world where everyone approached problems with a scientific mindset would be one I would love to live in.

You don't enjoy non-scifi arts and literature?

I sure do. People with scientific training are just as capable of producing art as anyone else. My personal experience is scientists are more interested in the arts and literature than the average person of equivalent education.

You've gone kind of far afield from the idea that anyone who wants to should be able to go through grad school and then support themselves in an academic job afterwards.

We want only people who have talent (top 1-5% of population) to pursue science. Majority of "science" produced by Ph.Ds outside of top 10-20 programs is complete junk that contributes very little if any to humanity.

At least in the fields I'm familiar with, the top 20 universities don't have anything near a monopoly on major advances. Especially if you consider advances that were actually made there, vs. people who did their important work elsewhere and then were hired away by the top-20 university once they were already famous. I could see it being true in some small fields where there are only 20 serious programs to begin with, but in a big field like CS it's not the case.

Agree completely. One of the best things I found about American Research System is that good research happens in many universities and not just the top/Ivy League ones. The benefits from this cannot be overstated: research is a speculative field, and the only way to increase the probability of "success" is to have many different people trying different approaches.

Unpopular opinion , but very true

"And succeed" is the problem there. Research by its very nature is speculative. So it becomes a game of probabilities, you want to find the sweet spot balancing funding with progress. Paying for everyone who wants one to have a lab and a supercomputer, would not be a good use of society's resources.

The money is in entertainment: NFL, Hollywood, etc.

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