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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment.

One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant funding proposals followed by a flurry of publication followed by more proposals. These proposals often carried some requirement for language that, in my view, was a direct response to a certain kind of taxpayer, in order to justify on some tangible level the "need" for the research to be funded.

Basic science, and theoretical research alike deserve far more funding than they get. That a significant portion of our country views the funding model we have for scientific discovery as "beg[ging]" is one of the greatest failures we have as a culture.

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Oh, some of it does come down to almost begging. It shouldn't, because funding discovery is important. People doing long hours of hard work for the common good shouldn't have to beg for funding. Then again, we shouldn't have to beg for school lunches or housing for military vets either but look at social media right now.

I think on a philosophical level everyone should be able to justify their work at any time. But on a practical level this can be distracting to the people doing the work and it gets us into the begging/funding/publishing cycle we're stuck in now. Maybe the reward system just needs to be changed.

How much of that attitude do you think is due to a cultural shared failure to value basic science and theoretical research, and how much is due to a failure to communicate the benefits of such activities?

I think it's quite possible that when people hear "it's complicated" or "we won't see practical applications for a decade", they wonder whether it's money well-spent. Especially if funding for things which have an immediate impact (e.g: healthcare, schools) is perceived as desperately lacking.

It seems to me that the joy of discovering and understanding the universe does not get communicated to the general public, and that's a failing of those who are asking that the general public fund their research (whether individual scientists or funding bodies such as EPSRC).

Also I think that popular media accounts of some ridiculous-sounding research that got funding tends to get extrapolated (by at least some folks) to a characterization all taxpayer-funded research. One example I remember hearing about a few years ago was a study of how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese Quail. A lot of people hear about that sort of thing and question why their money is being spent on such useless-sounding research.

And I imagine a fair number of people who are just working to get by don't see much point in the study of escoteric particle physics either. Never going to affect their lives.

I can't disagree that there is a failure of communication as you note. Or at least a deficiency.

Good comment.

Just curious, just how much funding should basic science and theoretical research get, exactly?

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