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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

> "Retrospectively you can justify anything. But the coronavirus outbreak happening now is not proof of the idea that the optimal thing to do in 2010 was to invest in coronavirus research..."

you know what we can justify prospectively? any and all scientific research, including corona research and every past and future ig nobel nominee, over funneling billions of dollars into the pockets of the already wealthy, as our politicoeconomic system is currently set up to do.

that's not to belittle your point that you can't a priori know what research will "pay off", but rather to buttress the idea that we should be pouring many magnitudes more money into research so we're that much less likely to miss potentially valuable science in the face of the vast unknown.

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Great response. Increasing investment in the "Science Index Fund" prepares us to handle risks like COVID-19 better without requiring the "active management / forecasting" ability to know what the probabilities of a COVID-19 outbreak would have been.

However, an indexing strategy still requires an estimate of the value of coronavirus research. Suppose $5T USD was funneled into all research over the last 10 years. How much of that would virology/epidemiology have gotten, and would it have been enough?

Should be all of it, considering this outbreak alone cost the global economy more than $5 trillion

This ignores the a priori knowledge problem. Sure, with perfect knowlege that there would be an outbreak in 2020, this investment might have made sense.

Without knowing the future, you can't make this statement.

i think it's really tricky because we aren't really smart when it comes to dealing with the future and/or counterfactuals.

risk averse investors (?) may want a lot to go towards prevention of catastrophic but perhaps lower probability things (e.g. pandemic, asteroid impact within 1000 years), others may want towards high probability things (climate change related), yet others may want to just solve nuclear fusion so that all of the above become way easier, etc. imagine if $5T concentrated solely in energy research got us some breakthrough leading to cheap/infinite energy, for example.

prediction market? i'm not really sure.

yes, the allocation problem is thornier, and valuing science properly more so, but it's pretty obviously working badly in our current politicoeconomic system. we can't both hoard wealth and power and expect good allocation. concentrating societal decision-making into fewer and fewer hands inevitably leads to bad and self-serving decisions.

with that said, once $5T (or whatever) is allocated to science, it's a matter for the decision markets in and around science to sort out allocation within. that mechanism has the best chance of coming up with the best available (but unlikely perfect) answer.

> Suppose $5T USD was funneled into all research over the last 10 years.

Hard to answer exactly, but we can get a decent answer. A quick quack (search)[0] shows that in 2013 the US spent $435bn in research (We'll round to an even $500bn) funding. So to answer your question:

> How much of that would virology/epidemiology have gotten, and would it have been enough?

Exactly as much as they already got and in exactly the same way it has.

But this answers your question too specifically because it is just all funding. Personally I'm in the view that if we're not in an active war we should be focusing more money into R&D. Science has a ROI of 1 year - a few hundred years, with 20 years probably being around the mean. A 10-30 year investment is not something I want my industry to focus around (or something I can expect industry to even spend money on because their incentives are not aligned for that). But it IS something I want my country to be focused on, because even 50 years for a country is not that long. I also want that knowledge in the public domain so businesses can form around these new things. Essentially the gov raises the tide and all boats benefit, even the people that are making new boats. I want my government to be funding basic scientific research because often there is no immediate benefit from this but the long term benefits are huge. Institutions like NASA and CERN don't spin off technologies because there is something unique about them, they spin off technologies because they are pushing the edges of technological capabilities and have to invent new components along the way, things they didn't know they needed. This isn't something I can expect a company smaller than FAANG to invest in.

[0] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15330/nsf15330.pdf

[1] Further breakdown: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17316/

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