Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

1. Don't try too hard to make science funding more efficient / market lead or whatever - just fund more - double the science budget tomorrow And again every five years for a generation. We are about to go through a societal refactoring with solar / electric / digital / climate change hitting at once. Spending a few quid to help out the fundamentals won't hurt anyone.

2. The above might upset people but string theory is a good example - partly yes people are held hostage by funding (much like it's hard to avoid being typecast as an actor). But the solution to that is to fund lots more (experimental) movies, not to hope studio heads can pick better winners.

I am perfectly happy for a slice of my tax dollar to go on someone thinking about Pram theory (#) for a decade simply because we have no idea whatsoever how to tackle the big ones in physics, so spray and pray is going to be a lot better than most other options.

(#) Red Dwarf episode. worth watching episode just for this joke.

I would agree with funding more science, but you'll need some hoops to jump through or anyone can just come in and grab free money to "do research" with. I think you will necessarily end up not too far from where we are now because of that.

sure go for it.

If you have a country rewarding intellectual effort, that’s a good country to be a part of.

I’m betting that there will be more smart people trying more smart things that will end up positive than not.

I mean we are on a hackers and startups forum - it’s the fundamental premise of a majority of people visiting this site.

Honestly this seems like an issues of not having testable hypotheses. I’d love to see how it gets to a testable state.

Why? I find this attitude curious the thought that all the academics would suddenly start just taking the money and twiddle thumbs. So because of this we set up a huge administrative body around it and keep the academics from actually doing the work.

I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.

> the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.

Good point, becoming an academic may already represent enough of a hoop, though that’s just the CS perspective. In other fields there may not be much of a lucrative industry, so I’m not sure whether this will hold generally.

> I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.

No, they're motivated by safety. And there's nothing safer than the ivory tower. Academics would work on self-referential research until the end of time if they could get funding for it.

They create academia children in a perpetual loop trying their very hardest to avoid life and all its complexities (especially those of people, of which they are ludicrously blind) by living in their theoretical world of nothingness.

> Why? I find this attitude curious the thought that all the academics would suddenly start just taking the money and twiddle thumbs.

Depends on how you define “academic”. There are suddenly going to be a lot of “academics” showing up for their free handouts once there is no bar.

>I can tell you that the vast majority of academics are not motivated by money. If that was the case they would move into industry where they could earn significantly more.

Selection bias. The academics you are thinking of are the ones willing to put all of the work into getting grants, teaching, etc. There are an order of magnitude more PhD holders that nope out of academia after graduation because of the grim prospects.

I suspect that in many fields, funding acts as a fertility drug for researchers. The opportunities to fund research are, accordingly, pretty much always going to outstrip any amount of funding that could be provided.

If that's the case, you're inevitably going to need some way to decide which of the many worthy opportunities merit sufficient investment and which ones do not.

Could not agree more. If you see into most big discoveries, fundamentals were laid 50-70 years ago. F.e. math for string theory (twistor space) was in 1960s while theory itself gained traction in 1990s. Todays the new math developed under premise of string theory might be fundamental for future theories coming 50 year later, even if string theory would be proven wrong

In terms of dollars that’s fine. But on a societal level I think you have to think about alternative cost: The problem is not the money wasted on string theory. It’s all the other research that those researchers could have done.

That ultimately is their choice - using money as a forcing function to get the research we want is a poor approach to picking fruitful areas of research (although not uncommon)

Sure, but the point of government funding is to encourage things we want for society. If some researcher wants to pour another 20 years of salary into more string theory, maybe we shouldn’t pay for that.

Perhaps rather than prescribing areas of research, we should just ban or severely limit areas that haven’t shown any promise.

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