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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to pretend the current bureaucratic approach is ideal. I'd say though that there is a difference between supporting long term national research capability, and flexibly deploying money to urgent or new areas (and everything between).

It's not like there has been a shortage of covid related research in the last ~2 years. Machine learning, quantum computing, all have piles of money pouring in from industry. And somewhere, some long-suffering career researcher is toiling in some area the rest of us ignore, that will be super important somehow in 10 years.

There's definitely room for streamlining processes, and making them apolitical, even if bureaucratic. But institutional inertia has an upside too. Fundamental research is a very long game.

Chesterton's fence and all that

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"And somewhere, some long-suffering career researcher is toiling in some area the rest of us ignore, that will be super important somehow in 10 years."

That is basically the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian scientist behind mRNA technology. She started tinkering with mRNA in 1978 and she was actually snubbed by Pennsylvania U. for doing "unpromising" research at some later point. All around, it took her almost 40 years of toil to arrive at a human-usable mRNA form.

One of the weaknesses of the current approach is the "publish or perish" curse. It incentivizes people to work on problems that yield (even mediocre) papers within a short timeframe. Most scientific breakthroughs didn't happen that way.

>It's not like there has been a shortage of covid related research in the last ~2 years.

And yet there has been. Where is the definitive research on aerosols? What is long covid? Why do vaccinated people get long covid? Why does COVID-19 arrive in fairly regular waves? Is Zinc helpful if you catch COVID-19? How does superspreading happen? It seems like a lot of research was abandoned when the pandemic seemed to be ending after the vaccine distribution started which turned out to be the exactly wrong thing to do when Delta showed up.

> Where is the definitive research on aerosols?

https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/air/publications

This example was pretty easy to find.

And if you read those papers and articles you'll find there are still a lot of open questions, for example a couple of quotes from the first paper:

For viral infections generally, little is known about the dose-response relationship between the inhaled number of virions and infection risk and the relationship between the site of deposition within the respiratory tract and the clinical phenotype and severity of illness.

The gaps in addressing the 4 critical questions highlight the necessity of an organized interdisciplinary research agenda. The pandemic quickly launched such research, resulting in the new but still incomplete findings presented at the NASEM workshop. These findings document the critical role of aerosols in transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Further studies are needed to refine understanding of the relative contributions of the modes of transmission in distinct settings. Strong and immediate precautionary actions should be taken based on the demonstrated significance of this transmission mode, particularly as the pandemic surges. Strategies need to be developed that assure sufficient ventilation and that add air cleaning and perhaps ultraviolet light in appropriate settings.

end quotes

Prior to this research scientists spent a long time arguing over what an aerosol was and found there were conflicting definitions. They've studied influenza and colds for a century and until now they didn't know it was spread by aerosols? And they still don't know exactly what the risk of infection by aerosols is.

There are still two years' worth of research that definitively answers some important questions, which covers the scope of the previous comments, as written.

There's also the option of simply trimming bureaucracy. For instance, you could cut DEI and still get the same research output [0].

[0] https://quillette.com/2021/11/02/tales-from-the-gulag/

I'm sure Lawrence "Groper" Krauss has a bug up his ass about DEI, but I don't see how that should mean a whole heck of a lot to me.

> Lawrence "Groper" Krauss

It's interesting how as soon as he spoke out against Affirmative Action and DEI he was immediately accused of some transgression. All that without proof, of course, or an actual trial (hint: it wouldn't pass the stricter bar of a court of law) but rather judged by an opaque "tribunal" of ethicists.

Note that he had tenure, so making up these accusations was probably the only way to get rid of the squeaky wheel...

Reminds me of RMS getting cancelled by... an anonymous blog post!

I'd group that under politics - that's about using the programs for aims outside their core mandate (in this case funding science). That's a separate issue that's endemic in government spending that I agree should be tackled.

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