Comment by mencius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mencius | Hacker News Reader

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I actually agree with all of this - in theory.

The problem is that the actual process by which this guesswork is done, actually right now in the real world, is nonsense. It is permeated by intentional distortions of reality. As a result, in my opinion, research is pointed in directions which a reasonable observer would guess are dry holes. The fundamental difficulty is that Congress is not a reasonable observer - it is a political one.

This is inextricable from the phenomenon of official research funding. I suspect that private philanthropic funding - the way it worked before WWII, a period in which there was no computer science, but quite a lot of other science - would do a much better job of "guesswork."

You can't "guess" any better than flipping a coin when it comes to funding research. They laughed at Bill Gates when he said he wanted control of the software. I think there is room for improvement (which there is for everything) in the funding of research but to call it worthless just because there isn't a direct need or use for something is itself worthless. Any kind of knowledge is useful, no matter what.

Try submitting this paragraph as your next grant application!

It is actually possible to make educated guesses as to what's interesting and what isn't. It is just very hard.

The management of the old Xerox PARC, for example, was very good at it. So were the people at DARPA - about 40 years ago. So, once, was Bell Labs. And so on.

Needless to say, the actual process of guesswork has nothing in common with the modern scientific budget process.

The only thing that made the management at Xeroc PARC, Bell Labs, etc. good, was that they let smart people do what they wanted and stayed out of the way.

Read Michael Hiltzik's "Dealers of Lightning." It's a little more complicated than that.

http://www.parc.com/research/

I'm willing to accept that you are more than capable than predicting what's interesting. Let's try a zero knowledge proof. You point out the interesting ones, and we'll check back in a few years to see your accuracy.

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