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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything except for one thing: I think their risk appetite is "u" shaped: low-risk is funded but they’d also fund insane-risk pie-in-the-sky academia dreams where many experts would immediately say that it will never work.

The stuff in between with sensible risk-reward ratios will indeed be ignored.

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I disagree. The pie-in-the-sky academia dreams are not risk, they are safety. ITER and CERN and similar do fascinating research, and I don't mean to throw any shade their way, but they do not represent risk. There's not any possibility of failure. Things could go completely sideways and papers would keep getting written and no bureaucrat would lose their neck.

On the other hand, most startups have the ability to be total failures. If your social network, or your rocket company, or your new type of airplane collapses, it is a total loss. That is risk.

Obviously, I don't know what baxtr meant, but I really hope it's not that. Because this critique of projects like ITER and CERN is really misguided IMO (and honestly just harmful). These are not startups, these are pure science projects, they are pretty much supposed to have negative ROI. It's not even fair to call giving them money an investment, these are grants and donations. Money that you sacrifice to a worthy cause, that supposedly would be the only cause in the fantasy world of communism-utopia, but that absolutely cannot get an investment in the world of pragmatic capitalism, because it is not about making money.

Hmm, perhaps my comment was not clear enough. I am all for large scale science and have nothing negative to say on the subject. I just do not consider that type of project to have serious "risk." Barring extreme cases, a bunch of researchers doing research is not going to produce any career-ending disasters.

I am definitely not talking about basic science projects. That’s an entirely different beast. And I want it to be well funded.

I am talking about projects that should be companies with an intent to make profits.

I think we are talking about the same thing to be honest.

They have turned something that should be high-risk into something safe with no consequences if there is no progress. Thus there is no progress, because why change things even if we are running into the wrong direction?

PS: I am not so much talking about CERN. CERN is basic science and we need that too. I am talking about projects that should be startups, i.e. commercially driven entities with the end-goal of making money.

> they’d also fund insane-risk pie-in-the-sky academia dreams

Just out of curiosity, can you throw a couple of examples?

Particle accelerators?

Those I think serve a good purpose. We can discover the universe one atom smashed at a time.

It's non-profit and would not exist without external funding.

The discussion is more about businesses I think.

The Human Brain Project comes to mind.

ITER and cold fussion. Its either impossible (my opinion) or far too early. ITER itself will not even produce single watt of electricity. Its PoC for net positive energy gain from cold fussion (we will see...)

ITER has nothing to do with cold fusion. And all cold fusion attempts so far ended up as scams.

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