Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx.

A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A society where everyone agreed on the ground rules about what constituted 'science' and what constituted quackery.

We are almost to the point where we have enough multi-billion individuals that such a society could be endowed to create a place for science and scientists. Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D. I could imagine that people who could learn the discipline to do the research could be supported in that research by some facilities and a modest stipend. Not the crazy big investment stuff like Fusion Reactors, but smaller problems like characterizing digestive flora in developed and undeveloped countries.

Its probably a pipe dream. But I wish such a group existed.

One existing institution that is fairly close to you're imagining is the HHMI.

However, I think you are making two assumptions about research that are incorrect.

First, it isn't at all clear that separating teaching from research entirely would be a good thing; researchers need to be trained, and trainees bring diverse skills and perspectives to the labs in which they work.

Second, many of the "smaller problems" have been getting bigger, in that they depend on large expenditures for equipment and professional staff to keep things running. To execute your example of characterizing digestive flora from different countries, you'll need a facility with the latest sequencing equipment and people to run it, computational infrastructure, and boots on the ground to collect the data in all those developing countries.. it'll quickly turn into a multi-million dollar collaborative project.

Yes, I think the funding is the key. There are already funders who see it as their mission to support scientists and allow them to tackle interesting questions. But in the end, they have a limited pot of money to dish out, and they have to somehow make a decision about what's worth funding. That brings us back to spending a lot of time writing grant applications and trying to justify the work.

Ultimately, 'gentleman scientists' were probably able to follow their interests because they were rich enough that they didn't need to worry about earning a daily wage. That's still possible, but we'd much rather let science be done by anyone who's interested and good at it.

The OP mentions Microryza, their crowdfunding platform for science. That's a very interesting approach, but I think it only works if you already have some kind of paid job in science: the projects I've looked at are all asking for much less than a year's salary for one person.

There are places a bit like this, but they are not generally liked by the entire scientific community because they can sort of swallow highly talented individuals and take the pressure to produce off them, which does reduce their output. At least that is my (very limited) understanding.

One example of such a facility is Janelia farm, part of the HHMI, which was endowed by Howard Hughes ('The Aviator'). Another one is Woods Hole, endowed by the Rockefellers.

Gentlemen scientists tended to be free of the responsibilities of the common man. The vibe of the Royal Society was a bunch of stuck up nobility debating worthless issues. There is a vain of thought that says science was promoted during the enlightenment precisely because it distracted the nobility from aspiring for social change. Voltaire in Candide mocked this with a debate, if I recall on sheep color.

> The vibe of the Royal Society was a bunch of stuck up nobility debating worthless issues.

To many, that wouldn't sound wholly unlike academia.

I'm sorry but your characterisation of the issues as being worthless seems to be entirely missing the point of intellectual thought. It is very difficult to predict what is fruitful and what is not when we are unsure of the destination.

Research without the requirement to teach undergraduates, publication with the requirement of a Ph.D.

A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.

Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities.

Also, the IAS does things like have "special years" devoted to a particular topic, and then a ton of professors in that area take their sabbatical that year to go to IAS for a year. It would be difficult for a university to do that.

Perhaps not, but the quality of research at IAS is surely better than that at all but a handful of universities.

Fair enough, but they also have much "better" researchers than most other universities. My hypothesis is that if you tried to scale the IAS model to researchers outside the top 1%, it would be less successful.

I suspect the reason for this is that cross-pollination of ideas that you get from working with other researchers and graduate students, combined with the clarity of expression and understanding you're forced to acquire when teaching undergraduates is the reason why research universities have been so successful in advancing human knowledge. This isn't to say there is no place for other types of research institutions. However, I am skeptical of unsupported claims that there are "better" means of advancing human knowledge that are structured very differently from a research university.

There is also evidence that your graduate students do better research if they teach. See http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1037.abstract

Did a search and found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Amateur_Scientists

It's not entirely clear that you know what the Royal Society actually did. It was hardly a model.

The Royal Institution is more along the lines of what you describe. Or here in the US, the Wood's Hole oceanographic institute. It was pretty much propped up by the Rockefellers.

A better historical parallel in America would be the American Philisophical Society [1], founded by Benjamin Frankin in 18th-century Philadelphia.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philosophical_Society

A fine institution; it served as kind of a national library, museum, even a pseudo-patent office until there were actual federal institutions funded for those purposes. Pretty significant no doubt, but it never conducted original research apart from "paying" for the publication of the Proceedings.

Wasn't until around 1940s that they even started having grants and postdocs, but they aren't significant enough stipends to conduct original research.

Wood's Hole and Janelia Farm were the 2 places that came to my mind, too.

A good proportion of the people who do biomedical research do it with little or no course teaching responsibilities. That is pretty much the model at most medical schools as far as I know, especially in basic science departments there.

Let's just do it.

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