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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

> I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it?

This isn't reason.com, is it?

> The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot.

The private sector doesn't advance science. Also: you are stupid for claiming so. Maybe even first-class stupid.

See where that exchange gets us? Now cite your data on the majority of scientific advances being privately funded, since you claim to be able to demonstrate it. In particular, I'm interested in basic-science advances, of the kind that CERN and Stephen Hawking and etc. produce. Who in the private sector is producing those?

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>The private sector doesn't advance science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

He and his former research colleague, Jennifer Moyle founded a charitable company, known as Glynn Research Ltd., to promote fundamental biological research at Glynn House and they embarked on a programme of research on chemiosmotic reactions and reaction systems. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory."

So, yes, the private sector does advance science, even basic science with no profit value. To claim otherwise is first-class stupid and also ignorance of history.

Josiah Gibbs, Irving Langmuir, and Robert Millikan were all American scientists who ran their research off of largely private (some for-profit as in the case of Langmuir, who did both basic and applied science under the auspices of GE; the others at predominantly non-profit educational institutes) These people are not insignificant - Gibbs rewrote the book on thermodynamics; Langmuir figured out that argon should fill lightbulbs -applied- but in basic science also invented the concept of plasma voltage, made observations describing ocean circulation, and conceived of molecular monolayers; Millikan discovered the charge of an electron). I am sure I am missing other American scientists who did their research with little or no help from public sources.

If you want another, more contemporary example, oh hey there's an entire research institute that doesn't take much (if any) in the way of federal funds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Farm_Research_Campus

http://www.janelia.org/professional-opportunities/research-p...

"All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants."

Totally disagree. Carnegie Institutions, Wellcome Trust, etc. are all 'private sector' and dispense millions of dollars of grants for fundamental research.

You probably mean, 'for-profit private sector'. But then, you disregard the several Nobel prizes that Bell Labs received, the intangible impact of IBM's Deep Blue and other programs on computing, etc. If solving a basic-science problem can result in several million dollars of revenue, you can be sure that a company will throw money and man-power at it. There are several examples even among the non-Bell Labs, non-IBM, non-Xerox companies: Google's search algorithms, pharma companies' Lipitor, Viagra, etc., Intel and AMD's industry-defining minuaturizations, 3M's optical films, etc. etc.

The private sector doesn't advance science? Intel doesn't advance science? Pfizer doesn't advance science? GE? IBM? ADM? BASF?

You don't think that private companies regularly form hypotheses, test those hypothesis, and draw conclusions from their results? Applied science is no less worthy of the title of science than is pure science, and the private sector is applied science writ large.

As for pure science and government funding, I'm not against it, and promoting one over the other is not my intention, as they both have their roles to play. I agree that pure science would not occur to the extent that it does now absent government funding. What I disagree with is that science would not happen at all were that the case. That's flatly stupid thing to say, and I'm a little amused that you would make that claim just before calling me stupid.

In a world where the rate of technological advance is larger than it has been at any other time in the history of the world (and is still increasing), it seems obvious that both are playing their roles rather well. The system is functioning. Science is not dead. Hell, it's not even sick.

First off, I'm pretty sure he was trying to make a point about the inefficacy of name-calling in such an argument, not literally calling you stupid.

Second, Intel advances very specific, safe-bet science like shrinking the semiconductor. As plenty of other people have noted, the semiconductor was a public-funded invention and farmed off to Japan before it could be made "profitable" by American corporations. Heck, early American business laughed transistors off the continent before the value proposition was discovered.

Also, as long as I'm commenting here, I'll note that science is not dead, but I believe that our ability to consume information has tainted our ability to understand true science. To me, the quintessential American scientist of the 20th century was Richard Feynman. His Cargo Cult Science [1] essay, which pops up on HN from time to time explains what's happening best: people who claim to follow science, are actually practicing some sort of modern-day witch doctor magic. They wave their hands and claim the data supports their wild discovery and someone bites. Suddenly it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something "on average."

1: http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

> people who claim to follow science, are actually practicing some sort of modern-day witch doctor magic.

Maybe this is just phrased poorly. In that essay Feynman is saying some people (namely advocates of pseudoscience) are invoking "science" to give credence to their claims but are abandoning scientific rigor, this is what he calls cargo cult science. Not all people who claim to follow science.

you should reread the essay. He then goes on to mention how mainstream physics experiments have failed to do basic things like "repeat an old experiment with the new apparatus" and therefore careening towards pseudoscience.

Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time. (PLoS One) [1]

Seriously? The greater issue here is modern day "scientists" or people who are interested in and consider themselves scientifically-minded, reading something like that and filing it away as new knowledge and not questioning the veracity of things.

As the other child to this comment noted, the problem that Feynman outlines is that no one is doing these tests over again to re-test hypothesis under new conditions or with new devices. The results get published and suddenly it's taken as Truth with a capital T.

"Because there are no facts, there is no truth Just a data to be manipulated I can get any result you like" -- Don Henley [2]

If that makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you try out some form of theism. Because if tomorrow I fall through my floor when getting out of bed, all we can do is re-evaluate our knowledge based on new data. And there's probably going to be a lot of new data.

1: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.... 2: http://ntl.matrix.com.br/pfilho/html/lyrics/g/garden_of_alla...

I don't even know what you're trying to illustrate with those links. My point was not that bad science doesn't exist, it certainly does. But Feynman did not have this nihilistic view of knowledge, he believed very firmly in the ability of science to deduce truths about the physical world and that there is objective truth.

Sorry to dwell on this, but this is not a nihilistic view, this is what's called the Pragmatic view of truth and was expounded by 20th Century Chicago School philosophers like John Dewey. Feynman was oft quoted as being a pragmatist, and a key tenet of pragmatism was embodied in one of his quotes:

"We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong."

In this fashion, we never hold objective truth in the Platonic sense, rather we accumulate knowledge that explains how the world works.

Does fellatio in fruit flies improve sexual reproduction? One study suggests it does. The problem we face now is that a substantial portion of people, including many very well educated folks who would claim to live scientifically-based lives, say "That's amazing!" and run and tell their friends this hilarious new "fact" they've learned.

Unfortunately there are plenty of these new "facts" people learn that are much more than novelty and lead to public policy or destructive dietary changes cough fructose cough.

We could all use to be a little more skeptical, pragmatic and curious in our lives.

As far as I know the early ICs were much less reliable than circuits made from discrete components. It's the improvement made by private companies like Fairchild and others that made them practical. There's really a long path from invention to its practical application and the world benefited much from the improvements made by companies.

On the other hand scientific research is an example of a positive externality. According to economic theory the market underproduces this kind of goods. There are numerous measures to correct this including patents and public funding of science. We shouldn't dismiss the private companies nor public funding as both parts have positive contributions to science and are necessary for the science to operate effectively.

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