[mensetmanusman]

That’s great.

Removing a platform for people that say, in hindsight, ‘it was obvious that was going to fail’ is a step in the right direction.

If western societies insist on outsourcing R&D through misguided tax laws, they have no idea the amount of harm they are doing to the next generation of young people (who will be subservient to the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies).

[toyg]

I'm not so positive. There is potential for this to become just another way to channel pork to friends and cronies. Which, considering the track record of the current executive, is probably the most likely scenario.

I'm all for DARPA-like initiatives, but when it comes to taxpayers' money we should have decent accountability mechanisms.

[mytailorisrich]

Accountability and obligation to disclose information on demand to the public are two different things.

Not all of DARPA's work is public, yet I'm sure that DARPA is fully accountable.

By excluding this new agency from FOI the UK government simply wants to be able to decide which projects to publicise and when, and which projects to keep secret, in the same way as DARPA operates.

[libertine]

Usually these initiatives should be extremely transparent, and they're the exact opposite. That's not good.

A current example is the covid 19 vaccine contracts, which were multi billion dollar/euro/pound deals, with accelerated research and approvals, and so far only one contract was made public.

It is specially concerning when some vaccines were developed with public funding.

[dageshi]

It doesn't matter.

Genuinely, the only thing that mattered was working, safe vaccines as quickly as possible. Whatever government paid is absolute peanuts compared to the costs associated with locking down economies let alone the lives potentially saved.

Covid19 was and is a crisis, you may well have a point in terms of other initiatives in this space, but with covid all that mattered was finding a solution as quickly as possible.

[libertine]

Well, I disagree.

It matters a lot, because who the hell knows what else is going on those contracts. It's not like any pharmaceutical company was gonna sit this one out.

Some of these companies were into shady shit in the past, and while they are playing a role in this pandemic, I'd be way more comfortable know exactly what they are getting out of this and at what cost to the tax payers.

[lordnacho]

> all that mattered was finding a solution as quickly as possible

What's to stop someone spending a bunch of money on a dead-end project that benefits them and no-one else, and then saying "hey, it's risky, bummer we couldn't make a vaccine"?

We can be generous to make sure it gets done by someone, but we should also make sure that people actually try.

The current UK government has a lot of stories about procurement, and it gives the impression that they mainly benefitted their friends, with the procurement of PPE and vaccines being a nice side-effect.

[dageshi]

In the context of shutting down significant percentages of economies for months, in the context of the government (in the UK) providing furlough schemes where they pay peoples salaries, in the context of essentially banning most social interaction and the population slowly going a bit mad, what the hell does it matter if we fund some dud vaccines? What does it even matter if some are outright corrupt and do nothing?

It's the worst kind of bike shedding, it's "well we can't do much about the most life changing event since WW2 but we sure can argue about the transparency of contracts!"

[lbriner]

What stops it is 1) Not awarding money to people who might be able to do it, only to those who can demonstrate that they can do it 2) Caveating the bulk of the payment to the successful production.

In most cases, the money was for a pre-order of vaccines afaik and if they don't produce, they don't get paid.

PPE contracts was another cock-up all together!

[throwaway0a5e]

>Usually these initiatives should be extremely transparent, and they're the exact opposite

The downside is that when they're too transparent politics gets involved and you can't study touchy things because people don't want the risk of conclusions they don't like.

Imagine the uproar if the navy said they think asbestos PPE might be less lethal than what it's protecting you from in some circumstances so they were planning on researching it. Congressmen would get involved. They'd grandstand and make all sorts of sound bites for the cameras. And the research wouldn't get done or it would have to be neutered in order to get done. Look at the political football that is women's PT requirements for the armed forces for a more mild real world example.

Of course, if there's no transparency involved the risk is MK-Ultra type crap which is bad too.

[libertine]

Well then maybe that's the cost of it, the public scrutiny of touchy things and political responsibility to justify such endeavors. It's like accountability is a bad thing.

If politicians would refused that, then that's a problem of politics, not of transparency.

I do understand that some subject might be too difficult to explain to the public, but that's more of an annoyance and extra work then anything else. Also could be a symptom of a education system with a lot of problems.

[andy_ppp]

The current UK government has a blacklist of left wing journalists who they won’t respond to freedom of information act requests and they are fighting a culture war about bullshit while Dominic Cummings has the gall to claim his friends happen to be the only marketing company in the UK who are trustworthy!

[andy_ppp]

References:

Jornalists FOI clearing house: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/01/an-important-victory-in-t...

Culture war: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universities-...

Dominic Cummings claims:

Cummings described Frayne and Wolf as his “friends”, but added: “Obviously I did not request Public First be brought in because they were my friends. I would never do such a thing.” He said he “requested” civil servants hire the firm because, in his experience, it was the only company with the expertise to carry out the required focus groups urgently.

From: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/15/revealed-cummi...

Not sure why I've been down voted?

[dohnuts1919]

> The current UK government has a blacklist of left wing journalists who they won’t respond to freedom of information act requests

Source?

Also, isn't it illegal to not respond to valid FOI requests? Otherwise wouldn't that defy the whole point of FOI?

[andy_ppp]

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/01/an-important-victory-in-t...

[Jochim]

I have massive support for government funded research but I think this is a terrible idea.

Government should absolutely have to justify how it allocates funds and which projects are taken on. This is a transparent attempt at avoiding the need to justify what is done with public money.

> Removing a platform for people that say, in hindsight, ‘it was obvious that was going to fail’ is a step in the right direction.

It really isn't. Covering failures up only makes the problem worse. Anything that does eventually leak will be blown much further out of proportion than if it has been clearly stated that it will probably fail from the start, but the benefits should it succeed outweigh the risks.

You would do even better to build a culture tolerant of failure. But the emergence of that culture depends on improving people's standard of living.

That this secret spending is coming from the same party that just months ago insisted there was no money to continue feeding children during a pandemic and who are also mired in corruption scandals regarding nepotism in government contracts just makes the idea look even more grotesque. Trying to do it during a pandemic you've just majorly fucked up the handling of makes it even less endearing.

Incidentally I happen to be in the middle of reading "The Dark Forest" by Liu Cixin. A core element of the book is how humanity is affected when standard of living is reduced and basic needs are unmet in order to meet technological research goals that will curtail an "undefeatable" foe. It generally leads to discontent towards the projects that are supposed to "save" them.

If the goal was to prevent the outsourcing of R&D then the government would be much better off taking a greater stake in universities and making sure both parties are compensated more from companies who go on to exploit that research.

[pjc50]

> the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies

Such as? Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?

(I'm inclined to believe that it could work - it was after all the model that gave us Concorde - but there are also a lot of ways in which it could go wrong and I absolutely do not trust the government with a track record of bunging corrupt money at shell companies.)

[rkangel]

I think you are going to want a mix of both.

The miniaturisation and cost reduction of electronics achieved as a result of continual investment by the phone industry is almost miraculous. A lot of innovation has happened to fit a supercomputer into your pocket.

The WWW example in a sibling comment is a great example of the contrasting sort. It benefits humanity as a whole, and would be very unlikely to be invented privately. We want more decentralised technology solutions - really standards rather than products - and government research have a different set of incentives that might make them better placed to deliver that sort of innovation.

That said, I work in telecomms. A large number of self interested telecomms companies have got together and agreed standard over the years (this is obviously not unique to telecomms), including making patents available (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...). The technology is not decentralised, but it is interoperable.

[mensetmanusman]

I mean incentivizing private companies to do R&D...

[paganel]

> Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?

At greater scale the State is definitely better at innovating compared to the private sector. Look at the internet itself and at www (CERN is basically a state project), and if we want to go even larger look at the war industry.

There's no way a "private entity" would have had the gall to build some rockets in order to bomb out London and its environs, and without the V2 rockets we probably wouldn't have had NASA and we wouldn't have had two private persons ~70 years later (Musk and Bezos) trying to build and innovate in private and with lots and lots of money what the Nazi regime did in 1943-1945 while being bombed out to hell and back by the Allies.

And then there's the entire nuclear industry which wouldn't have happened without Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both state-run (killing) projects.

[mytailorisrich]

IMHO, the exemption from the freedom of information act is more in fact aimed at protecting investment in sensitive new tech by in effect making it secret until the government decides otherwise.

That's why the title of the article is actually "Secrecy for high-risk tech research". It's 'high risk' but also aimed at being high rewards and potentially targeting sensitive domains so they don't want others to know what they are doing until after they have reaped the benefits.

I cannot read the whole article because of the paywall but the freedom of information laws do not prevent anything in terms of what to invest into. They only create a legal duty to provide information on demand.

The aim of this new agency has never been altruistic. It has always been discussed as a tool to further the UK's interests in the global competition. Clearly the government thinks that a level of secrecy, or at leat government control, is required.

[mytailorisrich]

I see my comment above is going down well...

Just for reference, the FOI already provides for the following exemptions:

22A Information obtained in the course of, or derived from, a programme of research.

24 Information for the purpose of safeguarding national security.

26 Information that would, or would be likely to, prejudice defence of the realm.

29 Information that would, or would be likely to, prejudice the economic or financial interests of the United Kingdom or of any part of it.

43 Information that constitutes a trade secret or would, or would be likely to, prejudice commercial interests.

I think that pretty much 100% of that new agency's work will fall within one of these exemptions so IMHO it makes sense to exempt it altogether and avoid having to deal with FOI requests in the first place. The agency along with the government will then have full discretion to make research and results public as they deemed useful and that will also allow them to work with private companies to license/commercialise stuff.

(Note that a lot of DARPA's work is also secret.)