Not all science is performed by way of academic research. Industry performs research too, and the best way to ground both biased industrial research and impractical/naive academic research is to have the two communities engaged as commingled peers, where both have standing in funding and process and are each obliged to provide justification and transparency to the other.
I think this is a common confusion. You need impractical/naive research because that's how exploration gets done. If you heavily bias the search towards areas of the search space that you've already seen a lot then you've basically killed science and its ability to deliver useful results.
The phrase "Eliminate corporations from academic research" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
If a company wants to bring a pesticide to market. We would like them to bear the brunt of safety research costs before they launch. You might say that product safety is different from pure academic research.
We're just arguing semantics and incentives at that point. Like giving them a tax break for that research. Sure that sucks. But how else shall we make it happen.
Corporations can fund research in ways that allow them to suppress results that threaten their profits. If science is conducted in these ways, corporations can fund science (for which they receive tax benefits) and if the results are positive, it gets published and the corporation wins because the research supports their business model (tails, I win). If the research results does not support their business model, they can decline to publish it (tails, you lose).
There are ways to do science that avoid this kind of corruption.
Name three academic institutions that would sign a contract that prevented them from publishing adverse results. You are at least fifty years out of date on this argument.
A) They don't have to have that in writing, it's very implicity understood that you don't bite the hand that feeds. B) Even if they do find adverse results, depending on what they are (e.g. actively harmful versus negative results) you may have a hard time publishing them since journals don't care much for negative results.
Presumably he means you can use company funds to donate to a pro-pesticide charity/NGO, and then use that donation to claim a tax credit (around 50%, subject to some limits). It's not really a "heads I win tails you lose" situation though. If you donate $100k, and claim the tax credits, you're still out $50k. You might get back more than $50k worth of monetary benefits from whatever the NGO/charity does, but that's not really guaranteed. It's like buying some junk on wish.com with a 50% coupon and saying that it's a "heads I win tails you lose" because if it turns out to be not junk, then you win, but if it's shit you still saved 50%. A far more straightforward and honest way of describing it would just be to say that they get a discount on their charity spend.
That's also money you're spending out of your "profit" instead of netting it off as an expense, so it's really a fairly minor discount on pre-allocating money over a multi-year horizon for purposes that can be structured as a charity.
> Why would eliminating corporate funding in academic research be bad?
The honest answer is because there isn't enough funding through government and philanthropy.
You'll find a really odd opinion, that many people think engineering endeavors are significantly more important than research ones. When instead the truth is that both are two sides of the same coin. After all, research funds the next generation of engineering.
I think there's an unfortunate effect of this because there is quite a bit of science that is beholden to corporate... let's say "motivations"(?) rather than more free intellectual pursuit. Then the money that is more free is much more competitive and frankly people are metric hacking to get there (publish or perish paradigm is weird when you have to frequently publish novel works). The system was fine but the environment changes and eventually all metrics are hacked.
For personal values, I think it is quite important to fund research. From the very basic low level to even higher engineering research.[0] I'd actually be in favor of 5-10xing the federal science budget. I'd argue this should be primarily funded through federal grants, because people will take that research and go make things which will then be sold (world wide) and we'll tax through that. It's like venture capital if it was less risky but had a longer time frame for ROI.
The category of "General Science, Space, and Technology" accounts for 20.5 bn dollars[1]. The problem is, people understand this to be a big number and hear about these huge costs (often of projects that last decades!), but this is actually 0.4% of the 2024 budget! 64% of that (13.2bn) is going into space flight, research, and supporting activities. The other 7.3bn is going to the rest of science! To put this into perspective, we spend 8.4bn dollars on salaries and expenses for Social Security. The Navy gets 16bn for research, Army 11.5, Air Force 8.2, and another 14 on "Defense Wide" (so a total of ~50bn).
edit: To be clear, I'm not against corporate funding of science or even corporations working with academics for research. I think it can often work out great. But I think there needs to be some balance or academia gets captured by industry. I think we can think of some where this may have happened (or is in danger of), including domains closely related to the topics HN cares about the most.
[side note] A fun thing I do is talk about the ultra wealthy's wealth in terms of "CERNs" instead of dollars. Because numbers in the billions are just unimaginable (I have a physics degree and work with numbers this large -- or the inverse -- and if you tell me you understand this more than an abstract concept, I'll call you a liar). But we can imagine a CERN (which is funded by several countries btw and not a significant part of any of those budgets. Despite being the largest if not most expensive physics experiment ever). Which is a (roughly) 10 billion dollar super project that took (roughly) 10 years to build and costs (roughly) 1 billion dollars a year to operate. This actually makes for a good comparison for people like billionaires because their money is so massive that it is often growing far faster than they can actually conceivably spend it. Maybe the best example of this is Mackenzie Scott who in 2019 got $35.6bn in Amazon stock when divorcing Bezos, has given away $14 billion (5.8 in 2020 alone!) AND Forbes has her at 34.9 billion in net worth (Amazon has done 30% better than VOO since 2019 for context. So, not counting her givings, it's the difference of about 5bn)