Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vbezhenar 551 days ago
The resources that public basically "donates" to the science are limited and there's always the question of priorities. Not just money, but people themselves. This is very valid question. One could argue that there's potential in studying almost everything: prime numbers, deep space, exotic matter, crash particles to each other, discover language structure, develop new programming paradigms, model economic behaviour, model nuclear winter. But those who giving money, need to choose and allocate. And those who want to study prime numbers while receiving money from government, inevitable need to prove why this particular study has value.
2 comments
nxpnsv 551 days ago
That validation already happens. I worked as a scientist for a decade before I went to industry, getting grants was a constant struggle - agencies and politicians don't just give out money randomly. One can argue that these processes aren't perfect and that some money gets wasted, and that it makes for weird incentives - but that's a whole other debate.
link
boxed 551 days ago
More money is wasted trying to prevent the money from being wasted I would say. The amount of time spend on grant applications is crazy.
link
ykonstant 551 days ago
And even that time pales before the mental toll. When I first went about writing a grant application, I thought it would be technically easy---I knew the bureaucratic details would be tedious, but otherwise straightforward. Oh boy, I think it was the most mentally taxing, soul crushing work-related task I ever attempted. I failed to submit, by the way. My research output also plummeted that year.
link
boxed 551 days ago
Classic "penny wise, pound fooling" crap. We could probably be a hundred or more years ahead of where we are if we stopped sabotaging ourselves like this...
link
boxed 551 days ago
This type of expenditure is a rounding error. We spend more dollars on charging phones that is then spent on flipping videos on TikTok. And TikTok only exists because of this type of curiosity based research. Not to mention antibiotics, refrigerators, cars, GPS, etc, etc, etc. The list is literally too long.

100% of all progress is science/technology/infrastructure. Without it we would be living in caves.

link