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by const_cast
396 days ago
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> What benefits do you expect to see? This is exactly the problem: you're describing a for-profit mindset, and it's exactly why research in the private sector floundering. If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it. You don't know if it brings value because you haven't researched it yet. That's what breaking new ground is all about. |
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No, it's not. If research never brought any value then we would almost never do it, aside from some weird hobbyists, and particularly not with public funds. Everything has a cost-benefit tradeoff, even publicly funded research, and pretending this isn't so is naive at best.
Research whose costs can be recouped on short time horizons arguably should not have public funding because the economic incentives are sufficient. Exactly where to draw this line is not clear, not only because research returns are unclear but also because publicly funded research diverts talented people from endeavours that would have provided direct economic benefits. This second order effect is not widely appreciated. How can you truly evaluate the opportunity cost of this counterfactual world? Seems virtually impossible in fact, so arguments that research X returns Y with no consideration that you can't evaluate the counterfactual should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
And this doesn't even get into the problem of scope creep. Academics charged with pure research develop the exact mindset you illustrate, where no matter how outlandish the idea, well maybe it will be good for something someday, so why not fund it just in case? This ends up producing a whole lot of nothing, as we've seen in particle physics over the past 30+ years.