[lentoutcry]

a lot of basic research is very risky and most of the time it’s not stuff that leads to immediate development of a new drug. it’s basically acquiring knowledge with the hope that some of it might turn out to be practically useful in the future, but in the short term, it just allows us to understand stuff. but it’s not directly profitable, so private companies aren’t motivated to invest so much money in that

[caycep]

This. And per John Maynard Keynes, it's money well spent.

[lakhim]

Its also explicit policy of the US government to encourage use of the new research done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

[throwawaymaths]

this sounds like it's a really bad idea for the government to fund. What's to stop someone who happens to have made it in the ivory tower go crazy, spin up some kooky ideas that are highly risky and just blow taxpayer money on something not really accountable?

[ARandumGuy]

Most research is funded through grants. Many different federal agencies provide grants, as well as private organizations. When applying for a grant, you have to indicate what you're going to spend the money on. And your grant may be rejected if the organization funding the grant thinks you're not going to spend the money well. And if you can't find someone to give you a grant, you probably can't do the research, even if you have tenure.

There are problems with this system. Researchers often have to spend a lot of time writing grant applications, and grants can be rejected for any number of bad reasons. And there are cases where research was funded that probably shouldn't have been funded. But research funding isn't given willy-nilly to whoever asks, and taxpayers wasting money on kooky ideas isn't a particularly big problem.

[biophysboy]

I understand your reasoning, but our efforts to prevent this is part of why professors spend so much time writing grants and filling out other paperwork these days. It’s better in my opinion to just accept reasonable risk.

I would add that weird ideas can be surprisingly useful; nobody expected research on gila monsters to lead to our most successful weight loss treatment to date.

[throwawaymaths]

the fucking gila monster story is pure revisionist history. back in the late aughts after the human genome got sequenced and qpcr started picking up it was pretty obvious from islet alpha cell proteomics that glucagon would be an interesting drug target.

[biophysboy]

Researchers were exploring GLP applications in the 90s

[lentoutcry]

researchers don’t receive unlimited funding for life, even if they made it into a permanent position. they have to regularly apply for grants, and those applications are reviewed by experts and have to be grounded properly in previous work. it’s just that potential for profit is not a criterion for evaluation, as it is in the private sector

[sega_sai]

That's why when you apply for grants, they are reviewed by the panels of experts and then you have to report the results/progress. Nobody will just give you money for something crazy.

[jmuguy]

And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.

[throwawaymaths]

what a tired old argument. you dont know what would have happened if DARPA did not fund ARPANET. we might have had something better. we don't live with access to reasonable counterfactuals.

[const_cast]

Au contraire, this is a tired armchair reasoning argument.

We don't know what could've happened, but we do know what did happen. It's like those people that say that the New Deal was bad, actually, and if we did nothing that would be the same or better!

Right... but no. Because the New Deal did pull us out of the depression. It's one of the most potent and effective pieces of policy in American History. We can play armchair economist all day. But we have to face what we know worked and think about why it worked.