[palmfacehn]

There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.

If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil...

>The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade.

>The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.

[ceejayoz]

> characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research…

It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.

Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...

> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.

> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)

https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...

"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"

[palmfacehn]

>They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.

Proposals which are identified as either worthy of funding or rejected.

If anything NPR's selective reporting is misleading. Obviously the overall cost would be much higher than the materials cost of $1k. More over, the treadmill wouldn't exist without the study itself. I don't have a problem with a source like having an NPR editorial or ideological agenda, but the way they twist things is highly misleading. If their case is good, it deserves a better supporting argument.

>It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.

It isn't difficult to imagine a world where a fisheries association or another large seafood concern voluntarily funded a relevant university study. Whether this would include treadmills for prawns, I cannot say.

Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.

However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.

>"It's the best way of funding..."