> What possible justification could you have for this
The base wants to see spending cuts in exchange for the tax cuts the rich are getting, and thinks science (especially climate science!) is a blunt tool by which liberals berate and control them.
There is no market test for “fundamental” research. So when an avenue of research secures taxpayer funding it exists into perpetuity, and as papers are published and requests for additional funding are made, it tends to grow like a tumor over the decades, getting more PhDs to be matriculated in the labs that began the avenue and grow ever more forever. Very rarely is an avenue of research closed off once the trifecta of university research labs + journals, PhDs who are minted to continue the research, and grants secured and grown.
A lot of the hand wringing by academics themselves are unfocused but circling the root cause, which is this. I would prefer corporations fund research but directed through the university system. The patents and gains are then funneled through the corporations that funded it, rather than the academics and universities with zero return to the taxpayers other than abstract “society gains” pablum, when the academics and universities truly gain all the profit.
When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner, and alternatives to the current vogue will be funded quicker. You can see a real-life example (of failure) in Alzheimer’s research which was hamstrung by decades of political control of research labs and taxpayer grants that refused to fund alternatives to the “mainstream” theories which set back society and the disease.
> When corporations that actually have a market test and profit motive are funding the research, avenues that are unlikely to succeed will be cut off sooner...
It's hard to see how your suggestion would work for fundamental advances in technology. For example, backpropagation took decades to move from an idea to industrial use. [0] It was also "invented" multiple times.
I understood the value of crypto well before the vast majority of people and made a significant amount of money. While that isn’t an argument in favor of my opinions on other subjects, the pejorative of “crypto bro” is certainly inaccurate considering I noticed a massive profit opportunity well before most others, and instead should signal that I have heterodox opinions that might be accurate before the small-c conservatives (i.e. academics writ large) accept the truths
Whether proponents of government directed Science, agree or disagree, your comment presents a well reasoned argument. At the moment it is the most substantive comment on the page. Moreover, it is a direct, good faith response to the parent commenter's question. Yet for all of this, I see that the comment has been downvoted into grey. At the time of posting, no substantive rebuttals have been offered.
This typifies the quality of discourse around defunding of "The Science" at HN.
it's a shit argument. Fundamental research funded by the government led to the Googles and OpenAIs of today. If industry funds research, the profits stay in the hands of the same people. When government funds research, new billionaires are minted down the line. if you like billionaires (I don't), you'd fund government research, not hope that the existing billionaires think it's in their interest. We wouldn't know about CFCs and the ozone if CFCs companies funded the research - we'd be burned to a crisp.
You have a lack of imagination. The research lead to Google and OpenAI, but you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding. Furthermore there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding, other than esoteric “America benefits when the research happens in America”
Maybe I should move to lalaland too. It sounds nice there.
Back in reality, American economic and military supremacy was founded on Government funding fundamental research and industry using it to create unprecedented growth in wealth and quality of life for mot people in the form of jobs. China has figured it out, and they are forging ahead. America is heading back to the middle ages.
> you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding
In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.
This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.
It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.
> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding
The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.
Until somewhat recently America had an advantage in commercialising the basic research. But now increasingly we fund some basic research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars only to see it commercialised overseas (often by China but by others too), often when technical know how is exfiltrated and patents ignored. This reduces the expected benefit of funding the research.
Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).
The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?
Funneling massive amounts of taxpayer dollars perhaps made sense in a pre-internet age where central planning of research was potentially more efficient when capital moved slowly and wasn’t large enough to fund such endeavors. I truly think that time passed decades ago.
I would entertain arguments for situations where huge amounts of taxpayer dollars might be required because the private sector doesn’t show up. But the bar has to be way, way higher than it has been.
Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?
If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?
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 do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
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.
I can understand disagreeing but it is funny that someone asked for a justification and then downvoted someone providing one, without even knowing if the person actually even endorses that line of thought. Liberalism truly is dead.