[palmfacehn]

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.

[jltsiren]

People who support public funding for research are usually strongly opposed to central planning in the allocation of the funds. They don't want to have uninformed politicians, administrators, and citizens deciding what research is worth funding. They want to have the decisions done in the field, by people who understand the topic.

Public funding does not require centralization. While the American style of governance is top-heavy, the EU is less centralized, with most resources at the state level. Each state has its own agencies for funding research, and together they distribute much more funding than EU-level agencies.

There are also plenty of private organizations funding basic research. European elites have traditionally found it prestigious to support arts and sciences, and hence there are many private foundations funding research. While some elements of that culture made it to the US, it's not as strong there as it is in Europe. Instead, rich Americans prefer direct donations to universities, which often use the money for buildings and student amenities.

In other words, American universities rely more on central sources of research funding, as the states are less capable and private entities less interested than in Europe.

[mindslight]

> Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources?

Plenty, of course.

> If so, why is state directed research a special case?

It's not a "special case", but rather there does not seem to be a better way to allocate significant resources for scientific research than governmental funding. Thus, the decision is either to accept that there will be some misallocation from centralized funding (while working to mitigate those inefficiencies), or to give up doing most fundamental research.

Also note that government funding of research is "additive" to an otherwise default-open system - independent actors can always fund research they'd like to see. Whereas most of the time we bemoan central planning we're talking about closed dynamics from which there is no opt-out. If privately funded research were generally lucrative, then we would see much more of it. But outside of some very specific contexts (straightforward patentability, prospects of immediate commercialization, subjects adjacent to highly lucrative centralized industries (which is closer to government funding than not)), we don't.

In general markets are not supercomputational - markets are merely one heuristic that works well for some things and terribly for others. If we were talking about say how many gas or electric vehicle charging stations to build and where, that's something that is decently handled decently by private investment. But an endeavor where the gains from discoveries will end up distributed and a private investor can't reap most rewards from their investment won't be.

[s1artibartfast]

it seems plausible that there are diminishing returns to fundamental research, and that those returns are conditional on the funding system environment.

I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.

[mindslight]

Sure? I would say that "many people" have concluded the system is a negative due to political propaganda fueled by general feelings of powerlessness, and are now trying to backfill justifications as if this is about anything more than the "culture war".

Your argument would be appropriate if we were debating the amount of spending in the context of other spending, or relative to itself. But in isolation as some heuristic it's "not even wrong". The larger context is this same movement blindly destroying our scientific research institutions also just added $5T of new debt, with a large chunk of that being spent on nothing more than a spectacle of performative cruelty (ICE).

And so I have to ask - do you really want to be making an argument in support of indulging the mob in their desire to see people hurt instead of actually advancing as a species?

[s1artibartfast]

>Your argument would be appropriate if we were debating the amount of spending in the context of other spending.

Thats what I'm talking about. Im not talking about the merits of a movement or mob.

Do you think the underlying reality of ROI is irrelevant? Do you support "advancement" at all or any cost?

[mindslight]

It's irrelevant in the context of your own argument because you have not specified what you consider those costs to actually be (beyond the implicit financial dollar amounts).

I obviously do not support "advancement" at any [large] cost. But it's fallacious to extrapolate from that to not supporting it at any [small] cost, as the thrust of your argument implies.

[s1artibartfast]

can you point to where I imply that?

>it seems plausible that there are diminishing returns to fundamental research, and that those returns are conditional on the funding system environment. I think many people have concluded that the marginal ROI is negative or the system environment is prohibitively inefficient.