[nomilk]

This means research projects will be optimised for political boasting.

Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.

[FriedFishes]

"less research intro trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding"

In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?

I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.

[defrost]

A lot of political appointees struggled with Why should we pay for shrimp running on treadmills? (The case for curiosity-driven research)

~ https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/basic-science-curiosity-...

Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.

[nomilk]

Being curious definitely leads to discoveries. But important discoveries can also be made by saying "Topic X, if better understood, might lead to a cure for cancer - let's look into (and fund) that".

We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.

Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.

[defrost]

Shrimp running treadmills, specifically, wasn't idle curiosity driven blue sky research though - it was tied to creating real metrics for measuring impact of change in marine environments on the health of the food we eat.

It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.

That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.

[nomilk]

I see your point, that donors could influence political appointees to nix certain research topics for their own benefit.

How often does that actually happen, and wouldn't other institutions pick up the slack in most cases? (i.e. high value research doesn't cease to be high value just because one type of grant or institution refuses to fund it; it would therefore be attractive to other institutions/researchers)

Some benefits of having political appointees in the loop are that the pubic perceives (not necessarily 'gets') greater value from public research funding, and the people responsible for the funding (political appointees) are closer to the actual spending and are more involved in the allocative process, which should mean fewer expensive, hard-to-justify topics.

[codewench]

So we haven't found a cure for cancer because those silly scientists are too busy farting around with unimportant stuff? That's your take away here?

[tsimionescu]

Consider one basic question: how much high-impact research do you think this would incentivize into global warming? Or is the looming global ecological catastrophe not high-impact enough?

[kelnos]

It means research projects will also be optimized for political ideology. That's not good.

[boron1006]

> Sounds terrible, but is it?

Yes

> It incentivises high-impact research

It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.

If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.

[insane_dreamer]

No, it incentivizes research that is aligned with the current administration's political ideologies.

> common sense says aren't worth the public funding

who is deciding what is "common sense"?

[rsynnott]

Thing about common sense is that it isn't.