[throwawaykf03]

There are a lot of misconceptions about research in your questions, but suffice to say that in most research, the vast majority of "ideas" don't pan out. In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it. That may seem like a "waste of taxpayer money", but without taking a very long view, truly groundbreaking advances won't come about.

[dnautics]

>In fact, a lot of research is so risky that no entity short of the government will invest in it.

Government is actually incredibly bad at funding risky research because in the end it is accountable and needs to show some level of result. Even the moonshot had concrete goals and mileposts that needed to be met or else the whole thing was called off.

Meanwhile, there's this crazy guy who discovered something incredibly risky that many of his peers didn't believe was true and did it outside of the government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

[throwawaykf03]

I guess any investor would want returns on their investments.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell*

I never said "all important discoveries come from the government". The Polio vaccine and penicillin and the theory of evolution and the last Nobel Prize for Graphene and a bunch of other things came out of non-government funded research.

That has no bearing on the fact that most of the biggest advances cannot be had without significant long term investment without guaranteed outcomes that most private investors are extremely unlikely to fund. I mean, have you seen the sort of research proposals professors write that actually get grants from the NSF?

Beyond things like DARPA and NSF and the like, think of things like the various National Labs. Nobody's winning Nobel Prizes every year at these labs, but year after year they do work that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge to enable future discoveries.

[dnautics]

You're conflating Private with 'for-profit'. Private includes entities that are nonprofits, like Janelia Farms, or, in the case of Mitchell, Glyn Research Ltd. American Cancer Society, American Heart Society etc. also give out very interesting long-term, high risk grants.

Yes, I have seen some of the shit that professors write for the NSF, and I'd rather they not be using taxpayer money to fund their intellectual masturbations, or hiking trips to the rainforest, or scuba diving expeditions (among other travesties).