Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexryan | Hacker News Reader

> conservatives believe the government is awful for most things, and research instead be done by private corporations.

This seems entirely rational to me. A private corporation must strive to meet real human needs in order to survive. Capital tends to flow towards those who are best able to convert it into happiness for other human beings. Public institutions have no such constraint. Logically, one would conclude that they would be less efficient at converting capital into happiness for other human beings.

Is there any evidence of which I should be aware which supports the proposition that publicly funded research outperforms privately funded research?

View on HN

The evidence is this: try to name one private corporation that either internally or externally funds basic research that is guaranteed to have no application in the next 10 years at the very least.

You most probably can't. The reason is that private corporations have a very short-term outlook and are (understandably) looking for short-term returns.

Depends on how you define basic research. I don't think there is a tremendous amount of difference in the type of research being conducted at many departments at MIT and Google or SpaceX. I recently had dinner with a Harvard Medical School professor who said he often encouraged bright academically-minded students to go to work at Google rather than pursue the tenure track because Google offered more freedom and a simpler path to resources.

The incentives are totally different. Industry will fund research if it may potentially provide an ROI. Google and SpaceX may be willing to take bigger and longer term risks, but ROI is unquestionably their goal.

Academics aren't incentivized by ROI. Instead, they want intellectual distinction and recognition, and pursue problems if they are perceived to be intellectually curious or may have a large impact on society.

Sometimes the actual work that is being done can overlap, but underneath the motivations are completely different, and each have their own pros and cons. We need both.

Yes and no. I'm not sure Google's research into glucose-sensing contact lenses is motivated by R&D in any sense a Wall Street analyst would recognize. Likewise with their research into life extension science. These are decade long bets that do not slot into any commercial structure at the company. Sure, if they cure death, it'll be huge, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of urgency, or ability, to commercialize that research. More important than ROI are these two factors (IMO):

+ The founders retain a lot of control via the company stock structure, are nerds, and seemingly want to recreate a Bell Labs style culture. + Doing crazy science keeps up their brand as a tech thought leader current, even though 95% of their revenue comes from a pretty simple set of products that about 20 years old. This helps them recruit the best and brightest.

Doing this kind of research also gives them a plausible potential growth story to sell to the Street. So it's not that commerce doesn't cross their mind, but it's not in the short-term sense that a lot of people think of it as. I'm not opposed to university research, I just think people underweight the corporate side's contributions.

Google can't just research glucose-sensing contact lenses, they have to publicize their research. They have to show that they are an innovator, either for recruitment as you say, or to impress Wall St, which is definitely all about ROI. I'm sure plenty in the company do care about technology and innovation, but they are still answerable to shareholders.

This plays out plenty at Google. They make a big splash investing in a speculative technology, devote a huge team to it for a year or two, then dump it to move on to the next big thing. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's not the same as academia.

Sorry but - however inspiring this story may be - I as a citizen don’t want to abdicate my role in society in the decision process and suffice myself to consume.

Google may be top “freedom of research” today but it’s a private property I have no influence or stake whatsoever; one day they take a u-turn and “spring clean” all.

I can’t trust a couple guys just because “they’re nerds”, that’s not a long enough guarantee. You actually used Bell Labs as an example... is it still as prominent today as it was? Why not?

> I as a citizen don’t want to abdicate my role in society in the decision process and suffice myself to consume.

Let me break to you the hard news: As a citizen you have basically zero influence over the research direction that the government TLAs engage in. Those decisions are made through elections which are determined by things like "who can we scare into thinking they'll cause abortions to happen across the land". If a candidate who had a proven track record of funding science wrote the Patriot act, you wouldn't vote for him, would you? (True story). It's even worse in the EU, since the commissioners are not elected. Oh and the kicker is that in the past three decades, those people who hate abortions and deny global warming have a better track record of funding science than the other tribe.

If you really want to have agency, you would be donating to a nonprofit science research organization.

Well, I agree that in practice the public system has been sabotaged down to the very core, I’m thinking of the ridiculous demand that it should be managed like a company to perform better. But giving up and handling the keys over to Corporate is a step too far.

I don’t think there’s a solution that doesn’t include reevaluating the idea of public commons, in a world without there’s absolutely no reason to spend a dime outside of corporate subsidy

False dichotomy: there's a very large and historically relevant gap between government funded and corporate. For example, how we cured polio.

? Where is the dichotomy?

That's fine. But any argument against Google as a private property applies equally to Harvard (and the entire Ivy League), Stanford, MIT, etc.

State universities are great, but they're not where the lion's share of Nobel-caliber research is done. In the US, Private schools lead 10:1 in the Nobel race: (https://www.bestmastersprograms.org/50-universities-with-the...).

There is still a difference between Google and Stanford: one is not a for-profit institution, and therefore has access to public research funding such as from the NSF.

>That's fine. But any argument against Google as a private property applies equally to Harvard (and the entire Ivy League), Stanford, MIT, etc.

Exactly! That's why we need to nationalize the Ivy League.

>+ The founders retain a lot of control via the company stock structure, are nerds, and seemingly want to recreate a Bell Labs style culture. + Doing crazy science keeps up their brand as a tech thought leader current, even though 95% of their revenue comes from a pretty simple set of products that about 20 years old. This helps them recruit the best and brightest.

I once worked on a Google R&D project that got well-known in some circles. Google cut the funding without warning and I eventually had to find a new job.

I don't think anyone is saying it's impossible for that kind of research to happen within companies. Just that it's difficult to get adequate amounts of it done by companies, because of things like companies needing to be profitable. Not many companies are or can be like Google.

MIT is nominally an applied research institution.

They do have basic research too, into topics that Google or SpaceX wouldn't do (see eg. http://math.mit.edu/research/pure/index.php)

I'm not sure if the difference is meaningful, there's essential applied research too that private companies wouldn't do. Like cosmology.

It's hard to see how we would have gotten quantum computers without decades of enormous public budgets for basically aimless basic research.

SRI. HHMI. Rockefeller institute. Back in the day, the Glynn research institute discovered the chemiosmotic effect.

These are all non-profits that work closely with a university and have basic research as a premise. They are both privately and publicly funded. I think that is different than a private corporation. Having worked in R&D at GM, and currently applying to jobs as I exit graduate school, the trend that I have seen personally as well as talking to many research scientists at private corporations is that R&D is an expense and must be focused on a business case. In discussion with some long term employees at some of the most research-motivated companies, this is in contrast to what private research was 20 years ago. Number of people, funding, and capabilities have been in decline. General Motors used to have an applied math research group and 10x more people in R&D! This led to things like the catalytic converter, the artificial heart valve and more. From what I have seen, nowadays private research will quickly test out a problem over the course of 6 months to maximum of a year, but will not do a 5-10 year project like academia has the freedom to do. These projects also like @gp stated, must have an application and not just be intellectually stimulating. Take it for what you will, this has just been my experience, but there are massively different purposes for current day private vs public research, which didn't use to be the case.

Nonprofits are still private research (private != For-profit) and hhmi operates janelia farms, which is not attached to a university. Glynn research was not connected to anything. Still I deliberately omitted places like the genomics institute of the Novartis foundation and the Craig venter institute, since they are more closely tied to industry. Not all of their results are directly profit driven. For example gnf's protein structure database effort where they systrmatically crstallized most proteins from an extremophile, was a huge tour de force in basic science, though they did complete it over a short time frame because they could.

Microsoft. :p

Before that: Xerox and AT&T. Google did too at first with their car are robotics venture s.

Admittedly sparse pickings...

Xerox and AT&T were true outliers. And I would name IBM before Microsoft.

Still, as far as I know, neither MS nor IBM funds truly basic research without considering some kind of potential return.

On the other hand, the NSF doesn't consider ROI at all because it's funded by us taxpayers.

“Capital tends to flow towards those who are best able to convert it into happiness for other human beings.”

Hmm, that’s a pretty strong statement, can you provide evidence it’s an observable phenomenon - a natural law - rather than an initial hypothesis, a postulate?

Fair. I kind of assumed that is was obvious that those who succeed in developing superior products and services attract more customers, do more business, and thus acquire more value to reinvest and grow than those who do not. Am I missing something?

Can also succeed by effectively targeting vulnerable consumers, deploying deceptive marketing tactics, lobbying for favorable laws for your company, or purposefully ignoring the law successfully. Or monopolize and milk a basic need like medicine for common disease. Or run sweatshops to minimize cost at expense of everything else. Sell weapons to regimes known for their human rights abuses. Secure a license to take up finite resources without regard for sustainability or at underprice. Manage to externalize costs for necessary environmental protection. I would claim it is easier to make money the more of such bad things you are willing to do.

Also, a bunch of people have good access to capital just because who luck chose as their parents.

Well I’d argue that the purpose of capital is to produce more of itself, not to develop superior products/services. Capital is a quantification of power, and if your sole purpose is to accumulate more of it, human history is a string of examples of how this comes with significant misery for the most.

Have you ever worked in a research capacity at either an academic or for-profit institution? My experience has been that private for-profit entities are good at scale and terrible at discovering new ideas.

Small sample size? I believe there are a few private for-profit companies which have discovered a new idea or two.

In biomedicine, at least, I'd really need some examples. Every break-through I can think of came from publicly funded research, which then gets turned into a product.

I'd bet that the vast majority of industry innovations can be linked to corresponding work in academia. That's not to say that industry doesn't innovate, but they clearly feed off each other in a mutually beneficial way.

>This seems entirely rational to me. A private corporation must strive to meet real human needs in order to survive.

My experience in private corporations tells me that they tend to be incredibly inefficient as well. So I see the logic behind what you're saying, but I think you're describing something other than reality. The evidence I see points to efficiency not being correlated between public and private, but more between people who give a fuck and people who don't.

Do you think they're better for basic research?

Where would society be without the basic research that was done over the last century?

What's the limit of basic vs. applied research?

AT&T has 8 Nobel prizes under its belt. At least three are fundamental science:

1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.

1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovering cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.

1998: Horst Störmer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering and explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect.

AT&T is a special case. It held a monopoly on a near universal service across almost the entire United States for close to a century.

I just can't think of any company comparable now. By the time of that first Nobel Prize in 1937, AT&T had basically had its monopoly for 30-50 years depending on exactly where you start counting, and it would continue to maintain it for nearly another 50.

> What's the limit of basic vs. applied research?

I'm not sure what you mean by limit, could you elaborate?

Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general.

> Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general.

True. But it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions. Which organizational form is better at doing it seems to be an open question.

If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so.

> it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions.

I never made that claim.

> If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so

That is nonsense. The whole thing about basic research is that it's generally very difficult to predict whether any particular kind of basic research is going to bear fruit and what sorts of applications it will have. You can't predict well, in advance. History shows this pretty clearly. You have to make a lot of diversified bets. There will be rare but massively profitable (long term) payoffs.

Discovering Quantum Mechanics has had huge benefits for society but no one could have predicted them in advance. And think of how much accumulated research was required over the years to lead to it, where it couldn't have been predicted that they'd lead to QM and its applications.

>A private corporation must strive to meet real human needs in order to survive.

Private corporations knowingly caused the opioid epidemic to make money.

Tell me how mass murder "meets real human needs."

Fair.

It meets the human need to relieve pain.

I did not mean to imply that it always does so in a moral way.

Clearly it does not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com