Hacker News Reader

Comment by warmcat | Hacker News Reader

As long as science continues to be funded by corporations, we will always have this problem of getting results biased towards the corporations. I wonder what else can be used to fund scientific research if not the government?

View on HN

Grad student here. I have thought about this a lot. I think governmental funding sources have problems similar to those from companies. They may not be as explicitly biased, but agendas will exist. There's also the problem that the people approving the funding don't necessarily make good choices. I might prefer an explicit lottery to the current system.

My plan right now is to save money, retire early, and then doing whatever research I want that fits my budget. This avoids many of the problems with the current system, but is not possible for many.

This would allow me to pursue more risky research (in the sense that the research may fail to produce useful results) than an assistant professor trying to get tenure could. I also wouldn't have to raise funds, so I could focus on projects I believe are important, not just what can get funded.

In the book "Invention" by Norbert Weiner, as I recall, he suggests that the government could fund independent researchers to encourage better research. I don't think that will happen, so I have a DIY solution instead.

You're plan sounds very appealing, but is unfortunately very limited to non-wet-lab sciences, such as CS. The amount of set-up and running costs for just a barebones functioning laboratory, e.g. in biochemistry, is in the multi-million dollar range, so there you will still be needing some sort of funding or a very large savings account.

I suspect some corruption going on when I hear something like this. I have no experience with biochemistry, but in my university they showed us a (selfbuild) 3D equipment consisting of one or a couple of computers, 3 (good) beamers and a gauntlet to control the scene. I couldn't believe the price-tag: 300k €. I think the problem is the same for many institutions. They get budget and need to spend it somehow (if they don't then they get less the next year).

I've seen that people start off gofundme's or the like when they need some financial support with an urgent unexpected issue. People are happy to help and contribute, sometimes even if they are complete strangers. I've read someone say it was because people want to know who is getting their support. Maybe if it was possible to easily support research similarly, then people might pitch in?

Check out https://experiment.com/ for exactly this!

Early stage research still costs a lot of money. You won’t raise $200k from a bunch of individuals like a go fund me; and individuals are probably not the best at judging the impact and merit of proposals.

We need an overhaul of the way research is funded, but I don’t think asking everyday individuals to fund is the right way.

Hi! I'm one of the founders of experiment.com.

The NBER just released a paper this week on crowdfunding, primarily looking at Experiment's dataset: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24402

Reply on news.ycombinator.com