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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually OK with this: 1. truly insignificant portion of government spending 2. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to investigate truly bizarre phenomena 3. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to conduct research outside of the known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

https://www.google.com/search?q=problems+with+peer+review

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I guess the people handing out the money are laymen unable to discern science that lies outside the mainstream from crack-pot theories.

Governments probably want to fund all kinds of weird research in fear of missing out on the next atom bomb. But there was a long and rich history of rigorous science leading up the the development of the atom bomb. I imagine the same is true about the development of ICBMs ect.

ICBMs emerged extremely fast after the V2. It has a lot more in common with this parapsychology research than with nuclear fission.

The Trinity test was 2.5 years after the first man-made self sustaining nuclear reaction and 12 years after the idea of a nuclear chain reaction was first proposed. The R-7 ICBM first flew 13 years after the V2. I'd say nuclear fission developed a lot faster than ICBMs.

I'd peg the beginning of the research that jostmey mentioned at the discovery of radioactivity. The science was already well-underway when research reactors were being built.

Ok. In that case, it took 49 years from the discovery of radioactivity to the production of the atomic bomb. It took 60 years from the development of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation to the production of the ICBM. Nuclear science still advanced significantly faster than rocket science.

Rocketry was already well-underway when the V2 flew.

In some ways, ICBMs are literally connected with parapsychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)

If intelligence gathering, and the reports produced by such were analyzed and critiqued with the same rigor as the 'known-to-be-flawed peer-review system', you'd be horrified at what your tax dollars are being spent on.

I doubt it. My tax dollars are already spent on lots of things that are known to be actively harmful, not just "low probability of ROI". For example, any 'critical theory' university program.

What's wrong with critical theory? How are your tax dollars funding the study of it?

To be clear, I didn't claim anything wrong with critical theory, but rather the university programs that focus on it. I'm not sure if it's causation or correlation, but the programs that focus on critical theory tend to promote an ideology that is racist and sexist (literally; they advocate openly for discrimination on the bases of race and sex). At public universities (and even private universities, to a lesser extent), these programs are funded by tax dollars.

> known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

That something is flawed does not mean it is useless.

You can find the fully unmoderated preprint forum at vixra.org and the results speak for themselves.

Just because something is useful doesn't mean it is finding all of the useful results.

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