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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

"The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away." -- Ronald Reagan

State university professors are technically "government employees." There are, of course, some absolutely brilliant academics out there.

University professor is the only viable career path for basic research. Similarly anyone interested in extraterrestrial robotics can basically only find a job doing that at NASA. It's much easier to attract brilliant people if the private industry doesn't offer any jobs in the field.

Still you see many great professors being hired away into private industry.

And yet, by many metrics (e.g. number of academic prizes), the best University professors work for private Universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.

Those same people are also part of the massive research system run and funded by the federal government.

Most medical schools, especially the ones you listed, are incredibly dependent on NIH funding and they'd be unrecognizable without it. Without that support (funding, but also the review process and infrastructure stuff like PubMed and the NCBI tools), very little of the prize-winning work would be possible.

The best state schools are generally comparable in that regard.

Berkley, UCLA, Cornell (partly), UNC, Pitt, U Michigan, and the UIUC, among others, are powerhouses in certain fields.

Matt Cutts of the US Digital Service strikes me as an obvious rebuttal of this. He's accomplished, a respected ex-googler and speaks well.

NASA scientists are pretty well respected, you know.

The NIH, CDC, DoE, NOAA, the various DoD labs (ONR, ARL, AFRL, etc)--and more too. The NSF doesn't have a ton of intramural research, but they have very smart people on staff evaluating recent research and figuring out what to fund next; ditto for DARPA and several other agencies.

It's not just technical stuff either. The FAA has made being shot through the air in a metal tube (i.e., flying) almost absurdly safe, so much so that driving to the airport is more dangerous than the flight itself. I feel comfortable eating food from the supermarket, thanks to the USDA and FDA. The Library of Congress's work is used in libraries around the world; their collections (and the Smithsonian's) are also useful for researchers and fun for the public.

But sure, the real problem is that renewing your driver's license sometimes sucks.

A comment made by a government employee who presumably took his government job for non-economic reasons.

I hear this Reagan guy worked for the government...

One could argue it is actually the other way around: the government works for the president. The president works for the people.

One could argue that, but one would be wrong, in the United States at least. Federal employees swear an oath of office to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" (see https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2019/10/the-oath-o...). It doesn't say anything about supporting either the office or the person of the President.

The president is the commander in chief of the army. The DoD does in fact work for the president. This fact, which is not popular on hn is that the USA wouldn’t exist without the DoD. We’d all be speaking Chinese or Russian. The rest of the federal government wouldn’t exist without the DoD.

I don’t think the oath you quoted is much of an argument.

Proved his own point

Working for a government contractor pays a heck of a lot more than working for the government directly, but then you have to ask yourself "do I want to be part of the solution, or part of the precipitate?"

You have to come up with your own answer.

Isn't that dependent on the best minds thinking they could perform their best performance in business?

Or money.

Not everyone is motivated by excessive profit.

Sure, the money needs to be there to pay for life and plan for the future, but beyond that for many people, mission matters more than pure bucks.

Depends on motivation. Business probably pays better, but defending your country can give a person a sense of purpose.

Ever heard about defense contractors from private businesses for hire?

Kamikaze by words.

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