Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Why science must always be done for free, and all the other non scientific stuff, including things dificult to explain logically, are gladly and generously overpaid?

Universities take an economic profit from this volunteer work. They can just share some and hire a few students to do it. And if there is a scarcity of more volunteers, maybe they should think about if repeatedly firing, whimsically dismantling expert teams, and cut the funds to scientists at the slighest opportunity really pays at long term.

View on HN

Zooniverse was a direct response to a PhD project that Chris Lintott was supervising. His student was tasked with classifying galaxies and in the end decided that the volume of data was just too great.

There is a good supply of volunteers, and the tasks are enjoyed by those who undertake them. Where volunteers identify notable things, they are also credited by name in the resulting papers.

> maybe they should think about if repeatedly firing, whimsically dismantling expert teams, and cut the funds to scientists at the slighest opportunity really pays at long term.

I don't see much evidence for this happening in the UK, where the project is based.

Ha, funny seeing this mentioned on HN, this student was my Professor for Astrophysics during my time in this field. He was a great mentor and taught me (and others) quite a lot, in particular about outreach and science communication. The Zooniverse project is amazing and citizen science in general is a great idea. However, you mention the crux of the issue already: the tasks need to be enjoyable. Looking at galaxies that potentially no other human ever laid eyes on is pretty much as exciting as it may get. A former colleague of mine (in the group of the mentioned student) worked on this interesting structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp that was discovered by one citizen scientist in the Zooniverse project (hence the name). It's one of the coolest success stories of crowd-sourced research I've heard about.

> I don't see much evidence for this happening in the UK, where the project is based.

Reduction in a 40% of UK funding applicants in the last years:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-50044659

Lets see how the nice promises will perform at the end

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/uk-cues-big-funding-...

> Universities take an economic profit from this volunteer work

This is untrue in many places. Like, not even close. If anything, everyone else economically benefits off the back of groundbreaking and blue-skies research.

For efforts like this, the University really only gets some news recognition blips that people quickly forget.

The PI may have a slightly sexier project if they successfully pull off said endeavor which leads to increased competitiveness in review processes, increased likelihood of funding, and then the University likely gets some overhead in many cases.

The real question for me isn't from Universities making money (which is highly indirect and likely fairly insignificant in volume). The real question is why research is so frequently underfunded and a low priority in this country. There can be more budget for blueskies research but ROI is long, unknown, and research is treated like a business. Research should be treated like an endeavor for knowledge where people doing it need to eat, have a home, etc. and realize it's being done and released to the public for everyone.

How about the transcriber getting free tuition, and a citation in the published data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com