This is absolutely false. I agree that discovery isn't easy, but you know what's even harder? The other 90% of the work needed to finish it and make it a reliable product. Chomsky trivializes the work of synthetic organic chemists, the engineers that set up and keep production lines going, researchers that test the drugs, and so on.
In software terms, this is like saying that all the hard work is done because someone banged out a prototype over the weekend. It's full of bugs and doesn't have the features people want yet.
If you believe that Chomsky's right, try running a startup while holding his idea. You'll fail, or you'll discover that it's not easy and reject his idea.
None of these things are exactly easy, but at least with development you're building toward something.
Much of what we call research vs. what we call development is simply an artifact that stems from the way science is funded today. However, science can't (and won't) always be funded by giant government bodies. (To say that it will assumes that the way things are can go on forever, but history shows that civilizations have lifespans just like everything else.)
They're doing this because it costs too much to do research and development gives them quicker return on investment.
Second, pharmas aren't free to develop whatever they think would be profitable. New drugs cost around a billion dollars to develop because of the FDA, which is ridiculous. There are many rare illnesses for which affected people don't want the "safety" the FDA imposes. As long as billion dollar development costs are imposed on every drug, there is no chance that any progress can be made for these people. So it's not the pharmas, it's the regulation.
Is there any way to get a best of both worlds in this scenario? Quicker to-market times for drugs for rare and dangerous diseases, and the safe route for the more common drugs?
Of course there is. Regulations can be changed, freeing drug companies to research and develop these drugs. In fact, I'm sure that this change - this partial deregulation compromise - is going to happen, someday.
But on what principle should we stop there? Where do you draw the line, and why? If the regulations say "freedom only for drug developers that treat diseases that affect 15,000 people with five years," on what principle do you cut freedom short for the 15,001th patient, or the one who is expected to live five years and a day?
The goal isn't some nebulous definition of "freedom", where "freedom" is defined as "adherence to conservative orthodoxy regardless of the particulars".
The goal is something that works well.
Who decides "what works best", and how?
Edit: I say that each of us has to do that for ourselves.
Also, I'm not a conservative. I'm anti-religion, pro-selfishness, pro-gay, anti-environmentalism, pro-abortion, pro-capitalism. I'm a radical for reason.
But you jumped way past "working better" into some unrelated and 100% ideologically-driven conception of "freedom". What are we talking about here, my freedom to get poisoned by cough syrup because I didn't perform my own scientific studies on the matter with a large sample population?
How come freedom only ever applies to the already-rich cutting corners for an extra buck?
It doesn't. Yaron Brook just addressed this in a debate held in New York last week:
"The biggest victims of government intervention in the economy, the biggest victims of socialism (as someone who came from a socialist country, where government intervened a lot more than here) are the ambitious poor - the people who could rise up under freedom.
The people who want to work, who want to make something of their lives, who want to succeed, who want to prosper. They are the real victims. They are the ones we should shed tears for when we regulate, when we control, when we put them through public education, when we put them through the whole social mechanism, when we use welfare to institutionalize them into poverty and take away their sense of personal responsibility and personal morality that is so crucial for their development as successful, happy, prosperous human beings. If anything Objectivism should rally around, it's those people. You know, I wasn't rich, I was an ambitious poor guy. I came to this country with nothing. Those are the people who are the real victims of state intervention, and the real benefactors of freedom and capitalism."
This quotes is from the last five minutes of audio: http://www.archive.org/details/FirstPrinciples-Government_Wh...
To his point, in the last 30 years, we've slashed taxes for the rich and really slashed welfare. Shouldn't the poor be picking themselves up by their bootstraps by now? Or is something a little more robust than "I don't even need to know the details, the problem is SOCIALISM and the solution is FREEDOM" required?
And meanwhile, none of this has anything to do with the very real problem of FDA regulatory reform. You haven't laid out the first reason why I wouldn't be poisoned by a bottle of cough syrup from duane reade or why it should be on me vs the drug company to prove that their cough syrup is safe.
I suppose we could always have a company that was in charge of rating drugs, and the drug companies could pay them for ratings, like AAA and BBB. I mean, it works for the financial industry, right?
No, just see the other comment right below:
You should be free to do this yourself or to seek the advice of those you've chosen to trust on scientific (or any other) matters.
As to your comment about the financial industry: it's inapplicable because it's not a free market. In a free market, there would be no Federal Reserve, no Fannie or Freddie to distort the market. Immoral firms such as Goldman Sachs would have nothing to take advantage of.
Gotta go, but on that whole federal reserve thing, go take a look at the boom/bust cycle in the US prior to and after establishing the federal reserve.
Again, it's not about what you find ideologically satisfying, it's about what actually works in the real world.
EDIT: btw, the fed and fannie/freddy had almost zero to do with the housing crisis. The problem was the multiplied leverage much more than the housing debt itself, and fannie/freddy's rules about loans to minorities only affected a miniscule % of total defaults.
Actually, it's got to be both. Being smart is being able to correctly predict things, and that requires both theory and empirical observations. While everyone has some sort of philosophy, some philosophies are better in the real world than others.
You should be free to do this yourself or to seek the advice of those you've chosen to trust on scientific (or any other) matters.
That's the early Google, Facebook etc. for you. Of course most of such ventures fail, but sometimes they get it done and gain traction.
I guess his argument is based on the premise it takes organization on scale of a state (country) to be able to organize broad-sweeping long-term research in areas that don't look promising at first. Without the sight of immediately sellable product or service. Businesses seem to be more oriented towards research that improves incrementally something that's already somewhat known.
I was going to write Bell Labs were one of notable exceptions, but then I realized they got much state funding for research related to military.
Also, high margins and no competitive pressure make research and dev methods stagnant - no IP + public research funding and FDA subsidies seems like a more effective system to me.
Because private companies would be willing to throw money into the wind to fund research. The concept's been proven, the risky part is over; although not necessarily the difficult part.
(If that description of corporate productization sounds unfair, I think it's closer to the mark than saying basic research is analogous to "someone banged out a prototype over the weekend".)
When it's able to be productized, that's when corporations come along. This is well known. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html)
That wouldn't stop people from doing it privately. For example, biochemist Peter Mitchell (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Peter_D._Mitc...) won a Nobel in Chemistry in 1978 for work he did entirely without government funding, out of a house he owned. (It's not some little thing he discovered, either - if you take an undergraduate course in biochemistry, you'll run across his chemiosmotic hypothesis directly, and it's taught in less detail in a lot of other biology courses.)
But both cases are probably marginal. In a world where one has to earn money to survive, innovation is slowed down, either because of copyright and patents, or the lack of funding.
The trick is to get a world where one doesn't need to earn money.
At the very least we need to move towards a place where money is not the final arbiter of 'Good'.
"Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn't have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people that are interested in it. That's the way science works. There's an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they commercialize everything else. "
The one thing that startups need is freedom to make what people want so that those people will freely choose to pay the startup (how many startups existed in the USSR in 1970?). OSS is just a nice-to-have once you look at it that way. If it was a necessity, you'd have to explain how there were startups before anything was open source.
Edit: OSS would still exist in some form even if there were no government funding for it. You know how some people say they do it just for fun? I think that's true.
Also, another thing. Linux/BSD push the bar way high up and force Windows to try and catch up. So even if you use windows, you're still affected by Linux. In the same way that you're affected (positively) by Apple even if you use Ubuntu.
The phrase actually means that the existence of a specific rule implies that the negation is true for circumstances not covered by the rule. So, if half of the blocks in a city have "parking prohibited" signs, and no such signs elsewhere, that "proves" that parking is in fact allowed on the other blocks, since the signs are excepting the general rule. In other words, why would there be a sign if it was understood that there is no parking?
Sorry to make such a big point out of a small matter, but we already lost one good phrase ("Begging the question") to widespread improper usage. Wikipedia has more info, including the origin of the phrase: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
Put another way, when used correctly, "the exception that proves the rule" is a valid rhetorical phrase regardless of how many exceptions there are. Whereas if there were 500 successful startups using non-open-source tools, you wouldn't say that they were the exceptions that proved the rule.
But you do. That's the point. It's not an absolute law. I'm sure you can find a great application written in Visual Basic. This doesn't make Visual Basic a great choice over Python.
If you could list 50+ successful startups running on Windows, then you could say there's a strong evidence.
And even then, this only proves that Windows is as good as Linux. It doesn't counter the original point about Linux being great despite not having a business model centered around IP.
Edit: For example, could you write CAD software without an OS as we know it today? It would be undoubtedly harder, but you could. People did this in the 60s.
The older AutoCADs (on DOS) apparently plotted the internal grid (hi-res), then resampled it to generate the screen display.
Thus, minor panning and zooming could be accomodated without "regenerating" -- replotting the hi-res grid.
Anyway, a CAD system doesn't really use the facilities of an OS; something like a web server, however, seems to benefit from an OS.
Since people lived just fine before technology, we don't need technology all that much, therefore we don't need IP.
But yes, there are government grants. Here's the first example I could find, one for developing a secure Linux desktop:
Here's a great example of "public goods" that's near and dear to my heart: I love Linux, and there's no way in hell I'd use anything else. However, it's hard to argue that it sets the pace in terms of usability. Commercial operations produced easier systems for the end user well before Linux got there.
Why? Because they got paid for their results, and they got paid because of intellectual property. And as they got paid, they sunk part of that money back into research and development into improving the experience. There is a comparatively tiny amount of money going into the Linux Desktop.
The problem is that some industries feel entitled to retire on mohito island while humanity gets to drag them along.
Also most of people using and developing Linux live off it - one way or another. I'm certain that professional/user ratio is in strong favour of Linux.
Idea that companies put money into R&D solely due to intellectual property, or that they only make enough to put something into R&D because of IP is wrong.
Look at some of the most successful businesses in the world. Selling sugared water, selling grilled pieces of meat, selling washing machines and various appliances, selling pieces of wood that fit together,...
Taking whatever IP from them wouldn't change their R&D and other forward looking spending activities much.
And don't come back to me with low tech/high tech argument. High tech production is even harder, that's why those who know how to do it and keep successfully investing into getting beter, get to run the show. Those who don't know how to improve and those who want to collect tax on everybody forever should just roll over and die.
Producing "information stuff" is difficult, but copying it is extremely easy.
You can pay a team of 100 guys to work for a year creating a program, a movie, or whatever, and then have it copied around the internet in a few hours, for free. Leaving you zero income, and a large loss on your sunk costs.
That's why IP exists. There is ample scope for arguing about whether the present rules and regulations are ideal (I don't think so), but the idea behind the system makes sense for many situations.
Why do you want a Lambo?
To me this seems contrary to the ideals that would support the liberation of IP. Why should we be wasting resources on such things?
You'd probably be able to get any item you liked with a Lambo TM (or are we keeping some form of trademark laws? please?) and certainly be able to buy some sort of Ford/Toyota/Kia with a Lambo shell. But it will definitely be a knock-off.
Lamborghinis will still be expensive not because of scarcity but because they're a huge waste of money and so in practise few people really want to spend the money on them.
If you wanted a Volvo instead I think you have a chance but you'll probably find it extremely hard to get one that lasts more than a few months, is safe. It will probably be even harder to get parts that are actually worth fitting.
If you wanted an iPad then I think you stand a chance and it might actually be half decent, Chinese factories are already making ripoffs of such things after all. Apple would have to own the supply chain outright otherwise the manufacturer will undercut them (sell at lower price exact same product) and Apple would be left with the R&D and design bills.
I'm a bit at a loss as to how many people on a site dedicated, in part, to startups, which for most of us are based on information goods (software) would blithely throw out the baby with the bathwater in terms of IP. Take a good, hard look at the current system and fix major portions of it? Sure. Eliminate it entirely? Probably a bad idea.
If Chomsky wants to argue that government funded research is the source of innovation, then he should also ask, what is the source of government funds?
Government takes dollars from those who earn it, and spends it according to collective values at best, or in favor of corrupt interests at worst.
Who is to say that if those dollars were left in the hands of those who earned them, they wouldn't be spent more wisely?
Granted, they're not fundamental science, but they were, at least, innovations.