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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone has tried to measure repression's "drag coefficient" effect on creativity.

The origin of Operation Paperclip [1] researchers is not heartening for the "repression research drag" thesis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

This is a very interesting question and one would hope that non repressive societies are more creative and have a higher scientific output. Im not 100 % sure thats the case, however.

It seems to me that it would have to. If your society punishes/limits/eliminates divergent behavior and thought, you are throttling your innovation lever.

I think that rising D&I budgets are a recognition of this truth.

It seems like common sense to me, but I'd be interested to know if it has been studied/measured...

In China, professors have to periodically write essays about how they're ideologically committed to the party goals in order to keep funding and not be fired. These goals are all nice sounding things about national prosperity and such, everyone knows what they're supposed to write, it's a minor chore.

In the US, they're only doing this at hire time for D&I so far. We'll see where it goes from there.

Don’t exaggerate it, people use template to do it. In China most of those are just a process thing, nobody even look at it

Same in the US for the pro-diversity essays as I understand it -- I was trying to make a comparison.

As long as you pay lip service to the right politics you can innovate as much as you want in science and technologies. You are free to use tabs for indentation or write your webservice in brainfuck if you want.

What can be a drag on innovation is if there is nepotism. If the leader appoints his good-for-nothing nephew to science minister. Or if there is corruption, and well connected incumbents throw up endless barriers for innovative upcomers. Or if organized crime steal too much value from the productive people.

Indeed. That's why the USSR has some really good scientific research sponsored by the state while a lot of the good art was underground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov...

In this context I wouldn't really include the social sciences, which leaves Biology and Cybernetics that were indeed suppressed for 20-30 years.

why wouldn't you include the societal sciences?

Because the comment I was replying to was referring to hard sciences and technological fields, where you can pay lip service to the ideology and go do your research.

> As long as you pay lip service to the right politics you can innovate as much as you want in science and technologies.

Unless you innovate in some field detrimental to the government, e.g. education, anonymity, freedom etc.

Cryptography is two-sided. It includes both attacking existing ciphers and inventing new ones which withstand attacks. I would think they will welcome your contributions but keep them secret.

They would have a higher variety of output.

It really depends on the level of repression or how smart the authority imposes it. West media depicts China’s repression as if it’s the same level as North Korea and then people believe it —- it’s far from it and in fact has very little impact on student and researchers life. The China’s authority did it in a way that’s almost transparent, that’s not too hard given the the overall awareness for citizen rights among Chinese people

It probably is, because the amount of distrust of others in places like China/Russia is off the charts hard for westerners to understand. That level of friction would be horrible for research.

> This is a very interesting question and one would hope that non repressive societies are more creative and have a higher scientific output. Im not 100 % sure thats the case, however.

Even if the repressive societies have lower overall research effectiveness, it may be higher in some areas that really matter geopolitically (e.g. military R&D). IIRC, many talented Western scientists boycott military projects for moral reasons, because they live in societies that celebrate taking personal moral stands like that. The talented scientists in a repressive society have different social influences, any may be far less likely to have a problem with military research.

the amount / fraction of money spent on R&D by militaries, especially by the US, would make me think this isn't an issue. most people don't think about the long term impact of their work

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