Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

Every specialty has taboos and learning what they are and how to avoid them is part of being successful with the job. As a physics graduate student I made an impassioned case to a high energy researcher that the money spent on high energy research was low yield and should be pushed to the biological sciences ... suffice it to say he did not take my points on their merits. Upton Sinclair’s famous “ It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” applies in the sciences.

View on HN

This seems very different to me than hiring researchers doing work in fields that directly impact your business and telling them their work will not be censored. And then censoring them from a position of power, since you now provide their paycheck.

Keep mind that this is a new, recently instituted process. During the interview process when these researchers were hired, this policy did not exist. Perhaps they were naive to believe that such a policy wouldn't be instituted later but I think that's a different discussion.

The policy existed, management just assumed that they would implicitly understand that they shouldn’t work on research that will knee-cap Google.

Of course, they also hired unhinged woke employees so it’s no surprised they’re reaping the seeds they sowed

The Reuters article says exactly the opposite. If you have documentation that this policy has been in place but ignored, I think that would have a big impact on this unfolding story, it definitely strike me as newsworthy.

The Reuters article clearly refers to this as a new change in policy and procedure.

"Google’s new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy."

"Studying Google services for biases is among the “sensitive topics” under the company’s new policy, according to an internal webpage. Among dozens of other “sensitive topics” listed were the oil industry, China, Iran, Israel, COVID-19, home security, insurance, location data, religion, self-driving vehicles, telecoms and systems that recommend or personalize web content."

To be clear, there was a review policy prior to the new one, but it's focus was rather different, the primary concern was on not revealing proprietary information. Which is a fairly reasonable restriction, though I would be interested to know what, if any, papers were asked to be withdrawn or retracted under the old policy.

I am a physicist, and I would say that, perhaps, you don't understand why we "waste" money on high energy physics. It's very similar to the reason why rich people buy useless status symbols, when they could instead buy useful things. It's essentially telling everyone, "I am so rich I don't care about money anymore and can afford to waste some of it on this useless thing".

In science, we as a society throw money at something like high energy physics, because we are telling ourselves, "We love knowledge so much, that we will throw it at high energy physics, which has little economic benefit to us" [1].

In other words, you can't prove that you love knowledge for its own sake, if you only invest in fields which have economic benefits. You have to invest in fields with no benefit, to prove to ourselves that we still care. That has deep and lasting philosophical impact on society.

[1] If you read grand funding agencies internal documents, you will learn that the primary economic benefit of fields like high energy physics is training people on hard problems, who will then go and apply those skills and raise the bar in other fields.

Your [1] should add that “additionally, there is a huge funding funnel that select companies can tap to without having to produce any results at all!” So funneling money to friends and special (dark) projects is also on the table, as a simple matter of what is “possible”.

How did you know, as a graduate student no less, that research money spent on high energy research was low yield compared to the biological sciences? I think that's a pretty bold and naive statement to make.

For example, research on quantum-mechanical light-matter interaction was considered not very practically relevant in the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s the results were picked up by the superconducting qubit research community and used to great effect to build a viable approach to quantum computing.

The outcome of research is inherently hard to predict, and telling people that their field of study is "low yield" because it's not the hot topic of the day seems quite naive and arrogant to me.

I’ll grant you the boldness, naïveté and arrogance of my 2006 self - he could be an insufferable a$$. But looking from the vantage point of 14 years on I think the statement is accurate and that researcher understood why. There was simply nothing on the horizon that remotely held as much promise as Alain Aspect’s and Serge Haroche’s quantum optics work.

Just because I was a graduate student does not automatically mean I was wrong.

The difference is that some of the biological research money ends up going to discoveries that dramatically improve the human condition, while quantum computers don't have any path to doing so yet (while conventional computers solve most of the important problems we have today).

Even biology has a pretty low dollar-to-discovery rate, though.

Reminds me of an interview a cosmologist from my university gave to the CBC around the time the higgs boson was confirmed by the CERN. When asked about real world consequences of the discovery, he answered "None."

I mean Heinrich Hertz, who proved Maxwell's electromagnetic wave theory also said "It's of no use whatsoever[...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." [1]

How wrong he was.

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

If you had asked Erwin Schrödinger how his wave equation could be commercialized he'd probably wouldn't have had any idea either. 100 years later it's the basis for most of our advanced computer technology. I predict the same thing will happen with the standard model, it's just that we can't see the applications yet because we're not technologically advanced enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com