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Comment by marta_morena_9 | Hacker News Reader

If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research.

The solution is never for the individuals to induce change. This doesn't work for consumers (i.e. you can't say "If everyone stops buying plastic bags, we do something for the environment", because well, nobody cares... You have to make selling plastic bags either illegal or add a significant surcharge that causes consumers to avoid them for reasons that actually affect them, like "too expensive")

And it doesn't work for anything else either. As long as there is funding, this will go on. The "solution" is to stop funding, but apparently since funding is still flowing, someone still values the research. So what is even the problem?

No progress has been made? Well, if funding is still there, whoever funds this seems to be beyond happy with the progress. This is a non-issue.

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> If there is funding, there is apparently a need for research.

This is very close to "There must be a pony in there somewhere". [1] If the question is whether the field is worth continuing to fund, the answer can't be, "Well since people are still funding it, it must be worth funding." By the same logic, we should just keep putting billions into WeWork.

Research is hard to value, and fundamental research especially so. The logic of "if people buy it, it must be good" only patchily applies to normal commerce, where results are relatively easy to measure and feedback loops are short. It's wholly inadequate for feedback loops on the scale of decades.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=the...

This makes sense until you realize the people funding the grants are not the people approving the grants. It is really a lot easier to spend other people's money poorly than to spend your own poorly. Besides, if you want to know if a grant is worth funding who are you going to ask? Probably esteemed people in that field or something related, who all have the same poor incentives and institutional inertia to contend with.

And when politicians are funding long term science, they aren't funding the actual long term benefits, they are funding the APPEARANCE of producing long term benefits (and the funneling of money to those who can provide kickbacks). As long as the pretense can be maintained, anything can be funded, regardless of its actual utility.

The logic is not "if people buy it, it must be good", but more "if people buy it, there must not be something else that they can buy that gets them what they want for less".

I think that's within the working definition of "good", but even if it isn't, I think my concerns still apply. It might on average be true in certain narrow circumstances, but there are so many exceptions it conceals at least as much as it reveals.

+1 insightful; 100% agreed; well-put!

Slashdot reference?

Yep

Perhaps the issue is that the funding agency is not sophisticated enough to realize that there's no value, or more value elsewhere?

OR perhaps the issue that the same people who are in the clique of the said field are also evaluating the research proposals. So the funding doesn’t run dry?

Not that that’s a good or bad thing. You wouldn’t want a “non-expert” to evaluate the proposal. And perhaps a tapering of the funding is better indicator of interest/progress of the field?

Generally there's an outside source of funding that's not part of the field. Thus top scientists find themselves becoming "rainmakers" rather than doing research. You tell your staff to wear their white coats and glasses, lead a tour around the facility, point out how big the machines are, etc.

Well, there _is_ quite a bit less funding for anything in Physics nowadays, at least compared to the Cold War era. Some professors have indeed been forcibly pushed out of Physics for this reason, but mostly it has an effect of making things more hopeless for younger folk (due to the cronyism problem mentioned above).

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