Hacker News Reader

Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

The follow on from this is rather more problematic. If you are prioritizing production things, then it means you'll severely limit the topics you explore. Anything that would take too long to get to market, or is too risky, or is too theoretical, will never be prioritized.

This is the reason for the tenure system, to give true freedom to explore novel and future oriented work. Things that won't pay off for decades, if ever. Ironically, the grant system does cut against it, especially with some grants now looking for more near term impact. Also, publish or perish cuts against this, because it optimizes for quantity rather than quality. Similar to industry labs, risky work or things that will take too long to get to publication are now discouraged. Instead we have a plethora of weak, simple, and short publications, often duplicating previous work due to a lack of consistency in terminology.

View on HN

The other problem with the tenure system is that professors - even the ones that want to try cutting edge research and have tenure - cannot risk the career of the PhD students in their lab on some very speculative and high risk research that might backfire terribly.

Or worse, they do and 10% of the lab goes onto fame and glory, while the others bash their heads against the wall.

> This is the reason for the tenure system, to give true freedom to explore novel and future oriented work. Things that won't pay off for decades, if ever

A long time ago, I heard the opposite view. Researchers only establish tenure once they've spent a long time on a specific path, and empirically, later-career don't suddenly throw out their decades of commitment to one path to explore ground once they're protected by tenure. This rings pretty true to me, based on everything I know about the scientific establishment (and my model of human psychology). There's a reason "science advances one funeral at a time" is such an old saw.

mRNA vaccines took ten years before they "made it" and they needed a black swan event to really take off. Moderna IPO'd eight years in.

I think this is a false premise that we have. That there is any long-term science going on at all in government labs that wouldn't happen in private labs. It's conventional wisdom but not likely to be true.

The market is very sophisticated now. There are players who make decisions outside of any human's life. There are instruments to insure against hundred year events, and it is possible to price both rare and far off successes.

If you've peeked behind the curtain you know there's a lot of fake science there, including photoshoppery of microscope images that's now considered science. It's out there, I've seen it, I know it's real.

Public labs have decoupled success from knowledge and, in doing so, many long-term fundamental science projects are now fake.

People thinking in the same line of you is why I think China is going to be the global leader in scientific discovery in a decade.

We've stagnated while they've organized their efforts for long term discovery and long term technical brilliance.

I guess time will tell if public or private sector research is the best possible solution.

I see no evidence that China has organized around long-term discovery or technical brilliance. They have many scientists, and relative advantages in certain fields, but their system of science still has major structure issues.

For example, one aspect of Chinese science policy is paying scientists based on the impact factor of their published papers. This, however, has lead to a much larger issue of "salami-slicing"/"least-publishable unit" publications aimed at passing the minimum bar of a "good enough" journal rather than contributing to science. Another issue—these payouts are only given to certain authors of the paper, which can lead to issues and controversies over authorship position. These are issues in the U.S. and Europe, but less severe, and not incentivized with cash payments.

China does not have some secret sauce that makes them better at discovery or technical brilliance. If anything their policies are organized towards maximizing prestige. Whether large-scale competence follows prestige, we will have to wait to see.

I know some folk that studied abroad in China as part of their US-based undergraduate program (US faculty teaching their courses in China), and they had a very stressful experience due to the seemingly widespread amount cheating by the Chinese students throwing off the grading curves. The university seemed to ignore it for political reasons.

I guess we'll see. It will be hard to tease out the effects of what is public funding vs what is due to other factors.

I think that Chinese science will advance far more rapidly because the Western ethical schools have converged on the Do Nothing school of trolley problem solvers and rampant safetyism is ruining our ability to study immediately important dangers, that Western society is organizing towards protecting its power structures (overwhelmingly elderly over the young), and that the infantilization of Western populations leads to the inability to study interventions since no volunteer can be said to understand any risk.

On the other hand, while Chinese R&D spending is hockey sticking (see Red Moon Rising issue of The Economist for lots of info on this), I am 50-50 on whether they'll manage to solve their fakery problem faster than ours. Theirs is far bigger but they know it is a problem and it is smaller than we think. Ours is smaller but we don't think it exists and it is bigger than our governments think.

But pouring more money into a device that exists simply to extract money is clearly insufficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com