Comment by raziel2701 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raziel2701 | Hacker News Reader

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That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people?

Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security.

We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab equipment plus salaries.

We as a society train all these phds that then leave their field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in. That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that training, for nothing.

It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded research institutions that employ them, and put them to work on useful research without having them worry about grant considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing treadmill?

One possible reason is that highlighting funny or bad examples of taxpayer-funded research is valuable political fodder [1]. Plus, at least one wing of American politics is extremely against publicly funded stuff in general. Although I was happy to just discover that there's an apparently bipartisan "Golden Goose" award given annually to government-funded research that sounds silly but has proven to have meaningful applications [2].

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

[2] https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history

It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win the government research funding for life lottery which obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that in the national labs although they need to worry about program funding like everywhere else. (Though military programs in particular are pretty secure.)

Which is not obviously an improvement.

It used to be the case that doing science for most of the last 2000 years was a matter of deep curiosity and farnsworth-level application. Something , at least in the US, has changed.

What would you say is different from say 50 years ago ?

Why is it that now everything says "Made in China" while less than 40 years ago everything said "Made in USA" ?

Why does china have ~200 COVID19 vaccines while the US only has 3 or so ?

Going back to your thesis - I don't think the current situation is a fit for a government-mandated solution. I would think the exact opposite is true. I think the system today is exactly what results when you mix hard science with bureaucratic government procedure.

Science has taken several steps back due to government interference. You can't cure this patient by giving him a stronger dose of the same poison.

If anything , you simply need to think how we can remove all the bureaucracy and academia, out of science. Universities need to be decoupled from research. We need to get people to stop rewarding papers and grant-writing, and instead to start tinkering on their own, unhindered.

> instead to start tinkering on their own, unhindered.

But where do these money/resources come from? What stops somebody from "tinkering" in a way that does not produce any useful results, but is costing money?

The grant writing process sucks a lot. But it serves a purpose (albeit poorly) - that of weeding out people who aren't actually interested in producing output, but want the grant as "free money". Unfortunately, the grant writing process is costly (for the researchers), which takes the time away from the actual research.

We do ..

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

Unfortunately they are US-only, have small funding and deliver little publicly available results.

And sometimes they do nasty stuff:

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

Many of us deliver much of our results publicly all the time. At ORNL any user can come and use our facilities. We've got a neutron beam system which I think exists only in one other place on Earth. In fact, users can use it for free only if they pledge to publish their results publicly.

> Many of us deliver much of our results publicly all the time.

I didn't imply otherwise.

Unless you are in a user facility, national labs are even more brutal than academia. Because your entire salary is soft-money funded, and AFAIK you have to bring in several multiples (~4) of your salary in grants to maintain your position.

They're called the national labs, and they're pretty awesome.

Academic labs on steroids.

> All that training, for nothing

All that training, for money that you pay to the university.

From the point of view of that companies, the more people failing, the more profitable is their activity, as long as the supply of new people wanting to try it does not dry. There is a reason for the words "inspire", "young" and lately "women" having a prominent place and being repeated again and again in every newspaper or report about scientists.

We may not have a Bell Labs, but we have the entire complex of national laboratories which have pivoted from solely developing nuclear weapons towards more basic science.

I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are employed through them currently doing basic science funded by tax payers.

I'm employed in one of them and it is a very bureaucratic, political environment. Our facilities are dilapidated despite the billions in funding, resources are so wastefully spent, there's a lot of siloed equipment, a lot of unused equipment, and it's not unusual to see the lab fund the same project twice but run by different people. I would be so curious for an audit to be done to the lab just to see how misspent the money is.

This place I'm in is top-down research. The research ideas that one proposes have to be aligned with certain wishlists and pre-determined directions. It's not a place of innovation, but stagnation. This national lab feels more like a jobs program for phds, but with a sisyphean twist, it lacks vision.

I've worked at a few .. there's one that immediately comes to mind from your description, but some are much better than others at giving freedom to their staff to pursue their own ideas.

There is funding like LDRD which is meant to support ideas from the bottom up.

I’ve previously worked at one before and have since drifted away from basic research. At this point I am gravitating toward it again... in your opinion, what FFRDCs are best at providing that freedom / are less political?

My friend just started a job at LBNL and is loving it. LLNL is considered a great place to work as well. I can't speak to every single lab but I hear good things about working at both of them.

Bell Labs was one organization. While it's always a big blurry how much pure research goes on at corporate research labs, I'm not sure there isn't as much research going on today than there ever was given all the money especially in software out there.

Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had really come in to replace them.

The Reagan Recession was brutal.

> What do we do with all these smart people?

Every community (families, neighbors, fandoms, friends, online chatrooms, religious groups, video game guilds...) has needs. What if smart people helped attend to the needs of the communities they're a part of rather than trying to solve the entire world's problems in a uniform way?

> We don't have a Bell labs anymore

Bell Labs was 100% funded by the rents of a government-enforced monopoly.

Ma Bell spent its corporate lifetime fighting to prevent things like the Internet from happening. Bell Labs' job was to patent things like the answering machine so AT&T could prevent them from existing for as long as possible.

I, for one, am very very glad that Bell Labs no longer exists.

Maybe we don't need all those PhDs, and we should stop funnelling public money into producing an excess supply of them?

We do need the PhDs (or otherwise trained researchers). It’s the universities that don’t.

On of the effects of training too many PhDs is downward pressure on academics' salaries - i.e. the public gets their science results on the cheap.

The public fails to get much science at all, not because they or the scientists are cheap, just neither one can afford the things that were always expceted to be within reach any more.

What public money do you think is going toward producing PhDs? PhDs are funded by teaching and research work. They aren't paid to get the PhD.

The research part is often funded by public grant money.

> They aren't paid to get the PhD.

PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived from (often public) grant money.

And the best part is that all this public money results in research papers that lie behind a private paywall. How have we allowed for this fraud to go on and on?

That's no longer true.

From 2013 onward, the results of all federally-funded research needs to be publicly available. Here's the memo mandating it: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi...

People do generally take this seriously and there are consequences (e.g., can't use publications in NIH grants if they haven't been deposited).

I have continued to publish and never have I been instructed to make the papers be open access. No one is enforcing that mandate. The research I've been a part of is wholly funded by the taxpayer and papers that I published after the mandate continue to not be freely available.

Umm...not sure what to tell you about that, other than you’re potentially out of compliance with the terms you and your institution agreed to.

I think there is a 6-12 month “exclusivity” period still, and some journals handle that automatically if you acknowledge federal funding. For example, Current Biology moved our stuff out from behind the paywall automatically on its publication anniversary.

- Here’s the NIH policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

- The NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/index...

- DoE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...

- DoD: https://discover.dtic.mil/public-access-requirements-incorpo...

I’m not sure if anyone has been sanctioned for not following these, but NIH progress reports/renewals require a PMCID for any papers you want to claim. You want to claim a lot on these to demonstrate productivity, so....there’s a good incentive to do this.

Regarding the GP and cost. Open access often incurs additional costs! It's absolutely madness that such a model of exists at all.

Yeah, no one from up top has brought it up. There's no enforcement. It's just cheap talk.

Perhaps they fall under export control due to being applicable to national defense?

No, national security stuff is simply not published. The mandate is not enforced.

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