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Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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