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Comment by temp131 | Hacker News Reader

You could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund eugenics or something.

There could be a whole range of topics that could be worked upon and you could allow the researcher to move freely between them,

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The thing that is needed is trust. Its by far the best way to do it, it just that going on trust sounds like the worst and most irresponsible way of doing it so people don't dare do it, and they don't dare argue for it.

“Erwin Griswold, who had been the Dean of Harvard Law School, had the theory that he knew which people were geniuses. If he approved of them, they would certainly do good work over time, and therefore they had to write nothing.“

https://volokh.com/2011/10/02/justice-breyer-on-tenure-stand...

“The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic.”

https://fs.blog/munger-operating-system/

I've often given thought to exactly this problem: trust in all American institutions has been and continues to decline precipitously. I can not name a single case of trust increasing anywhere within the last decade - religion and the church (catholic/Catholic/et al), government at all levels (SF on up to NASA), academia and the sciences and seemingly all forms of education from elementary school on up to University, unions, the medical establishment from local providers to the CDC/FDA/NIH, the US military, the police (although somehow, we went from the Democratic party regarding the FBI as Hoover's institute to one safeguarding Democracy), Facebook (Big Tech Everyman) went from a beacon of Democracy under the election of Obama to whatever it is considered now, corporations and Capitalism, the courts and even the founding of the country itself. For a more niche subject of personal interest, our furniture has seemingly purposefully declined in quality as we outsourced manufacturing to China via IKEA and forced everyone else to do so.

I'd guess that the polarization of our society is self reinforcing, and that as it increases, our institutions follow along for one reason or another whether it be some form of "good business" or internal capture. Its probably some Internet Law that any institution not specifically devoted to staying out of it will eventually succumb, but even then you have the ACLU... and there is non-culture war decline in trust - something more like the financialization of everything or the injection of metrics into all parts of life that can be metered....

We don't value competence and accountability first; maybe this was always the case and only our narrative changed, but that's hard to imagine when we used to do things. At this point, why not Research, too?

My view of this is that the pursuit of money is leading America (and the whole western society) to a dead end. Everything now is corrupted by money is a very shocking way (it was always like that, but not in the open). We're back to the 20s of the previous century, where a few people had enormous amounts of money and most people barely survived, even in the richest country in the world.

Interesting observation. Maybe it's a natural evolution of society, that in part it resembles evolution of a person - it starts out young, full of ideals and energy, trusting the people and institutions around them. Then it gets older, loses energy and as perception of corruption blows up, trust becomes rarer. This does not have to be the end of that society like it is for the person, but probably society needs some radical revolution to get things "back on track" again.

In research, abolishing the grant system and the business model of universities selling credentials in favour of direct financing of learning and research institutions to teach the best students should be attempted. It probably won't come from the academia, it has to come from the state.

Shelby Steele does a good job of diagnosing the malady in his book White Guilt: when institutional America had to own up to its sins in the era of civil rights, it surrendered moral authority. Every generation rebels, but usually the kids come back to the same principles that their parents held once they experience the real world for a time. The civil rights era broke this pattern: the adults were wrong, and admitted it, and so an entire generation (Boomers) came of age thinking they had the justified authority to question and possibly overturn any of their elders’ institutions.

"You could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund eugenics or something."

The thing about basic research is that you usually cannot see the consequences down the line.

Few of the original researches that discovered ionizing radiation could anticipate the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons. And yet their contributions were crucial.

Starting to think that the most honorable thing to do is live a simple, modest life and not have children.

There's already a lot of published work in that area. Are you looking at confirming earlier work, or is there a particular focus that introduces novelty?

I guess the practical execution varies a little in each time, place, individual, and circumstance. Look at all these new temptations and tools we have developed! Maybe it will be different this time! Maybe not.

Here’s a novel idea: Try to have the same child with two different partners.

May require extensive trial and error before a good result is uncovered. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s cherry-picking..

Funny thing is that people often choose simple, modest lives specifically because it allows them to have children and be decent parents.

Nothing wrong with having children. It’s an honorable, self-sacrificing choice.

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