Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjreacher | Hacker News Reader

His foundation, the Simons Foundation, funds among a few other things, arXiv. I have wondered why other tech related billionaires do not sponsor more items in the scientific sphere like Simons does, because unlike funding a building at some rich university your money could actually be used for something useful and if something good comes out of it, having your name attached to it could mean a lot more than the name of some silly building (on top of the actual scientific progress it leads to).

View on HN

Because billionaires are more often than egomaniacs and having your name be remembered is more important than the actual value of your charitable donations.

We grew up in a world dotted with buildings and universities with the names of robber-barons like Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. Having your name carved into the stone of the building of a major institution means immortality (well, as long as the institution remains important) - directly sponsoring science might do more real good but it's not as good at sanitising your image or for being remembered long term, which are the real goals of most billionaires' philanthropy.

People don't remember John D. Rockefeller for the money he pumped into eradicating hookworm, probably the single greatest thing he did for the world in his life - ending generations of sapped energy and cognitive impairment in the American South. People remember him because his name is on the buildings and colleges he funded.

FWIW, he does also have his name on a building: the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley. https://simons.berkeley.edu/

What's wrong with paying for academic buildings to be built (and having your name on it)? The point is that students can go to the building and receive lectures, or run labs, or read books in the library. Who cares whose name is on the building... These buildings will stand for a long time anyway, soon nobody will know who that person was anyway (other than by the name of the building).

For me what’s wrong is that ”buildingless students” in rich universities is not a social problem at all, so funding those has no positive impact in the society.

One would think that such buildings would be built even without rich donors.

There's nothing wrong with it per se, it's just in my view the money could be better spent. If a university needs a new building it will get built regardless. In contrast, I know graduate students living off ramen and suffering because their stipends are so small. Here the work of Simons Foundation on funding grad students is of great help because it means the students don't have to focus on getting money on top of their research but just focus on their research, which should lead to better results.

For some reason he didn’t want to fund William Stein and his rival to Mathematica.

Today's plutocrats should be looking to people like Carnegie for inspiration.

He didn't pay to put his name on one or two libraries in influential universities, he paid to set up a national system of libraries which any person could walk into and make use of.

Why haven't any of our tycoons stepped up to create a national system of community centers, makerspaces, etc? I'll give you three guesses.

They decided fighting malaria and polio had higher priority?

He also donated to Brookhaven to extend the operating time of one of the particle accelerators. (His Wikipedia entry doesn't mention this, remarkably).

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

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2006/brookhaven-receives-outside-fun...

- "Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Praveen Chaudhari has announced a $13-million private contribution that will enable the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to operate for 20 full weeks this year. The money was raised by Jim Simons..."

One non-trivial part of it is that his (academic) expertise was in mathematical physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern%E2%80%93Simons_theory

I’ve often wondered why we, the public, don’t fund more items in the scientific sphere. Basic research, for example.

At one point, there was a “Kickstarter” for science but I haven’t gotten an email from them for years.

I think that is the case, no? The majority of research is funded by the government, i.e. taxpayers' money, even more so for basic research. The better question is why we taxpayers have to pay publishers to access research funded by ourselves.

Good news! It’s been years since most government funding sources have required research they fund to be open access. The NSF has required this since 2016 and the NIH since 2008. The bad news is that journals charge incredible fees to researchers to make their articles open access and so your tax dollars go (via grants to researchers) to these publishers to fund this. Which would be fine if the prices were more reasonable but they just keep increasing.

There was a company called Petridish that did exactly this. They pivoted after six months and became Blue Apron: https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...

Gates (and Buffet via Gates) invests huge sums in science and tech via his foundation. Elon Musk funded the $100M XPrize for carbon removal. Yuri Milner funds the Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics. Sergei Brin and Mark Zuckerberg are also breakthrough prize funders. Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt are also major funders of X Prizes.

The list goes on and on. These things just aren’t widely reported because they are boring and don’t fit narratives favored by much of the press.

Zuckerberg has a very interesting medical imaging research program as well: https://chanzuckerberg.com/science/programs-resources/imagin...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com