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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

I had a great conversation this evening with a marine biologist studying the recent collapse of a 100,000 sq km California kelp forest. The grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship are in the 10k-50k$ range.

Over the past few years, something killed over 5 billion giant starfish and “science” has no idea what did it. Without the starfish, the sea urchin population exploded, turning kelp forest into desert.

I love the LHC. But we need to seriously grow the science pie and prioritize the science of ecosystem collapse and management. There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.

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I recently heard this comment by Sean Carroll in his June AMA episode

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-...

--- [..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?”

It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is a lesson that has been beaten home over and over again when we’ve had an expensive science project that people have campaigned against on the theory that the money could be better spent elsewhere, and the project gets cancelled, and guess what, the money does not get spent on science at all ’cause there’s no rule that the amount of money spent on science has to be fixed ---

This is not correct. There is a fixed annual amount and it is partitioned by policy and earmarks.

This is not accurate. There is no fixed annual amounts for anything the US Congress passes, notwithstanding the fact that the LHC is an international project.

Congress decides the fixed amount and it gets partitioned after allocations.

What you're ignoring is the reasoning and the process behind that decision. Of course it matters what it is that needs funding and how effectively the people requesting the funds are making their case.

If it was a competition between english literature and greek philosophy you can be absolutely certain that the fixed amount would be a tiny fraction of what it is now.

Curing cancer, infinite amounts of cheap energy, staying competitive, winning against China both economically and militarily, you really think the size of the pie would be the same without these things?

Interesting point. So, hopefully the science of environmental stewardship gets a name like “Environmental Engineering” or “Resilience Engineering” from the NSF and grows the pie.

Because the costs of not adapting to climate-related environmental change will be astronomical. I mean, would you say climate adaptation is on par with the importance and urgency of curing cancer? The arguments would be interesting.

Is this a case of America != The World

No, all countries with large science programs use similar processes for total fund size and suballocations (dunno about zh but jp and eu are quite similar, with some non important details)

The truth is somewhere in between.

Ultimately there is a fixed amount of effort people can expend - however the science budget isn't fixed in the sense that projects like the LHC can generate the excitement etc to enlarge the overall pie ( for science - taking away from something else of course - though that could be time spent at home unemployed ).

Most science is done through small incremental advances that add up over time - one of the problems with that is it's rather hard for politicians to see or understand that.

Big projects capture the attention. Though obviously big projects can also, if they fail, damage the reputation of experimental science as a whole.

So yes - LHC isn't probably the best use of money - there are more pressing immediate concerns - however on the other hand - everyone has heard of it - it attracts funding and people to science ( and does good science of course ).

Tricky balance.

Only nationally. There is no global science institute, which means there is no big picture funding.

This is a huge problem when the immediate extinction threat problems are global.

Like the NSF, a “Global Science Foundation” is a vision we should all promote. There is a big need for supporting global science. It would have so many follow-on benefits culturally, politically, economically, ecologically…

Genuinely curious about the downvotes

If it's just one downvote, it could be accidental, otherwise my guess would be people who don't like those types of organization or ideas.

At least in some countries, the government makes a yearly budget and decides what to fund, including specific projects.

That's what I said.

See the ssc as an example. Note also the nih is a massive fund (25+ billion in grants per year, all bio). Nsf is a better example because they have to fund many fields. Doe has fixed funding for nuclear, plus soft funds for scientists in many fields (they funded the human genome long before nih).

I think about this with space exploration as well. What is the most efficient and practical way to tackle large exploration and science projects that may not see fiscal profit in near term? I’m fiscally conservative capitalist, but want to find a way to do all the science and help the public have higher risk tolerance. My family worked on Apollo and I just worry our generation’s tolerance for risk and ambition of that sort is sapped. Or, that a WWIII is necessary trigger an age of growth as I and II did.

>> I’m fiscally conservative capitalist, but want to find a way to do all the science and help the public have higher risk tolerance.

You want to remain conservative, but also want everyone else to be more risk tolerant?

It's always easy to talk about spending other peoples money isn't it? ;-)

The amount of money that goes into these unuseable results is just sad. This and astrophysics of remote galaxies.

Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors.

Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students.

We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator.

For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.

I have a PhD done in CERN, too, and I can state that your remark is idiotic.

Money was not spent in order to confirm that the Higgs boson existed: rather, it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy.

Whether the Standard Model is validated or challenged, it matters as much as a grain of sand on top of the Himalayas.

> I can state that your remark is idiotic.

Thank you for the kind comment.

> it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy.

What part exactly is humanity going to enjoy? The 8 T magnet? Where do you envision using the technology to drive particles?

Or, to be fair, which technology from the LHC was ever used for humanity? Anything you do in biology today can have a direct effect OTOH.

For what it’s worth, a very close friend of mine got his Physics PhD at CERN in the late 80s (high energy particle physics) where he witnessed the birth of HTTP.

This experience, coupled with the US government’s decision to not build an equivalent super collider in the 90s, led him to switch to computer science, where he had a bit of a “head start” due to his experience at CERN.

He always said the data analysis, measurement, and collection stuff was more advanced than anything else in the world at the time. The original “big data”. But in 2022, this is less of a distinguishing feature in his opinion. Also, Bell Labs probably faced similar issues.

I asked, and he agrees that he’d do molecular biology if he were starting over today. So you’re not at all crazy!

This is very similar to my trajectory (PhD in the mid to late 90's).

I made friends with some people working in the computer center (the famous 513 at the time, may have changed by now). I discovered UNIX, then Linux and I was sold. During my PhD I started to work for the industry in IT and never stopped since then.

CERN had an outstanding computer system, they invented the "grid". As for HTTP, it just happened to be invented at CERN when Tim Berners-Lee was working there (there was nothing special related to CERN). The hardware-software interface was bleeding edge technology (built into the detectors) and the data bandwidth capacities were ahead of their times.

All of this, however, is not particle physics and if CERN did not exist there would be not much "holes" in today's computers (as opposed, say, to DARPA or Linus).

Very high field magnets are critical for MRIs, tokamak fusion reactors, mass spectrometers, and probably many other uses if we consider pure science as “useful”.

Actually particle accelerators somewhat funded the early investment in high field superconducting magnets which might now appear to yield improvements in fusion energy Q factors due to the strong dependence on field intensity [1]

[1] https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

> if we consider pure science as “useful”.

Of course it has to be useful. Based on that we build our world (through engineering) and if we work for something that cannot be used then it does not make sense. I do not see any use for quantic foam or quasars any time soon.

As for magnets: this certainly helps, but has CERN done any breakthroughs that were used afterwards? They had at some point the world record for the density of a magnetic field. There is no practical use for that neither in MRIs (that require a lower field and were used for many years already), nor tokamaks (where the homogeneity of the filed is paramount on larger scales compared to the ones in CERN.

I am not saying that the engineering work that is done in CERN is useless - it is just that the money poured there goes primarily in some "whose is bigger" contest that has exactly zero chances to be used.

> Of course it has to be useful.

No, it hasn't. "Science" means "knowledge", and the only things you can know are the things how they actually are.

A PhD from CERN should not confuse science with engineering.

> the only things you can know are the things how they actually are

Yes, but investing MM€ to know something that has no use does not make sense, if there is much more important knowledge competing for the fund. I guess that knowing how to cure MS is more important that discovering a four quarks particle, right? In an ideal world we could do everything but we have to choose wisely because the amount of funds is limited.

> A PhD from CERN should not confuse science with engineering.

Can you please tell me where I confused them?

At cern, science is engineering is science

> further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries....

... which started with a simple observation. 200 years ago in 1820, Ørsted was giving a lecture when he noticed that a current-carrying wire deflects a compass needle. Of course, he had no idea what that would lead to, nor did anyone else. It was a completely 'pure', 'unuseable' observation. But, as a student of Kant (what a waste of time!) he shared it in a four-page pamphlet.

Thanks for sharing this great story.

>There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.

It just doesn't pay enough. Society doesn't place enough value on these roles.

Sure, that doesn't help. Most scientists don't do it for the money though, so that doesn't have to be an issue per se. The barrier to entry for becoming a scientist, however, is extremely high and not filled with equal opportunity.

One example is a female friend of mine with two Master's degrees who's currently not getting paid a lot in a government job. She would love to do a PHD and start doing research in the areas she's been educated in and worked in, but she hardly gets invited to interviews and when she does, she never seems to get the job, because she lacks research experience. The longer she works outside of research, the less of a chance she gets to actually get hired for a research position.

I understand that there have to be high barriers to entry, because quality needs to be high, but I feel like the balance currently might not be right.

Believe it or not, scientists need to eat, want to own homes, have vacation, and buy things like everyone else. There's a selection bias in "scientists don't do it for money"--the scientists that don't do it for the money tend to be the most successful because they're willing to undercut their competition. They're the ones who will invest significant amounts of their life towards an area of research, spend their weekends and nights pursuing some goal, sometimes even put family second. They are the entrepreneurs of science.

There's a lot of other scientists who are just as skilled, may have just as good ideas, as so on. They view their work as work, enjoyable for some or just a job for others (though these are very few as by this point they just find something less stressful that pays).

So it's not that the lack of money doesn't help, it basically shapes the entire labor pool of scientists selecting for the most passionate, the ones who might not be making much over a small resturaunt manager when you normalize their time spent to comp. Skilled scientists who want a life and see other opportunities tend to leave science as it's high risk low reward and apply their skill elsewhere. It's a lot to science.

If you look at CS, the research community is almost starving as most leave for big tech or others that can comp 3-5x what academia can provide. I suspect big pharma is a hit the same.

> it doesn't pay enough

> Most scientists don't do it for the money though

Naturally, a field that doesn't pay well will fail to attract people who are motivated by money.

I think there isn’t enough _funding _

Funding needs to come first then extra scientists if budgets permit. The problem in immunology as far as I can see from a close onlooker perspective is there is less and less funding. Staff get by on meagre wages, hoping to hold onto their role as budgets get cut and grants get smaller.

Very sad state of affairs.

Kinda sad when the government wastes millions in the funding of worthless R&D projects. I've never been more disappointed to see that such a huge portion of the whitepapers in my field aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They have also spent like $40M on certain rounds of funding to groups and it doesn't go anywhere as anyone in industry can clearly see that the projects are completely useless and don't solve any kind of real industry problem besides getting large amounts of cash.

To grow the science pie you need to shrink the military pie. To shrink the military pie you need to make profiting off of science much more lucrative than profiting off of slaughter.

I get where you're coming from, but honestly, I'm not sure there's even that much logic to it.

The US federal government seems to have a largely arbitrary budget. No real experience or rational principle restrains it. We have never seen a clear case of negative consequences related to spending too much, so no one is quite sure how much might be too much. Sometimes a politician sees political advantage in grandstanding about fiscal responsibility, but seconds later, that same politician will be found funneling some arbitrary number of billions of $$$ in pork to their district.

I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care.

We could and should 10x the science budget, and it would have vastly more impact than almost everything else the government spends money on. But we don't because politicians see it as some amusement to fritter a limited amount of money on. Occasionally Republicans will publish a list of ridiculous scientific projects and no one wants to be caught in the crosshairs of that -- even though tens of billions are probably being simultaneously spent on murdering people in a country you've never heard of, or flushing thousands of tons of soybeans down a toilet.

Defense-related science gets an exception to this, which is why a big war is often also a big leap forward for science.

No, politicians are very (street) smart. Science produces results in the long-term, but elections are every x years and a career is maybe y years, all of which are shorter than the time in which science will show definitive results. So politicians will just look out for themselves as much as they can. The reason militaries get funded is because it plays on the basest fear in people and the money makes it back into politicians' pockets fast without having to show any more results than a pile of rubble.

You're right however, that nowadays it's structural that scientists request funding through defense, like of course it needs that cover.

Right, the problem is politicians' incentives, and since their incentive is to get us to vote for them, the problem is us.

Some good points, except the first one. Politicians are mostly not smart. It’s why they go into politics in the first place!

Militaries get funded in the USA because it’s a massive jobs program.

Building housing and infrastructure can be a jobs program. Science itself (e.g. Apollo program, even though that's dual use) can be a massive jobs program. Being the security apparatus of the world as a pure play though is a choice, and a rather unique one.

I agree that I'd prefer those sorts of job programs.

> I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care.

Most politicians understand that humanity is never going to leave earth and so all of this stuff is basically pointless to the actual business of governing. So we will miss out on the next MRI or microwave because we missed some new technology... so what? How does that make their lives, personally, worse in any practical way?

Humanity is going to melt down in the pretty near future here... if the Russia stuff doesn't escalate, and the US doesn't slide into fascism, there will be yet another wave of conflicts tomorrow due to extremity from climate change or something else. Water is going to become extremely scarce, habitable lands are going to become uninhabitable and undesirable tundra is going to become extremely desirable, and countries will fight for ownership of the reshuffled deck.

Humanity has passed the peak of this enlightenment cycle and is heading for a new dark age, maybe the Forever Dark Age given the depletion of most of the accessible reserves of energy and critical materials. The best-case scenario is that we wind down to some steady-state existence with some level of mechanization/etc, but the exponential growth thing mathematically cannot continue indefinitely. The Earth does have physical limits and just because Malthus was wrong about it in 1700 doesn't mean you can grow an exponential rate in a finite system forever.

Who cares about space? We're not going there. And their job is making themselves comfy and keeping things going mostly straight in the meantime. Science really doesn't matter in that context as long as someone else isn't drastically ahead of you such that it produces a military advantage, they don't care about the absolute advancement, only the relative to everyone else.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm saying this is how it is.

> the exponential growth thing mathematically cannot continue indefinitely.

It's not continuing indefinitely. Since the 1960s, women have been drastically curtailing their reproduction when given education and access to contraceptives. Fertility is above replacement only in Sub-Saharan Africa and a couple other places. Global fertility is projected to drop below replacement in this decade, leading to a population peak and decline a few decades later.

People are constantly predicting doomsday because they think humanity deserves it. Maybe we do, but by my reckoning, there is no guarantee of our imminent demise just yet.

Big forwards for science are usually outside of war period(peace time and preparing for war time). During the actual war, science usually stagnates

>which is why a big war is often also a big leap forward for science.

Care to name any inventions we owe to... the Spanish-American war?

Sure, there were about as many as there were dollars in the federal government's scientific budget at the time.

Then a better hypothesis would be that the science budget makes progress happen, rather than the military budget.

The M1903 Springfield.

it's extremely humorous how "trend-chasing" the small arms market was at that time. First cartridges... then brass cartridges... then centerfire... then brass... then repeating weapons... then high-velocity cartridges... then spitzer point bullets... it's almost a Pentagon Wars style story chasing the latest technological developments and often trying to modify your existing inventory to fit the latest need.

The Krag didn't have spitzer-point bullets so it had to go, despite poor tactics really being more at play than the rifles themselves. And the Krag was banned from the service-rifle category of the influential National Match shooting competition after some humiliating upsets showed this.

Is the 10k-50k "grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship" refers to the sum of all grants to the "the science of ecosystem stewardship", or just that marine biologist got for his particular study? Is there only his team doing study in this field or there are other teams doing similar ones got separate grants?

I always wonder if the implicit telos of modern science is space colonization (leave this planet behind), and what the ramifications of that mindset is. Is this a dogma that can be challenged?

We've still barely scratched the surface of ecological sciences

Yes, and it's the same telos driving all life, which has spread to every possible corner of the globe, and now will spread throughout the galaxy. I don't think anything that fundamental should be challenged.

https://imgflip.com/i/6lwyle

Such a thing sounds disasterous. Was a private campaign organized for donations? I think you'd have a better chance convincing private citizens at this point than any government.

Yes. If you know anyone who cares about kelp forests in California, consider donating.

https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/

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