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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

How much research do we need? Sure there are advances to make in physics, but do we really need another paper explaining why Richard III wasn't completely evil, or whatever similar activity English professors research? How much more research into the real nature of the Greeks do we need? Don't get me wrong, both are interesting subjects, and the thinking that goes into those papers is worth teaching/knowing. However the real reason to support most college programs is teaching to think (a topic hard to define!), not having the professors do research.

If you are a medical researcher there is a lot of useful research to do. Most subjects are of questionable value. It is unknown if knowing more about how quarks work will ever be useful.

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How much do you know about research funding?

For example, the fields you mention (sciences/engineering, medicine) pull in vastly more money that humanities. Because they have more money, they hire more faculty, and they also train and graduate more PhD students.

I knew a few humanities PhD students while I was in grad school, and none of them were funded by research grants. If they were lucky, they got fellowships. That's a stark contrast to engineering where both grant and fellowship funding was relatively plentiful (though I've got a few horror stories there too).

On top of it, humanities jobs are really hard to find (even more difficult than fields like physics that are already known for multiple postdocs, etc.), making it a bad deal all around for PhD students in those fields.

Overall, I think things are already allocated more or less the way you expect, and I don't think we need to piss on humanities for this. They already have it hard enough.

Yeah I always laugh when I see people complain about people in the humanities scooping up grant funding. Like, NEH is already basically defunct. When I was in grad school for CS I was on a seven figure grant. My wife is a history professor. Her grants regularly run like $3,000. There is already no money being funneled to the humanities, but people choose to shit on it them incessantly because they haven't the faintest clue how funding works or even what the research output of the humanities looks like.

This is a pretty myopic view of how scientific discoveries happen. This is a good time to remind people that truth-tables were first created by Wittgenstein, who wrote some pretty obscure and borderline indecipherable books on natural language, placed well inside the walls of the humanities departments.

Philosophy of Language would have been dismissed by most making these types of arguments in the late 1800's, but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

> but it is one of the fields that was necessary and instrumental in the development of the of the universal Turing machine.

You'd be shocked how many people in the software industry regard Turing machines as some esoteric construct that is of no value and wasn't necessary for the invention of the iPhone or Javascript.

Well thankfully people like you are in the minority and can be safely ignored.

Because learning more about our history and the world we live in furthers humanity in immeasurable ways often only appreciated years and decades in the future.

In my experience Humanities professors cared way more about the classes they taught. It was the Engineering / "Hard Science" professors cared way more about the research and treated teaching undergraduates as a chore and/or an afterthought. (Though there were a couple of exceptions)

That's part of the issue in research though, you don't know what will have value. The actual problems that particle/nuclear physicists attempt to solve might not be valuable but the engineering required for the experimental apparatus could be revolutionary.

Even in physics or most of the hard sciences, how much important research is even being produced outside of the top (and may even second) tier, given the increasing laboratory costs?

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