Hacker News Reader

> Society is not structured to encourage this.

I wish more people understood this and the value that it would add to society. For some reason most people understand how roads and transit improve commerce, but fail to understand how education and social support for the individual does as well.

View on HN

Sport incentives work out nicely for getting a supply of top talent. Big money through sponsorship/ads/tickets, fairly formulaic system to get better at a sport (top coaches/teams, get fitter, practice a lot), an easy way to identify progress (wins games, scores goals).

But for sciences, someone could do great work for 20 years and produce obscure papers that might stay obscure, or may unlock the mystery of the universe or help us meet the world's energy demands without pollution! So the pay off if magnitudes higher than sport, but magnitudes less probable. Someone will run 100m fast, guaranteed, but will we solve science problems X Y Z and when?

Would employees of non-sports industries accept the weird-ass ways that sports contracts work? Major League Pharma Research is certainly intriguing

To my understanding it'd need to be set-up so the proposition of R&D is granted by unbiased parties. I believe its been linked on HN before, where it describes what system would be best to incentivize research? It stated the dangers of funding the research of only the popular (and contemporary) topics, which tilts R&D away from discovery and more towards 'lets try to yield xyz, and if it fails, lets not release it'. Someone who is motivated to grant something must be completely separate from the publication, most likely those who researched it and many other scientists, & unlike peer review try not to trim any of it out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com