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Comment by casparvitch | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that science has the wrong incentives. The place for science is to chase new (e.g.) physics, not build something useful.

As a society we have decided that (e.g.) physics should/shall solve our problems with better technology. But that is not what pure academic science is about, or what pure academic scientists care about.

You want to iteratively improve technologies? Give more funding to proper engineers, not physicists/chemists, even if they're sometimes in the 'school of electrical engineering'.

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Lifetime, resiliency, non-toxic structure are different dimensions to efficiency and there are likely trade offs between them. Those all can involve what you call “new physics” but parent points out only one gets funding: efficiency. Which parent also points out is suboptimal for society.

Parent claimed only one gets funding, but that is wrong. Industry, capitalist companies work on the other stuff all the time. Parent is likely wrong about researchers not getting funding for that other stuff also, parent likely had trouble getting funding himself due to bad attitude and blames it on other factors.

I like how you decided to trash years of my life and experience and made up a scenario where I'm motivated by envy or failure (and even faulty of bad attitude) behind your keyboard because my experience doesn't fit your views.

If you've been in this field, I'll gladly listen to your experience.

Seconded. It's weird to see your clearly well motivated and insider perspective trashed like that.

FWIW you've helped me understand some of why we keep seeing these efficiency publications that never make it to production. What is impressive is the degree to which cost has reduced as a result of economies of scale and I wonder what the bottom is there. Compared to the price of solar panels even 16 years ago (when I did my previous large installation) it is amazing to be able to get panels at todays' prices for what I perceive to be much better quality panels.

But inverter quality seems to have gone down compared to what I was buying back then, though they too are cheaper.

Are you in the Bay Area? If so, we should plan a coffee.

What do you think of MEG/singlet fission cells?

You are way out of line with this comment, please don't do this because it makes both you and HN look bad.

'Proper engineers' often have no interest in actually understanding the underlying processes, which would make for more than iterative improvements. Industry can fund iterative improvements. Source: Marc Baldo telling me to wait until my paper was published/on the arXiv and then he would 'look at it', while in the meantime trashing simulations and theory in his press releases.

Fair enough. The point of my comment was the incentives are set up in 'science' to research fundamentals (I don't think there are many interesting fundamentals in degradation, but I may be wrong). I am arguing there should be a separate stream of funding/researchers with incentives to work on other types of problems.

Scientists tend to be interested in 'neat cool solutions' or 'neat cool problems' and there should be separate funding for 'important problems with boring solutions' that sits separately to current science funding. I agree leave the small-scale iteration to industry.

> Give more funding to proper engineers, not physicists/chemists

Materials science departments are often called "Materials Science and Engineering". How do they fall in your categorization?

Without disrespect intended, your words sound like those of someone who has never spent any time in graduate school in a engineering program in physical disciplines. The lines can be blurry.

I get that. Perhaps things are different in different countries, but where I am materials science/eng is drastically underfunded for this reason.

My comment was worded strongly, I meant more that funding could come from different streams fo4 different purposes.

A scientist is someone who follows the scientific method for one, engineers do that too. You can be both

There is no agreed upon definition of science or the scientific method. I'm sure we could agree upon a demarcation between scientist and engineer, though, and I was drawing that distinction in a way I think we can all intuit.

I’m not sure that demarcation is easy. As I understand it, the Manhattan Project (for instance) was science Monday, engineering Tuesday, and usually by the same people.

Applied sciences are a thing, you know ...

They are! And they receive fewer funds in my neck of the woods.

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