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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

So, what is the solution? Fire all scientists? Close down all university research labs?

And then when will that "saved" money go? A high-speed rail? I don't think so. A tax cut for private jet owners? Probably: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/18/melanie-da...

With zero spending, there will be zero waste and corruption. I will create zero bugs if I write zero code.

Just like VCs expect a tremendous amount of waste when going for wealth appreciation, so should countries expect waste when investing in science, research, and innovation. There will be waste, there will be fraud, but the options are either play the game or be left in the Middle Ages.

In the same fashion, let's have innocent children go hungry because some adults abuse social programs. Let's stop all military R&D because some contractors are overcharging.

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There’s plenty of opportunities to reform the scientific organization and science in general.

1. Get rid of scientific journals, replace them with databases of scientific results and raw data. A paper may explain the result, but looking at the database must be enough. Assign credibility score based on independent verifications/confirmation of trustworthiness by other leading experts in the field. Negative results, verifications of known facts should have equal significance there. Theories must be peer-reviewed first. In some scientific field this may significantly change how the research is made, probably for good (it’s fun to read papers in certain fields where authors disagree with another scientist because of some gut feeling).

2. Get rid of degrees and titles - they do not age well without continuous learning and participation in research. Bachelors and doctors should have had an expiration date. Credibility of a person must be based on exams, certifications and scientific results accepted by others and as such always has certain age. A scientist who became an expert by verifying a lot of other’s works may be more credible expert than someone who made one new discovery. The weight that this scientist puts behind each verified result must boost its credibility significantly, but if the reputation is damaged it must cascade to everything downstream.

3. Management career track must be separated from professional track: head of a lab must not be the best expert and should not be the first name on a published result. Leadership skills, ethical code and ability to assemble a great team must be more important. Choice of the direction of research must be a team decision.

Reward boring and interesting results equally? Finance more independent attempts to reproduce interesting results?

Stop trying to "business-fy" research. The demand and drive to make research more efficient and business like hurts the point of academic research. It's similar to how the theory in business itself that the singular goal of public companies is to "increase shareholder value". Academic success can't be linked to just the number of papers produced or cited.

Western cultures needs to go back to embracing plain old hard work and that business, research, etc all require difficult work and reflection at the top levels to function best.

I'm completely fine with academic success not being linked to any sort of outcome or result or increase in value to society.

I just don't want them use my tax dollars to do it.

That's self defeating though and precisely my point. The mindset that tax dollars should only be used to fund "valuable" research degrades the actual value of the research for society.

Academic research should be funded because it's an important aspect of the human experience. The fact that it also leads to material benefits should be a knock on effect that's encouraged but not the core goal.

It's a perfect example of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

IMHO, accountability is great. It just requires difficult work at the top leadership to do so well. Just boiling it down to a single number like "economic value of research" doesn't work.

You can simply assume that your tax dollars do not fund science directly, it’s all other’s money and other people are fine with that. The budget pie is big and your contribution to it is going elsewhere, e.g. funding military or subsidizing some big corporations which in turn fund some private science.

It is because every dollar I spend is inflated by the government debt.

https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/

I don’t think there exists a conspiracy to dilute your contribution to US budget with more debt (if it did exist, it would be a very VC style conspiracy, so what not to like?).

I don't think you understand how the debt works.

You can see it in another way: science is directly improving your life. Your tax money is not a "gift" that you make, or even a "salary" that you pay, it's you buying the right to profit from it.

Why should the result of the scientists work be given to you for free, when you have contributed nothing as important in exchange? I don't understand why some people think tax money is some kind of favor that they are doing: are they so full of themselves to think they can profit from modern life for free like a parasite?

The choice is there and was always there: you don't like paying taxes, you can always go live on your own somewhere in the wild. But as soon as you profit from the modern life that is 100% built upon the work of the scientists, you have to pay them to live here.

As someone who worked on publicly funded grants, I find this attitude repulsive.

Everyone who receives money from public coffers owes that public a service mindset. The arrogant self-importance in academic science is inexcusable and reason IN ITSELF for de-funding the entire enterprise.

> are they so full of themselves to think they can profit from modern life for free like a parasite?

How ironic.

You are reaching conclusions that are not implied by what I've said.

You are somehow inventing that being grateful to someone means that the other person is not being grateful to you.

Nothing in my text implies anything on how the person who receive the money should act. I do not think that scientists are one bit more important than other members of the society, and I think they should act with the upmost care and respect for the trust the society has given them. Why would I think differently than that? I'm criticizing people who thinks everything is own to them. These people can be tax-payers that don't even think one second that their taxes are not some kind of generous gift, AND these people can also be scientists who thinks the society owns them money automatically for their work without any conditions.

What a strange view of the world, where everything is a competition where if someone is not considering themselves as the "owner", it means the other person is. What about no one acts like the other owns them something, what if everyone recognizes that that we are in a win-win situation?

It is really telling about our society that when someone reads my text, they are so shaped by their competitive "money = power" vision of the world that they are totally oblivious that considering that A being grateful to A does not imply that B is be arrogant and full of self-importance.

> You can see it in another way: science is directly improving your life.

You can argue about spending mentality though. Some institutions consciously ignore important signals from the research community to keep departments going. And in the field of IT especially, there's a trend to push novelty in publications alone, producing results that aren't even interesting outside the research community.

I'm happy paying taxes to fund research, but I want that research to be accessible all the way through - that includes access to collected data. Which isn't the status quo.

https://news.wisc.edu/decades-on-bacteriums-discovery-feted-...

Taq polymerase is about my favorite thing discovered through basic research. Just some scientists looking at interesting stuff in a Yellowstone geyser, who happened to discover the molecule that enabled DNA replication in a lab and essentially exploded the field.

No corporation these days is going to pay somebody to do that. I think it's worth the risks to get something like that.

Polymerase was already known (isolated ,purified, and characterized in '56); the interesting part of Taq was its thermostability which permits thermal cycling to implement PCR (and other neat techniques).

That's a lot of straw men you put up there to knock down.

Maybe have a whistleblower hotline for academic fraud. I'll bet some of the grad students knew what was going on.

That one guy's selfishness tarnished the schools reputation for probably a generation.

Sometimes they are the ones doing it if their visa is on the line.

They don't want the whistle blown.

There is definitely room for reform in the "business" of academia. IE: in how research is published, checked, verified and funded. And how Universities interact with it. There is a clear problem in how things are incentivized and it is encouraging misconduct.

Sure, but to what point?

"We spent 1 million dollars on oversight, and the 100 thousand dollar project is now completely free of fraud"

Nope. I think this is better: We spent zero citizens tax dollars on science grants and all scientists had to get venture capitalist funding like the rest of the world.

99% of modern scientists would not make it out of series A funding from VCs yet the government keeps throwing millions at them because they keep publishing papers even if the papers provide no value to society. And the people in charge of giving the funding went to the same elite universities as most of the people that are getting the funding.

Theres zero accountability.

Modern science industry is a massive scam. Its literally theft. And hasn't produced much applicable to the actual world in decades.

The solution is to eliminate white collar welfare and make the scientists get their own funding like an entrepreneur or an artist or literally any other field.

That will not advance science much because of completely wrong incentives. Scientific knowledge does not always have to be monetized and often is impossible to monetize, yet it is extremely valuable. Just a few examples:

1. Verification of prior research that produced negative results (e.g. proved some hypothesis wrong). VCs may want to take the risk and fund the original research, but what’s the risk model in verifying the negative results?

2. Theoretical research that will yield practical results only in 50+ years. No VC would wait that long (what share of fusion research was funded by VCs in the last 50 years?)

3. Research that undermines capitalist model, e.g. by demonstrating the necessity to increase taxes or altering redistribution to reduce inequality. The society will clearly benefit from it, but what could a VC gain from that?

Science is not advancing much now!

What is it produced in the past decade?? Past 30 years??

I've been on this earth for many decades and (other than the internet developed by the military)...the TRILLIONS of tax dollars that have gone into science have yielded nothing to minimal application to my life.

I completely understand your idealistic version of blue sky science needing disinterested non-results-based funding.... but that just turns to corruption and using our tax dollars wastefully with no results with the perpetual excuse of: "it's blue sky research I don't have to prove anything to you just give me more money"

and I've worked in labs and universities and I can 100% tell you scientific corruption with tax dollars is more the rule than the exception.

If you missed the progress of the last 30 years, it shows only how much are you uninterested in this topic.

There happened A LOT practically in every field. Several major mathematical problems were solved, big progress in theoretical and applied physics, astronomy, biology, medicine etc etc. All modern electronics, electric cars, medical treatments are based on recent research. AI, solar energy, green tech… shall I continue or you just subscribe to phys.org?

The problems with corruption are direct consequence of applying capitalist model with the wrong incentives. It is pretty dumb for modern scientists to value published papers over verified results and to pursue medieval titles.

> modern electronics, electric cars, medical treatments are based on recent research. AI, solar energy, green tech

Every single thing you mentioned is a result of private industry.

I've read phys.org....cold fusion has been righttttt around the corner for a century now according to them. So has all of the promising miraculous cancer cures that never materialize.

Even if some research comes from academia, I bet you that private industry would make the same breakthroughs and for far far far less money.

So you are just demonstrating your ignorance. All of these are based on years of government funded research, private funding really only got involved once things looked promising.

electric cars: invented by private industry, refined by private industry

lithium ion batteries: invented at Exxon and Asahi Kasai corp

AI: refined at IBM culminating in deep blue, refined by Google with BERT, recently refined by Open AI

solar panel: invented by bell labs private industry

modern electronics, medical technology, and green tech??

all so vague, but probably all invented by private industry.

It's actually the reverse with you showing your ignorance.

Solar panels were invented even before Alexander Bell was born, by Edmond Becquerel. His work was funded by France.

Lithium ion batteries of Whittingham were based on decades of research in academia, including his own work at Standford and work of other scientists in many other institutions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat... how many research institutions are mentioned in the article.

Profit-oriented research rarely produces interesting fundamental results.

Electricity, radio waves, flight, antibiotics.. it seems to me that private industry and individuals produce the MOST interesting fundamental results.

It might be good to check your confidence in your knowledge.

> His work was funded by France. Citation needed.

Everything I've read he was a private citizen experimenting in his father's laboratory and not part of any academic institution or receiving any government funding.

Electricity - not a single result, but a big topic, to which contributed Faraday, Galvani, Volta, Thomson among others. You can check where they worked. Ben Franklin funded research himself, but his contribution to modern theory of electricity is not the biggest.

Radio waves - Maxwell, of course. Radio receiver/transmitter invented both by Popov and Marconi independently of each other, so it’s 50/50 academic vs commercial research.

Flight - impossible to attribute to a single person or team of inventors. There are balloons, gliders, airplanes, space flight etc. Wright brothers built a machine, but there was prior research in academia. Theory of flight was developed with heavy influence of military (i.e. state funding) and I can name a number of state-funded institutions in different countries which advanced the science significantly. Commercialization did help, but not as the only driver and probably not the main one.

Antibiotics - what fundamental result do you mean exactly? It’s a broad term with a rich history, a lot of initial research done in non-commercial institutions.

I will stop here. I have an impression that your views have something to do with your personal grievances. If you want to construct some unorthodox theory of how science works, good luck with that.

So much rationalization. Anytime someone has to rationalize to this great of an extent... I know they have an agenda.

It's extremely simple.

The wright brothers discovered/ invented flight.

Ben Franklin discovered/ invented electricity.

Marconi: radio waves

Flemming: antibiotics

This is settled history agreed upon worldwide, this is not controversial or complicated.

why do you have to rationalize so much!?

His father was a professor at the French National Museum of Natural History, that's presumably where the lab was.

> What is it produced in the past decade?? Past 30 years??

MRNA vaccines?

Thats an entirely different discussion as to whether those are legitimate or not.

Aaaand there we have it.

And now you have completely disqualified yourself.

just to people who thought masks were a good idea but when the waiter brings the breadsticks it's okay to remove the mask to eat at a crowded public restaurant for some reason

What is produced in the past 30 years? Lots of stuff. For example the LIGO project produced sufficient evidence to conclude that gravity waves exist and we can measure them, as well as identifying sources of such waves. No real application is anticipated- but it's damned nice to know that the prediction was borne out by reality.

CRISPR- an extraordinary tool for genetic manipulation. Could potentially have a huge impact in medical treatments; has already revolutionized experimental research.

AlphaFold demonstrated that protein structure prediction with experimental-level accuracy is possible. This could also have huge implications in medical research and treatments.

Probably, we don't see advancements occurring in real time because we learn about things that happened over decades or centuries, but collapse them to short intervals.

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