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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

If being part of the scheme suddenly makes everything possible then I'd say the system is indeed designed to make things difficult for those not part of the scheme...

Let's not kid ourselves, this is geopolitics and influence, not just generous cooperation.

Edit: Very strange to observe the reactions to my comment... many of you seem have a knee-jerk, black and white, if not naive, reaction to Brexit and the EU. Both sides are playing games and both sides are trying to further their interests, including indeed geopolitical and international influence ones. I am not claiming more than that and not passing judgement on Brexit here.

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Let's translate your comment from scientific research to driving:

> If driving on the road suddenly makes car trips possible, then I'd say that the road is indeed designed to make things more difficult for those not driving on the road.

This is obviously silly, because the road makes car travel easier, not harder. Schemes like Horizon Europe make scientific research easier in similar ways.

For funding agencies to give money to universities, they and the univerisities have to make a whole bunch of critical but basically arbitrary decisions about how to handle the impedance mismatch between their respective organisations' internal finance procedures. Doing this over and over is wasteful of time and effort, and one benefit of big cross-national research funds like this is that a university can make these decisions once, and then don't have to do it over and over again, once for each funding agency in Europe.

Also, generous cooperation is an important part of geopolitics. Cooperation is how you convince your neighbors you are an ally rather than a threat.

> Schemes like Horizon Europe make scientific research easier in similar ways.

Roads allow any vehicle anyone built to work on them. Having EU-specific roads that cars built in the EU can easily drive on, while other cars require significant modification, would be a better analogy.

This analogy doesn't work, because it assumes that "roads any vehicle can drive on" is the default position outside the EU. But that's precisely not the case here - the default position in the Non-EU world is that cross-border cooperation and financing bears prohibitive problems. So Horizon is a significant improvement on the default position.

Roads only help people who are in that location. The EU-specific roads (or programs) only help people driving (or researching) in the EU (and affiliated countries).

If you want roads as metaphor. Here it is: Roads profit those who are based along the road. A road between cities A and B profits those living and doing business in A and B more than anybody else living in a third city which is not connected to the road. That is just a matter of fact not a deliberate design decision to exclude someone.

The Horizon research framework exists to make it easier to form research projects across a set of countries. Everybody from a thirdparty country is at a disadvantage. But that is not because they, somebody in Brussels, wants to exclude someone. It is because the thirdparty country didn't put in the work to align it's local rules to the rules of the treaty.

> It is because the thirdparty country didn't put in the work to align it's local rules to the rules of the treaty.

I don't think this contradicts my analogy. You could say non-EU cars just haven't put in the work to be compatible.

So you are suggesting what? That the UK would be allowed to join a scheme that hands out a large pot of money drawn from EU tax payers without pitching in? Give me a break. Framing this as some sort of ominous plot requires leaps of logic that is far beyond what I can even imagine.

If the UK wants to stay outside, they are more than welcome to keep their funds and do so. However, I can tell you exactly how happy my academic colleagues have been about the enormous mess that has been the UK government promises regarding EU funding over the last few years and that several of them have left or are in the process of leaving due to what Brexit did to the funding climate and academic opportunities in the UK in general.

He's suggesting that the scheme should not exist at all, and researchers should just collaborate with whoever they want via project-specific setups.

I'm not suggesting that at all... I am not suggesting anything.

I don't think you appreciate how H2020 (the previous Horizons Europe) worked imho.

Go make research on air purity in the UK. Buy your captors, your GPU, data storage, all that stuff.

Or,and this is crazy, participate in a project across Europe. Paris already have captors a'd the data is already accessible. Munich make their air data accessible, like Rome and Berlin. Now you buy captors for a dozen small cities accross Europe, Warsaw and London. You still only need one computer, but you can have the Italian team working on prevision, the UK team working on health outcomes with the French, and probably other team working with other use of the data.

In the end, it's cheaper, you get more data, and are able to do more with it.

[edit on response to your edit] : listen, you're the one making it a brexit thing. I've worked with UK researchers after brexit, they weren't kicked out of H2020. A team from Tunisia was a part of the research too, and they aren't in the EU. Obviously it's better to be part of research initiative than alone, I don't get your point at all in fact.

As I understand it, it's not allowed for a third-country institution to lead part of an EU project. They can collaborate on specific tasks.

The UK joining now means a group at Manchester University can lead the work on health outcomes, not just be a part of it under someone else.

Thank you very much for this explanation, I was confused by TFA (I skimmed through it, its my fault). Like I thought then, it's not a brexit thing at all.

It is a result of Brexit, as leading part (or all) of a Horizon project is a significant goal of many scientists' careers, and usually brings in much more funding than doing the smaller parts.

Britain lost that opportunity for several years, which will have caused people and groups to move to the EU.

Like an club, things for members are different than for non-members. Having a common and agree set of rules makes it easier for the members and more difficult for non-members.

I would take issue with the notion of the EU having any geopolitical capabilities, though.

The EU is a geopolitical entity with geopolitical aims. that has always been the case.

You don't disagree with my point re. 'club rules'...

No disagreement on rules, but I don't see that as particular exclusionary in the sense that whenever people cooperate they do that under some set of rules anyway.

EU might have geopolitical aims, but not much capability, so I see Horizon as not very strong in that area, if at all.

> EU might have geopolitical aims, but not much capability, so I see Horizon as not very strong in that area, if at all.

The EU has quite some capacity to project power worldwide. Especially when it comes to trade and regulation. Surely not like the US or China, since it doesn't have it's own military. But much more than any of it's member states alone or other mid-sized countries like the UK.

Not that I can imagine it happening, but in a hypothetical where neither side had nukes how would a war between China and EU nations play out? Your comment seems to suggest that the combined militaries of EU states isn't a match, which isn't what I would have assumed but it's not an area I know anything about.

If you use a somewhat wider view on geopolitics that includes regulations, yes, agreed.

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