About Dr. Kariko:
"But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year"
Individuals focused on real discovery and not publishing much until they really have something significant to say don't fit into this well.
Charles Darwin, for example, was born into wealth and doesn't really need to work for a living.
Even ones that are not all that prosperous per capita achieve things like moon landings.
You can have the monarchy without being a colony - several former colonies do.
Basic science funding seems sparse though. Investments tend to favor commercial entities.
This is still true, although to a lesser degree, because everyone is much better off. 500 years ago, you could only pursue some things if you were born rich. Today, the field has greatly expanded, to everyone's benefit.
1. Government funded research
2. Private industrial research
3. Private personal research
Usually, those involved in #3 are made fun of constantly by the lumpenproles. Before someone in category #3 makes it they look like Bryan Johnson doing Blueprint. That's the defining characteristic, actually. If you were to look at Ms. Kariko before she was successful, the majority of HN users would have made fun of her.
I don't have any idea how to calculate those proportions, but it's an awesome puzzle.
And have their own internal politics - they want science that does not disrupt the VP/CEO's plans, or make the chief scientist look bad.
Hence patents. The new Hep C treatments are hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper than older treatments, but were still researched and developed.
My point was only that (by the definition I think makes the most sense here) they are doing science to the exact extent they give up the intellectual-property monopoly, whatever that extent happens to be.
That does not mean that dissemination of new information has to work like it does now. The Republic of Letters was very different but quite successful. But if you have taken no effort to make your discovery available to others, I’d say you’re not advancing the cause of human learning; if you have taken effort to ensure it is not available, like what many patents aim for nowadays, I’d say you’re working against it.
On the other hand, those who at the same time were experts in, for instance, making shoes, made efforts to keep secret their techniques.
Fuck, even the head of the institution publicly announced that only quantity matters, not quality. Because the government funding for research also depends only on quantity.
Graduate school, MS at Harvard & MIT, PhD at UIUC.
Both my MS and PhD supervisors were brilliant and strongly believed in publishing only when they had something real to talk about, which I respected a lot. But it was clear this wasn't what the top professors were doing. They were running paper mills.
>> What fields in academia?
Elec engineering & CS.
>> Do you work there or have friends there
I don't work there, although I was offered several positions. This culture is pretty much why I chose industry. In the real world, most customers care about real achievements.
Lots of friends, yes.
Obviously, you then only get very incremental, low-risk, low-reward research, but high-profile scientists who mainly serve on the committees at the NIH and dole out funding get to keep their small business (err, I mean lab) going with minimal disruption in funding.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
Kariko had a PhD from Hungary, was a post-doc at Temple U. - not an elite pedigree. At Penn, an elite school:
"It was a low-level position, research assistant professor, and never meant to lead to a permanent tenured position."
and after that boss left,
"Dr. Kariko was left without a lab or financial support. She could stay at Penn only if she found another lab to take her on. “They expected I would quit,” she said.
Universities only support low-level Ph.D.s for a limited amount of time, Dr. Langer said: “If they don’t get a grant, they will let them go.” Dr. Kariko “was not a great grant writer,” ...
Kariko was slotted into the non-tenure / adjunct role, and it didn't matter what they did. It happens in private industry too. The problem is elitism overlooking talent and production. It's a brazen, obvious flaw.
The US long had the culture - imperfect, of course - of an active rejection of elitism, class, etc. 'All men are created equal', 'every man a king', meritocracy, hard work, you can accomplish anything if you work hard enough, the land of opportuity, the American Dream, etc. That equality, the respect for others, is the foundation of voting - you respect everyone's right to have input and its value.
The dominant fashion, a sort of neo-reactionaryism, is to reject that, deride it, rather than aggressively moving it forward. Many people look for ways to justify prejudice, to exclude, to embrace personal ego and greed and to mock public good. I think that's because if you embrace universal rights, opportunity, equality, etc., you can't avoid 'liberal' ideals too, and those are the target of reactionaryism.
What really matters is if the elite is closed or relatively permeable, and how it treats the non-elite.
What the founding generation of America rejected, was inheritance of elite status, but I don't think they were completely egalitarian either. After all, people like Jefferson and Washington were highly regarded by their peers.
You could also ask, 'is there any elitist country out there?'. There is no perfectly elitst or non-elitist. The differences are matters of degree.
Some countries have castes and royalty that last forever. Others at least advocate social mobility and work at it.
> people like Jefferson and Washington were highly regarded by their peers
'Highly regarded' and elitist are very different.
I know it's a dumb cultural cite, but I keep thinking of the "12th man" scene from the movie (book too?) "World War Z". The Israeli is explaining that his job is to disagree with the consensus. Just in case. Who is then given charter and resources to plan accordingly. Just in case.
I hope there's many buckets of research funds. With a modest bucket for long shots. And perhaps a smaller bucket for loonie tunes. Where by formalizing that model would preempt all the reactionary "omgherd golden fleece!?" outbursts.
As a taxpayer, I'd be thrilled if researchers, artists, journalists, musicians, and misc crazies got some kind of UBI, to do their work without starving. Considering the scale of all the usual waste and pork, genius grants wouldn't be more than a round-off error.
With a payout of 1:1000, it'd be a bargain for society. Smartest investments ever.
Institutions also often don't recognize researches that end up going nowhere. What we can say is that finding a gem is hard because of abundance of noise.
It's just a culture of self-improvement.
Improving involves blood, sweat, tears, and defeat. Only to come back ever stronger.
People in the 99th percentile aren't super happy and satisfied that they've outcompeted 99% of the participating population who look at them with awe and envy. They're comparing themselves to the 99.9th percentile who leave them in awe and envy.
I think it's important for any high performer to occasionally step out of their narrow perception of the world and really grok how far ahead they are compared to everyone else. This is definitely something a lot of my high income tech friends could learn to appreciate when they get caught up feeling like a loser for only making $250k total comp.
A (pre-Putin) Russian proverb goes it’s better to be first in the village, than it is to be last in the city.
Unlike industry, where there’s no internal politics and everything is merit-based.