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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

You have summarised the incentives. You've yet to defend them.

Presumably the point of research is that it's not commercially viable at this stage; were it, the market would already address this need.

Why bother with a university research system which 'lives or dies' just as start ups do? We already have those.

It is widely recognised that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?

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The defense would be that this set of incentives worked. We have an amazing rna vaccine that saved millions of lives. This came about from public ally funded primary research and privately funded subsequent research.

It is easy to opine on the amazing value of the amazing technology or the vaccines should have been carried forward with perfect hindsight. This was not obvious to other academics or private markets at the time.

The only way to avoid this with certainty would be to tenure every academic, and publicly fund every project.

> It is widely recognized that there needs to be a long (perhaps millenia-long) pipeline of 'unprofitable' research into commerical outlets. Who thought playing around with wires and magents would lead anywhere?

We do amazing things with wires and magnets. You know because the system worked, just like it did with mRNA vaccines.

Masses of very smart people do their best to assign government grants, and invest private money for returns. If someone can perfectly predict scientific winners and losers, there would be no problem.

Simply funding all "unprofitable" research is not a workable solution. If we did this, every university would have an alchemy department. Making something work is not just a matter of time an money.

I have defended the current incentives. Do you have a workable alternative that doesnt involve future knowledge?

Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society. Money needs to be made, growth needs to be demonstrated, debts need to be paid, and for that grants need to come in. People recognize that unprofitable research is necessary, but no one wants to fund it. And event when by some miracle it does get funded, people complain loudly and mock it ruthlessly. Sometimes the institution stays strong, sometimes it buckles under the pressure.

The government funds a large amounts of unprofitable research because some of it may prove valuable. much of it does not prove valuable.

Unlimited funding for all researchers is not a viable option, so discretion is used. Very smart people put effort in to competing and selecting the most promising options.

One could argue that this technology was overlooked initially (although it eventually DID get funded).

What nobody suggests is how this technology should have been discerned from the rest without future knowledge.

> Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society

This is of course true (trivially and of absolutely anything in a capitalist society). However, it's somewhat ironic in that academia as an economic system is basically communist and rests on funding and planning by state bureaucracies. We are in fact discussing the kinds of corruption and misaligned incentives that plague communist systems. That is not to say, of course, that just making it "more capitalist" would immediately improve it.

Government investing money in private sector research is not communism. And there is no central planning going on here, it's quite distributed. At the top the people making the decisions on how much money to be allocated to research are democratically elected in free and fair elections. At the bottom, the people using the money are distributed across thousands of independent organizations, working on their own things.

"Unfortunately universities are not immune to the realities of living in a capitalistic society."

There might be unpleasant realities of living in a capitalistic society but they are less unpleasant than living in any other sort of society.

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