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Comment by joshuamcginnis | Hacker News Reader

What I'm trying to call out is that not all studies are equally valuable nor should they all be publicly funded. Would you at least agree me on that?

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But how can you know ahead of time which studies are valuable and which are less so? What about metastudies? How do you quantify their worth?

Those are great questions worthy of debate. But we shouldn't just give up on those hard questions and say that all research is worthy of public funding should we?

Eh. It's not like research funding is unlimited. Institutions get a budget and they spend it on research projects how they see fit.

public funds are allocated by multiple experts in various fields checking applications are in line with government policy. if you think you can do better, I'd encourage you to run for election and set different policies. from what I can see, the system is working as intended.

HN literally posted a video on how broken the public funding system is (in Physics) days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41808127

This broken system doesn't just stop at Physics. If you watch the video, she does a great job at explaining what exactly is broken.

I'd love you to watch that video and then come back and explain to me why she is wrong and why the system is actually working well and as-intended.

I've seen the video - to be fair, theoretical physics is probably the cheapest thing to fund - they just need a supply of chalk. ultimately a lot of physics is a jobs program to keep physicists from going abroad and working on a foreign nuclear program.

seriously though, you should run for election on this platform!

> ultimately a lot of physics is a jobs program to keep physicists from going abroad and working on a foreign nuclear program.

Wow. Uh, citation needed.

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