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Comment by palmfacehn | Hacker News Reader

>...this thinking again assumes an oversimplified linear model: in practice, the rest of the world would not be able to absorb all of the lost opportunities in the US in a single job cycle, and some mathematicians may end up leaving the field entirely, or not obtain as enriching a career as they would otherwise have been able to achieve.

Has the author considered the possibility that there may be an misallocation of resources directed towards academia? If the work is valuable, individuals in the private sector will voluntarily pay for it. Decentralized market pricing is the method by which dollar values are assigned.

He could equally say, "My colleagues in the dig holes and refill them field have not received their grants for their important research. Think of all of the missed opportunities. This disruption may result in individuals leaving the dig & refill sector."

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Fundamental research shows progress on timescales that are incompatible with most "free market" timelines, i.e. the stock market does not want a company to spend 10 years developing the science for something that only pans out after that time period and vastly prefers short term success.

Yes! Let’s direct all research by the behest of large corporations! Of course there is no intrinsic value in research unless it’s producing value for the market! Absolute dollar value is the only measure of value! The market is well known to accurately favour niche research and development that can accumulate over time to fundamental breakthroughs instead of short term profits!

> If the work is valuable, individuals in the private sector will voluntarily pay for it.

Only if the work is valuable to the private sector. There are other types of value - academic, social, environmental, long-term - that often don't or can't motivate the private sector. That thing about governments being there to solve the collective action problem.

Yes, the market is very well known to price in future breakthroughs or externalities.

Especially when it comes to something like fundamental hard science and math that underpins most of our technological progress over the last few centuries.

Agreed. This is the basis of private research and development.

You may have missed the sarcasm

Yeah, I also really like how that market put Humans on the moon & enabled the yeeeears of mDNA research that enabled covid to be tackled.

Is capitalism a cult?

Your example of men on the Moon is precisely what drives people to support more privately driven progress.

Because that was an amazing achievement orchestrated almost entirely by government, but then once the geopolitical factors motivating government to support it faded, the entire human space program was defacto cancelled.

Over the next 50 years progress in human space sharply regressed and, if not for Elon and SpaceX, we would very likely still be on that trajectory.

Governments can be whimsically unpredictable in a way far beyond how companies can normally behave. In fact this is exactly what this topic is about!

Musk can fund good engineering. I doubt he'll ever fund breakthrough advances in theoretical science.

I don’t buy into the idea that because money was brought in that is valuable and anything else is not.

A private sector org could find that fermenting tensions and selling bullets is a very valuable activity vs say studying the financial impact of war / conflict resolution methods.

The latter is unlikely to bring in much or any money but the latter clearly leads to an overall better / more valuable market for everyone.

The private sector is very good for determining what widgets to put on shelves for Christmas for people to buy, but it’s decidedly short term / shallow in its actions and thinking.

The missed opportunities of highly beneficial for society work for hedge-funds for example.

Jokes aside. Research is ~ 5% of US budget https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25313 and mathematics is 1% of the that.

Also, yes, clearly just stopping all the funding is the best way for people to get the most 'enriching career'.

Capitilism is eating itself and we are watching it from the front row. Private capital rarely looks further than the next year.

Given Psychology has invented the word 'Replication Crisis', it makes me quite anti-academia.

I'm not saying we get 0 valuable output from Academia, I know better to say extreme statements like that.

I have seen the people who get PhDs and they are not A or B students... They are the ones that Industry wouldn't accept.

I have read what is deemed 'science', and more time is spent calculating statistics, than understanding their dataset was a terrible. It looks really fancy.

I have read what is published in 'Prestigious' journals like Nature, and there doesnt seem to be a correlation between replicable and predictive science and trendy ideas.

What recently irked me, I was talking to a a tenured/post-doc/professor, and we pulled up some scientific study that seemed like it contradicted the empirical evidence I observed. He looked at the publisher, 'Nature', accepted it, and moved on instantly. I immediately scrolled down to the Data. It seems like Academia is more of an Authority than Science.

We’re watching the Protestant reformation 2.0 play itself out. The role of the Catholic church is this time being played by the technocratic establishment of NGO’s, academia and mass media.

Having done both academia and industry, my experience is that the amount of wrong conclusions and bullshit delivery in industry vastly outweighs what exists in academia.

>I was talking to a tenured/post-doc/professor...

To be fair, in all of industry, academia, and politics this stuff happens. The leaders, CEOs, and presidents rarely have any knowledge of the technical matters at all and will BS their way to conclusions in the same way.

> If the work is valuable, individuals in the private sector will voluntarily pay for it.

Here we have demonstrated the essentially religious belief in The Power And Majesty Of The Free Market. And when it's proven to be false, well, you can always tell yourself that the market works in mysterious ways.

Suppose there is a misallocation of funds.

Congress passed a spending bill instructing research agencies to distribute funds to researchers. Academics applied for funding through these agencies and had their grants approved by experts within these agencies. This is generally a highly competitive process, with most grant applications being rejected.

Then Trump shows up, issues an unclear order with the seeming intention of rooting out DEI-related stuff, and shuts down everything in a way that creates absolute chaos and uncertainty for everybody. Surely this is not the appropriate way of addressing misallocated spend.

Even if "industry will pay for it instead" were true, it obviously isn't the case that industry will replace the lost funding this month so that grad students can get paid and make rent.

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