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Comment by Onawa | Hacker News Reader

As a federal contractor within NIH, I can tell you that the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science. Even if every action taken by current administration is reversed, the uncertainty for foreign scientists is too much. Many that I have spoken to are looking for their exit from either gov or academic research, or looking to leave the United States completely.

The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.

Things are quite bleak right now...

View on HN

You are entirely correct. The massive investment in science (and the culture of valuing scientific knowledge) that started with the cold war is coming to an end. It turns out that destruction is far easier to do than creation.

I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)

But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.

This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.

It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.

I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning while also expecting republican administrations and voters to continue funding them. I've seen this best expressed here: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-beatings-will-conti...

It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.

> I'm increasingly sympathetic to the perspective that universities cannot both exclude any questioning of their ideological leaning

Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them.

Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint diversity" among police offices? After all, why should liberal politicians fund non-liberal institutions?

The government should not discriminate based on political orientation. Government services, including government-funded universities, should serve all Americans.

> It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.

Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.

There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023.

Said as a liberal.

Litmus test: Say something incendiary in a liberal direction at a university and observe reaction (i.e. "there is no such thing as biological gender"). Say something incendiary in a conservative direction and observe reaction (i.e. "life begins at conception and abortion is murder").

There absolutely was a double-standard.

That said, even if liberals created consequences for conservative speech, they by and large allowed it. (While picketing and, in later years, shouting it down)

In contrast to the current group of populist-conservatives who are anti-free speech and want to erase liberal ideas from existence.

> There was a liberal monoculture in American universities ~2000-2023.

The fact that there are a large number of liberals at universities does not make it a monoculture. There is no conspiracy to keep non-liberals out. Your anecdote shows nothing.

The affiliations of employees and students (if liberal) isn't what creates a monoculture -- it's the double standard and resulting self-censorship.

Too few liberals in academia were willing to say "I disagree with what you say, but support your right to say it" when it was inconvenient.

Which isn't in any way to justify the excessive clusterfuck of a reprise by populist conservatives these days. Two wrongs do not make a right, and what's being done today is much worse than the liberal bent of early 21st century US universities.

A Quantitative Study of DEI Statements in American University Job Listings

>Job applicants should not be required as a condition of employment to profess their loyalty to partisan statements or beliefs. Yet universities that solicit statements of commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from job applicants do precisely that.

...

>We have discovered that 86 out of the 98 American universities we investigated required diversity statements for at least some job positions.

https://www.nas.org/reports/ideological-insistence/full-repo...

A commitment to nondiscrimination is not "partisan", or at least it wasn't until the president made it so.

University professors are also required to accommodate students under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the president finds that wheelchairs are a communist plot, does that make the ADA partisan?

Hiring wasn't requiring candidates to make ADA statements, because it was the law.

And the command performances of DEI (the implementation) did get a little Kool Aid-y, even if diversity, equity, inclusion (the principles) are individually laudable.

But that's most things once they go through the HR washer.

Nondiscrimination is also the law .

See Title 6, Title 9 of course the Civil Rights Act

Do you see how you're doing the "even if that is happening, which it isn't, it's actually a good thing" thing?

No, I don't. What is "that" in your telling? Obeying the law?

Performative statements of allegiance.

There are redresses for breaking the law -- the courts.

> Performative statements of allegiance.

I think you don't know what that word means.

The comment I'm addressing claimed that DEI statements are partisan. They weren't, until an ideologue decides to make them so.

Performative, maybe. In many jobs, I have to prove that I can be legally hired: is that performative as well?

Performative : made or done for show (as to bolster one's own image or make a positive impression on others)

It's hard to parse how they were used any other way.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250403173227/https://edib.harv...

https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedo...

Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan.

> It's hard to parse how they were used any other way.

No, it's pretty easy. They were used to comply with the law.

> Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan.

Do you know what partisan means? It means favoring a particular political party. The attempt to cast perfectly normal rules against discrimination as a partisan project is one of the more evil ideas to come out of this administration, and that's saying something. Believe it or not, some people take actions because they have authentic beliefs. Not everything you don't like is performative, and not everything is calculated for it's political impact.

The current government, like you, sees everything through a partisan lens. They thinks that a lawyer who takes the case of a client who opposes the administration is necessarily partisan (and therefore worthy of punishment). More recently, the American Bar Association was singled out for alleged [1] partisanship for having the gall to support a plaintiff who thinks the government should pay its debts. Or how about the Associated Press [2] is a partisan organization now because of the name they choose to assign to the body of water south of the US.

The expansion of the world "partisan" to mean anyone who has any beliefs at all makes every person and every action a partisan. Which means that everyone is either with the administration or against it. That's exactly how they see the world, but that's not the world that I want to live in.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-temporarily-blocks-cance...

[2]https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/the-asso...

You managed to write three full paragraphs that didn't respond to what I wrote.

If you want to monologue, that's fine, but I thought we were having a conversation.

One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

> One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.

This is a criticism that you should take to heart. I addressed your previous comment: you said that DEI is performative, and I explained how it wasn't; and you said that DEI is partisan, and I explained how it wasn't. Are you able to read and listen, or are these virtues that you love to extoll only when it suits you?

Or you could take the lazy way out.

A monoculture does not require some kind of conspiracy or even concerted efforts to maintain it. Simple dominance by numbers is sufficient, and that is very much observably the case based on numerous polls of political leanings.

FWIW I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. As far as I'm concerned, a lot of it is due to conservatives increasingly drifting away from major positions that can be sustained through facts and reason (although the same effect also exists on the other side of the aisle, I'd say it's less pronounced overall).

But that doesn't matter. OP's point is, if science falls squarely on one side of political spectrum, for any reason, the consequences shouldn't be surprising.

>Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.

If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.

> If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.

What does "beholden" mean? Does it mean the executive branch gets to install "viewpoint diversity" police and cancel whole departments, as they wanted to at Harvard? Do you think that level of government takeover benefits the university or the community?

I am not sympathetic to this, simply because it is a long standing weapon to attack education.

If you believe, truly, in the market place of ideas, then the question is why you dont have wildly successful conservative universities springing up, to take advantage of the inefficiency this so called purity testing is taking up.

If professors are going to leave the country whole sale, thats a pretty clear sign of preferences which can’t be faked.

——

A point I raise on the DEI angle. We are at a stage where, with better ways to allocate resources, humanity could become (or be on its way to) a post scarcity species. This used to be the dream.

The question is how we spend our time. Part of that journey is the existence of role models from communities where there is a low diversity of examples of careers to take one through life.

DEI doesn’t mean that this is anti-majority. I’ve heard this particular assault in more than one country now. Fundamentally, the issue is never DEI.

The issue, stripping past the politics, is always resource distribution, AKA jobs.

Seconded. Everyone is just fighting for survival at this point and it will have decades of consequences.

How is "scientific dominance" defined? Dollars per Papers per minute?

The qualitative definition, that of practically every major technological breakthrough of the last half century having emerged from America, even if it was later capitalised on by others, more than suffices.

As disrespectful as it is wrong and overly generalized.

> As disrespectful as it is wrong and overly generalized

How? Since the fall of the USSR, what major technology took a lab-to-living-room path where the “lab” bit wasn’t American?

Lots of things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventi...

Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible.

On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.

I’m talking about paradigm-shifting conventions. Microprocessors. LLMs. The Internet. Lithium-ion batteries. Our institutions reliably did the basic research to bias us (and the USSR) towards discovering their underlying phenomena and then maturing that into technology. Today, the only real player in that space is China.

> paradigm-shifting conventions

   - Basic oxygen steelmaking
   - Float glass
   - Orbital satellite
   - High speed railway
   - Public key cryptography
   - Orbital space station
   - DNA/RNA/sequencing
   - Self-driving car
   - Cellular phone service
   - CD-ROM
   - Direct satellite television
   - Laptop
   - (Also some other stuff after 1985...)

Take many and don't be a dick about most.

JumpCrisscross said "half century"; while I would doubt the "practically every" part of their claim and like you would instead reduce that to somewhere between "lots" and "most", your list has a lot of stuff from before 1975.

You can definitely have CD-ROMs and I think it's fair to give you DNA sequencing (though that's not really one single thing), but everything else is questionable or just not correct when I look up the history of those exact things on the same source you link to above — their own wikipedia pages.

As for "questionable":

- Cellular phone service: depends what you count as such, given people have been working on the predecessors to what's now called 1G since about the invention of the radio; but 1G itself would be Japan in 1979, so if that's your cut-off-point, then you could have it I guess.

- Laptop: only if you're counting the Portal R2E CCMC, because the first clamshell laptop was the Grid Compass. While the founder of the company and designer of the laptop were British, they were doing the work in the USA.

As for "just no":

- Basic oxygen steelmaking: 1856 for the first demonstration in the UK, 1940s for industrialisation in Austria

- Float glass: 1950s

- Orbital satellite: 1957

- High speed railway: depends what you mean by "high speed", but you could easily claim 1938 or several different points in the 1950s

- Public key cryptography: 1973 in secret in the UK, but they were classified for ages and only the US invention of the same a few years later made it commercially available, so the "lab" part in the lab-to-home path was definitely American.

- Orbital space station: 1971 (I'd count this as a paradigm shift even if there's no living rooms anywhere in sight here)

- Direct satellite television: why did you put this in your list? Not only is the first ever satellite TV broadcast the USA's Telstar in 1962, the first direct broadcast satellite was ATS-6 in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-6

- Self-driving car: Even the SOTA in self driving cars is not "paradigm-shifting", so it's not really been invented yet at the level required to be on this list

From his comment I think he just means the attractiveness of moving to the US to do research. US science is probably majority completed by foreign born scientists

You didn't say what's wrong with ending up in industry, but mention it like it's bad?

Not doing basic research, and your research is entirely driven by short-term profit motives rather than long term benefit of humanity.

Bell Labs is a counterexample that ran for decades, and pharma companies have internal research labs, I know Motorola and Apple have, too.

In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.

Here is an incomplete list of things that it's impossible to research in industry:

1. Astronomy.

2. Physics.

3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.

4. Biology aside from medicine.

5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.

6. Theoretical computer science.

7. Mathematics.

I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about astronomers? They've been a part of our culture and the prestige of civilization for thousands of years.

> Astronomy.

What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?

> Physics.

Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?

> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.

What benefits do you expect to see?

> Biology aside from medicine.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.

Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

> Theoretical computer science.

Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.

> Mathematics.

Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.

There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.

Basically none of modern optics would exist without astronomy (well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics). Most of statistics and efficient cameras originate in astronomy/astrophysics (mostly because you have to count all the photons and you are never getting a second relevant measurement point)

There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Results are often spun out into companies, but there is no institution that can fund experiments that require timelines of multiple decades (even things like fusion power is nearly completely government funds)

And those are the only two parts where I actually have some competence. So yeah.. I wouldn't buy

> well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics

Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.

> There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded.

Yes, and? Is this an argument that they cannot be funded in other ways, or an argument that the parts of physics that cannot be funded in any other way ought to be publicly funded? There's just this blanket assumption that this is true but it simply doesn't follow.

For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude.

> For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude.

This is not true in many aspects. There are many problems with plasma and laser wakefield acceleration. First, the beam quality (emittance and stability) is orders of magnitude below collider requirements. They have demonstrated GeV-scale acceleration over centimeters, but scaling to multi-TeV and maintaining luminosity is not even close to solved. There are no concept for a full detector-ready experimental program exists using wakefield accelerators. But on the other hand, we have "FCC" being based on mature accelerator technologies, with well-understood cost scaling and detector integration that builds on decades on experience building accelerators. Actually it is much safer option than what you are saying.

But the important point is that you are making it binary choice, we can still investigate and work on wakefield accelerators while working on more mature projects. Remember than it takes decades of work and thousands of scientists to make any of these things work. And it is not the question of accelerator itself but what detector can use it and for what physics exactly. We can produce much more interesting physics colliding muons instead off protons but this is much more challenging task and will cost more efforts and will cost more.

Also I would say that Scientific value isn’t measured by compactness or cost alone. This is a VC mindset not a scientist pushing boundaries of knowledge.

> Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.

Well since we are here. I know it is a cliche by now and many people HN doesn't like to be reminded about that but guess that is the most beneficial CERN output ?

> But on the other hand, we have "FCC" being based on mature accelerator technologies, with well-understood cost scaling and detector integration that builds on decades on experience building accelerators. Actually it is much safer option than what you are saying.

The question is not whether wakefield accelerators are "ready" for something on the scale of a supercollider, the question is what is the expected return per dollar spend? From what I can see, there's very, very little we can expect from the energy levels achieved by the next radio frequency supercollider. It's basically "explore the Higgs sector a little better", and that's it, and we're not expecting to find much there. $20B is a high price tag for producing basically nothing new.

I'm saying that if you took $18B of $20B for the supercollider they've been tossing about and invest it into wakefield research, it's very plausible that we could solve all of the problems you describe, and with the $2B left over we could build a wakefield accelerator of comparable energy, and that we'd be better off in that world.

> But the important point is that you are making it binary choice, we can still investigate and work on wakefield accelerators while working on more mature projects.

Investment dollars are finite, therefore it often is a binary choice. You could fund tens of thousands of smaller experiments in domains where we have actual uncertainty for the cost of this one piece of equipment that's good for only a few experiments.

> Also I would say that Scientific value isn’t measured by compactness or cost alone. This is a VC mindset not a scientist pushing boundaries of knowledge.

If you want to expand knowledge faster then you should consider adopting the VC mindset: reduce costs per novel datum gathered. You can run more experiments in more diverse fields and uncover more surprises. Sounds like something a scientist should value frankly.

> I know it is a cliche by now and many people HN doesn't like to be reminded about that but guess that is the most beneficial CERN output ?

Direct military projects arguably haven't been a focus of CERN for 30+ years. They might benefit indirectly, but ask yourself whether the military would have still achieved the outcomes they needed by funding that research directly rather than indirectly in a way that accidentally produced things they needed. The direct funding is what I'm suggesting is well justified, the indirect maybe not so much.

Each of these has a long answer, so I'll pick this one:

>[Chemistry]? Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?

Everything around us is made up of "molecules," assemblages of parts called atoms. Since it's not possible to manipulate the molecules directly in sufficient numbers (one pound of plastic is made of 2000000000000000000000 individual molecules), we have to assemble molecules en masse by subjecting them to processes that cause each step to happen to all of them at once. How does that work?

Let's say you have a molecule. Its structure will have exposed parts, and some bonds will be weaker than others. If you want to replace a part with another part (one step in the assembly of the final product), you might go about it by letting another molecule come along that has a greater affinity to bond with the location of the part you want to replace, and also has a tendency to be in turn itself replaced with the part you want to add. How can you know which molecule to use for this? You could run a computer simulation, apply a rule of thumb, or look it up in a book. In order to write the simulations, deduce the correct rules of thumb and write the books, scientists need to try a lot of combinations of molecules to see what parts swap with what other parts when they're mixed, and then think very hard about what's happening and why it is happening. This practice is known as, "chemistry."

Once a lot of the rules for a certain molecule are mapped out, engineers with an application in mind can go to the library and ask, "what sequence of steps will take me from available molecules to a molecule I can sell in a way that succeeds very often?" This is called, "industrial chemistry." If there was no library and no knowledge in it, industrial chemistry would be impossible. That is the relationship between science and engineering.

All well and good, but not an argument that the science here has to be publicly funded, and that a commercial research enterprise providing this library is not viable. The question was about what benefits come from the public funding, in particular, benefits that simply cannot be provided by a commercial enterprise or alternative approaches. You merely stated this was the case and I'm asking for the reasons.

Even supposing the costs associated with basic research can't be recouped commercially using existing technology, that does not suggest that alternatives are not possible. For instance, in a world in which this library was not created, perhaps the set of talented industrial chemists in our timeline would have studied physics or computer science instead and advanced quantum chemistry simulations that capture some, most or even all of the utility of this empirical approach.

I can look at what you describe and acknowledge that it's useful without automatically accepting that it's a) not commercializable, and b) impossible to work around, which is what you were implying.

[flagged]

> Why are you parading your ignorance of my position as an informed rebuttal?

Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.

> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.

You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.

> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.

This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a great deal of it in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> What benefits do you expect to see?

This is exactly the problem: you're describing a for-profit mindset, and it's exactly why research in the private sector floundering.

If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it. You don't know if it brings value because you haven't researched it yet. That's what breaking new ground is all about.

> If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it.

No, it's not. If research never brought any value then we would almost never do it, aside from some weird hobbyists, and particularly not with public funds. Everything has a cost-benefit tradeoff, even publicly funded research, and pretending this isn't so is naive at best.

Research whose costs can be recouped on short time horizons arguably should not have public funding because the economic incentives are sufficient. Exactly where to draw this line is not clear, not only because research returns are unclear but also because publicly funded research diverts talented people from endeavours that would have provided direct economic benefits. This second order effect is not widely appreciated. How can you truly evaluate the opportunity cost of this counterfactual world? Seems virtually impossible in fact, so arguments that research X returns Y with no consideration that you can't evaluate the counterfactual should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

And this doesn't even get into the problem of scope creep. Academics charged with pure research develop the exact mindset you illustrate, where no matter how outlandish the idea, well maybe it will be good for something someday, so why not fund it just in case? This ends up producing a whole lot of nothing, as we've seen in particle physics over the past 30+ years.

wild to come across people on HN who are skeptical about the value of knowing things

"holding my head in my hands" to quote an earlier poster

Wild to come across people on HN who don't seem to understand that "knowing things" has a price tag, that there is no such thing as "no price is too high", that science that can economically justify itself shouldn't be publicly funded and that science that must be publicly funded should have to justify itself to tax payers.

wild to come across people on HN who don't understand that putting economic scrutiny on scientific studies and questioning the public funding of science will both slow the development of yet unknown useful knowledge, as well as slow down economic growth

the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted

by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research

to give two examples

1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"

2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.

Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.

So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.

Apple definitely had an internal group doing mathematics research, which i know first hand. But yes there are, to your point, topics in science probably only done in academia etc, but, to my point, several are seriously funded in industry.

I couldn't say more without knowing the details, but industrial labs don't usually research mathematics, so much as ways to apply mathematics to their industry. These are called "mathematics research departments," because they hire mathematicians.

"Bell Laboratories has been the recipient of 11 Nobel Prizes in Physics, with notable laureates including John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and Arthur Ashkin. Other notable achievements include the invention of the transistor, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and the development of optical tweezers."

Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS.

Biology - there is a ton of research in agriculture too - e.g. Monsanto and GMO seeds.

The discovery of the CMB was accidental. Bell Labs didn't fund it intentionally.

Bell Labs was at its peak from 1960s-1970s. Since the 80s, corporate governance has completely changed due to Jack Welch’s short-term shareholder maximization ideology taking over the corporate world.

I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.

Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.

There is tons of research on online safety being done at platforms.

It can never be released.

Things aren't impossible to research in industry. Managers with an R&D budget can fund whatever research they want, and it's easy to find examples of companies doing research in most of the fields you name. The fields where it's not are because you've defined them in a circular fashion e.g. "chemistry aside from industrial chemistry" is not an argument for "there are things you can't do in industry", and space research is primarily driven by the private sector now but I guess you are defining astronomy to only include study of things too far away to matter to anyone except astronomers.

> how can people not know about astronomers?

Light pollution. Lots of people now live in places where the stars are hard to spot.

And now we also all have infinite distraction cuboids, many who can still see them if they look, won't look.

And if you don't know what's out there — or mistakenly categorise all of space as scifi — then why would you be curious about it? Why even ask who might research it?

Pretty good article on Bell Labs recently, but also I think it indicates how it's not likely to exist in the US again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010

Industry research is generally R&D (applied science, engineering research), not basic research (basic science). Not to disparage either; both are needed, but they are quite different and a person may be suited to one but not the other. It can be hard for someone looking for work to determine where an organization's focus is, as an outsider.

Bell labs was funded from the profits of a legal monopoly, and the money spent on it was used to justify the continuance of that monopoly. You do see some private basic research these days as with Google in robotics or Microsoft in quantum computers but its fairly rare and small compared to government funded research.

And pharma companies do a lot of research but it's almost entirely applied, taking the basic processes discovered by NIH funded research and figuring out how to turn them into feasible drugs. You need both halves there to sustain our current progress.

> it's almost entirely applied, [...] you need both halves there to sustain our current progress

why do we need to subsidize "half" of these pharma companies' research? if they can't get it for free then they'll have to find a way to do it themselves at a profit

Bell labs also took in and benefitted from, the larger tapestry of experts and scientists that were attracted by the US education and research machine.

Bell Labs was a monopoly granted by the US government where they were literally compelled by Congress to invest in research.

I also don't buy the notion that industry is better for science, maybe if you want to research ways to damage humans and the environment sure but most people don't want these things.

Do you work in industry? I do and the notion that all or most science will be coming from MBA driven decision making makes me want to throw up. Industry does the wrong thing for a higher return on a regular basis. That's not what I want driving science.

I worked for a decade at a major research university, and then couple decades in places devoid of MBA types, in the most obvious case because Steve Jobs wasn't into that, nor was the part of Motorola Labs or Sun etc where i was.

Theres firms that support research into debunking climate change.

Industry researchers are less likely to release their findings to the public, because their bosses choose that way. They are also doing research, but the outcomes of the research are fundamentally different.

I hate to be a contrarian right now, and it’s hard to disagree that an entire generation of science progress will be severely slowed because of this incompetence.

However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering. The entire western world is under populist pressure right now, not just here. So even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country, it’s not a guarantee they will find stability there either.

Have you ever applied for a grant? Do you understand how science in the USA is funded? How it is unique?

Will the rest of the world absorb the scientists in the US? Probably not, that is honestly their mistake and missed opportunity, but all the same probably not. Fine, so you're right? Scientists just stick it out? No.

The best scientists will definitely leave. Those are the very ones we always wanted to attract. They could have always left, but didn't because the US was the best place for them. Now they leave. Everyone else will try and leave or leave for industry. Even if you only lose 20% of your scientist to other countries and sectors where they are no longer doing productive scientific work, that is a massive blow to progress.

Worst case scenario is China wakes up from its xenophobia and uses this opportunity to replay the US science strategy. Suddenly 20-50% of US scientists can leave for China.

> However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering

So, cutting off real funding is now considered "fearmongering"?

Sure, scientists wont move and decades of research goes down the drain and/or will never exist. Science progress will slow down but lets be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

> even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country

the problem is not students moving and studying elsewhere, it's PIs accepting a position to run a lab at an institution in another country that will fund their research; and many will definitely accept that given the prospects in the US for the next ?? years.

> realize that you will most likely end up in industry. > Things are quite bleak right now...

you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?

Yes.

what are your thoughts on the replication crisis?

If it results in megacorps 'forcing' papers that misrepresent the truth for their own gains, yeah that's pretty bleak. Think weed killers, sugar, etc.

this is a major misperception of what private research output is actually like

Yes, and no. It's no secret that corporations will purposefully play ignorant when a profitable product has safety concerns.

J&J kept their asbestos baby powder out of the public eye for 50 years. 3M knew about forever chemicals in their adhesives for decades. Bayer knew their drug had been infected with HIV and they sold it anyway.

That's not to say all private research is untrustworthy. But, we should be skeptical.

Why does research have to be profitable? There are many, many smaller diseases and cancers which affect a small subset of the population which will never be 'profitable', but it's important to research for the sake of scientific progress. I fundamentally do not understand how one can be so enthralled by capitalism that they believe we should not research anything unless a shareholder can generate a profit somewhere along the way.

> Why does research have to be profitable?

Because it's the only way to get a job in industry.

I find it repugnant that theoretical scientists feel entitled to some of my income.

Theoretical scientists made your income possible.

The algorithms behind modern finance, logistics, and computing stem from abstract mathematics.

Quantum mechanics laid the foundation for semiconductors, the internet, your smartphone etc.

Even GPS depends on Einstein’s general relativity, a theory once attacked for being too esoteric and detached from reality.

Do people not understand the concept of a long term investment, even if they can't grasp the importance of understanding for its own sake? What is it?

Didn't the space race help usher in consumer technology such as CAT scanners, GPS, digital imaging, etc.?

How do you know those scientists and engineers would have contributed less to society had they been employed based on supply and demand instead of central planning?

Using an inaccurate phrase like “central planning” calls your motives into question. That’s designed to conjure up scary images of Cold War-era Russia or China, but it’s really not how things work in a democracy where democratically-elected representatives allocate money based on their constituents’ interests, and hire experts in their fields to disburse those funds to private researchers based on the recommendations of other private experts, and the resulting research is often greatly profitable for private companies competing in the market (nobody bought Air Force microchips or had to license CRISPR from the president’s nephew).

One thing all of the major advances which shaped the 20th century have in common is that they required huge upfront spending which even large companies couldn’t afford. Smart people will contribute to society in various ways but creating those opportunities allows that to happen more frequently and on a larger scale.

> but it’s really not how things work in a democracy

The US is very purposefully not a democracy.

> Using an inaccurate phrase like “central planning” calls your motives into question.

My motives are transparently not to have the money I earn taken from me to subsidize theoretical science research.

Short-term versus long-term gains. Businesses have the short term covered, but they're rarely going in on high-risk/low-reward (monetarily) research.

So supply and demand can get stuck at these local maxima. Central planning can think longer term. Maybe it doesn't pay off, but sometimes it does. And when it does, it can shake us free of that maximum.

This works, and is why Bell Labs and its peers existed. For reasons I don't fully understand, they stopped doing this, largely. Maybe because it's difficult to quantify those long-term gains.

Finally, those scientists get to choose where they are employed. So if the private sector wants them to do this work, they can hire them.

> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable … ?

The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?

> why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?

Because if it isn't profitable then it needs to be subsidized to continue. Given the replication crisis I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this.

> I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this

Why don't people prioritize increasing their income? Like, they could look at wealth inequality and consider that if they owned some of the wealth around them then they could instead generate income from it, which might obviate their desire for lower taxes because they're able to pay their bills with a surplus of savings. What's the purpose of destroying science funding when the problem is a lack of personal wealth?

All hail the mighty dollar.

Some of us believe that there are things that are good for society that are worth the money. Medicaid doesn't make a profit. I'm glad people don't die in abject poverty quite as often as they used to.

How do you think the replication crisis gets solved? By doing less science? Or by doing more replication?

> you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?

I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". The callous and lack of empathy is seriously astounding.

> The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society.

There are infinitely many things that are marginally good for society and finitely many resources to accomplish them. Spending on irreplicable research has an opportunity cost that most taxpayers wouldn’t choose. Framing it as empathy to forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic.

Another way to look at this is that a country that only spends research money on profitable ventures is going to lose to a country that spends exploratory research money. I, for one, willingly give my cash. You don't get breakthroughs by being timid with this.

assuming the government is already maximizing tax revenue on the laffer curve, what would you be willing to give up so that it could spend more on theoretical science research?

It's almost certainly not maximizing tax revenue, but I'd trade some defense for research.

>most taxpayers wouldn’t choose

How do you know that? Tax paying is a larger subset of people who voted in this election because migrants also pay taxes. The popular vote count was 49.8%. So, however you want to dice it "most taxpayers" aren't choosing here.

> forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic

Forcibly take? That is a right-wing point you seem to be repeating without seeing the irony.

The whole point of electing a government is that it can allocate taxpayers money maybe to causes you don't agree with.

If government reallocating resources is "forcibly take" then "most taxpayers" - the 50.8% people who didn't vote for this government can also claim their taxes are being "forcibly taken" by this government as well? Or is it that right wing voices matter more than others?

As I said lack of empathy and callousness is a hallmark of this government and its supporters.

I do, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding, I would. Science research has a high overall economic multiplier and frankly I'm sick of how one political tendency in the US has chosen to clothe itself in ignorance for political gain. It's contemptible.

> If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding

That is literally the opposite of how taxes work though. Other people decide how your money is spent. If your financial situation was that of the US govt [0] I also don't think you would act the way you say with your earnings.

[0] https://www.usdebtclock.org/

> the damage has already been done to the United States' dominance in science

Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?

... and to pharma (similar money flow to arms), banks (bailouts), big tech (tax breaks)...

What an amazing comment.

If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID.

Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...

Other than, say, the GPS on your phone, the internet that you're posting on, or anything like that--you want to know what government-funded basic science has done to benefit you lately, not any of these decade-long timeline projects that are best funded by institutions with long time horizons, such as governments. Yes, we must have results that are brought to market this quarter, so the government-funded research justifies itself in the free market.

If my memory serves me correctly, the ones you mentioned were DARPA projects. Which is defense arm - and AFAIK defense budget is not being cut.

I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?

great example of a reverse gish gallop right here, select one point to argue in a response and attempt to discredit someone based on that

brandolini's law in full effect

You are posting in a thread about the NSF. The very least you could do is be informed about what the NSF actually does and has funded before asking questions.

Given that the article we're discussing explicitly mentions the NSF contribution to those projects and links to articles going into great depth about the details, including NSFNET, I'm going to assume you're working off prior assumptions.

Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation

[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...

it's not dominance, it's scientific achievement in general that benefits US citizens as well as the rest of the world

whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research

(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)

> Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science?

This is a fair question.

For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.

If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.

I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.

> other than funneling billions to arms industry?

As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.

You're on the internet. Do you think Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg built that?

“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?"

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