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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

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Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding. I have yet to see any real evidence of fraud from the DOGE reports, just contracts and projects that don't align with the current administration's world view and priorities.

Yes, scientists are human and there are certainly instances of scientific misconduct that take time to root out. In the grand scheme of things, funding for science generates many times its value in economic output.

https://g.co/gemini/share/816aa7510c1a

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It is what we used to call FUD. Like parent says, it never gets near a prosecutor, even a prosecutor "on their side" in a state with a judiciary "on their side" because we still have the semblance of rule of law in this country. DOGE makes a claim, and it sticks permanently into Trump-supporter minds, never mind that they quietly walk it back a few weeks later or it never makes it to the DOJ.

Might be referencing the replication crisis.

> Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding.

Are you serious? Just go look at the recent Alzheimer's research scandal. It's the tip of the iceberg.

The fraud perpetrated by an individual which misled the field as whole is not the same as 'fraud in government funding'.

Again, scientists are human and will do things for personal gain. There are mechanisms being implemented in science funding that are meant to try and curb this behavior. NIH intramural research now require the use of electronic lab notebooks, which greatly reduce the ability to doctor data post-experiment. There is also a push for scientific preregistration, which helps to prevent p-hacking and hypothesis modification.

But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.

> Again, scientists are human and will do things for personal gain.

Which was my original point.

> But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.

Who said this?

> Why do think so much fraud has been uncovered lately?

> Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding.

> Are you serious? Just go look at the recent Alzheimer's research scandal. It's the tip of the iceberg.

> But saying that all funding towards a scientific dead-end due to misdirection by individual researchers is proof of fraud in government funding doesn't compute.

> Who said this?

That was how I interpreted you bringing up the Alzheimer's scandal. When you say "why do you think so much fraud has been uncovered recently?" and mention the Alzheimer's scandal, I feel you portray it as an overwhelming or systematic issue with government funded research.

The process of getting funding for science from a government agency is tedious and painful. There are many eyes that review each grant application. It takes months/years, there are usually reviews to make sure that research is on track and aligns with the original proposal... So when you say that the Alzheimer's scandal is the tip of the iceberg, it implies systematic and widespread fraud in science funding rather than individual instances of fraud and misconduct.

You're not wrong, however, who would have funded lasers? What about CRISPR funding? Most scientists are focused on status, however, many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.

The original laser was built by the research arm of Hughes Aircraft, so I'm not sure I see the issue there. Even if Hughes was partly funded by defense, I don't really classify defense under the same category as other types of pure research funding because there's typically an actual purpose, which fits the "short-term profit" rather than "long-term benefit of humanity".

Re: CRISPR, wasn't that discovered at least 3 different times on completely independent lines of research? That suggests to me that it's sufficiently "obvious" it would have eventually cropped up in many other areas.

> many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.

Yes. I took no position about this in this specific thread, but I will just say that "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future.

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) would not have been possible without a completely unrelated discovery of a heat-resistant bacteria by a federally funded scientist years earlier. Is it possible that eventually a privately funded effort may have figured out that some bacteria can survive in temperatures beyond what was generally considered possible and connected that to replicating DNA? Yeah maybe, but it seems extremely less likely.

Your black and white way of looking at this is naive at face value. We need both federal and private funded research. Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud? Somehow expect fraud not to exist in privately funded research? Your comments here are so myopically driven by a bias against something rather than what is the best outcome for scientific research.

> Is there fraud in science? Yes. So your answer is throw it all out instead of rooting out the fraud?

I didn't suggest any such thing. Deconstructing fallacious arguments around publicly funded science was the only objective here. At no point did I stake a position on whether science should or should not be publicly funded as a whole, or what mix of public or private funding would be optimal. I would love to live in a Roddenberry utopia with no resource scarcity so we can all research to our heart's content, but we don't live in that world, and the evidence is mounting that we're not in a good place or on a good trajectory.

In a very real sense we are stuck in a local minima: innovation as measured by patents have been decreasing every year for decades, researchers spend more time writing grants than doing research, they are heavily influenced by publication bias and celebrity status, the replication crisis has rightly undermined trust in a lot of scientific disciplines, and cases of decades old fraud indicates that academia is not as self-regulating/self-correcting as we might have hoped, and the skewed incentives in academia are largely to blame. You can take these changes coming as some kind of authoritarian oppression, or you can take them as an opportunity to remake research and academia into something better. As Wheeler said, "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."