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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

> Scientific discovery is bottlenecked.

Yah, by funding and how we award it, not by an imaginary lack of undergrad and grad students. Scientific funding requires a shotgun approach and many national science funds try to pick winners as opposed to funding broadly. When the folks who researched bacteria in volcanic vents or the molecular biology of the Gila monster they never could have imagined the industries and markets they'd create let alone the lives they'd impact (i.e., PCR and GLP-1 agonists). Lots of grants require you to explain how the work is "translational" or has some sort of economic application (even if not explicitly), but that'll just get us faster horses or whatever the Ford quote is.

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I truly believe if we took a measely $50b out of the LLM world we could create trillion dollar economies from basic research within 10 years. I personally know folks who have intuitive understanding of things that can't get funding to be studied. If we could keep the money away from university upper management, it'd cost $10b max.

Oh and while we're at it, $20b a year would house every homeless person in the US - there's a hell of a lot of extremely high intelligence and low social cohesion folks who can't handle the extractive punitive system we have. Our ability to deliver opportunity to create lucky situations for ourselves is getting worse and worse

$50B is essentially 100% of the annual NIH budget, which funds the vast majority of JUST life sciences basic research. So you may want to update your beliefs

e: oh and while we're at it, California spent over $24 billion over a five-year period (2019–2024) specifically targeting homelessness

Yes! But if science is bottlenecked by funding, making it cheaper might help?

Not really. Grad students are already essentially working for free.

How many lavishly-paid deans and bureaucrats and administrators are employed for each grad student?

It's not easy to disentangle and it varies by country and institution, but those positions are not normally directly funded by public research grants.

They are, because every university (in the US) takes anywhere from 10-50% off the top of every grant

Generally universities take half the grant from the start and that's before taking fringe on top of salaries.

But they require large support systems (typically rich parents) to work for "free". Scholarships mean they're not free.

This is indeed how it works in some countries, but depending on how strong a nations social net that isn't necessarily true.

Social net is a fun term, it's just earned value reallocation.

LLMs can't materialize funds or political will so let's stick to running GPUs hot and publishing papers. The citations will be amazing. /s

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