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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

We could construct hardly any of the infrastructure on which our developed economies are built without science: our energy systems, our food production systems, our communication systems.

Science has enabled us to separate fact from fiction, and hence develop theories that allow us to manipulate our environment in sophisticated ways.

I don't see how you can argue that 'science' as a whole hasn't paid off as a 'logical financial investment'. That claim is so challenging to my worldview, its hard for me to engage with.

For a start, what might we have invested in instead that might have had a higher rate of return?

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You missed his point. Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment. In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.

And I'd argue that this is false for most industries. Perhaps it's true for life sciences, but many other industries love putting more money into R&D.

R&D is a bit different than science. Usually it has a time horizon of 3-10 years to commercialization, sometimes 10-20 at the high end. While much of science is in the 10-100 range. The 20-year patent window is crucially important for industry R&D. The timeframe can be extended a bit by keeping things as trade secrets, if you're very careful, but it gets trickier. Unpredictable and non-application-specific research also tends to be disfavored: improvement on a chemical process is one thing, since it has a clear path to application in a specific area that the company does business in. But new basic physics results are not favored, since it's not clear whether they will lead to profitable applications at all; and even if there was some way of knowing they would, those applications might not be easy for the company to take advantage of if they don't align with its business.

You couldn't directly build a product on Einstein's major results, for example, certainly not within the time window of patent protection (if they were even hypothetically patentable), but they were hugely important anyway. Same with much of the mid-20th-century materials-science work that is now proving useful to chip manufacturers: the tech industry didn't fund that research in the 1950s-70s, because they didn't know at the time which physics results would be useful to them in 2010s chip engineering. But they're definitely using them now! It's important to the tech industry that this pipeline of not-sure-where-this-will-be-applied basic research exists, because it's hard to do things like improving manufacturing processes unless there is an existing understanding of how physics and materials work in the first place. But the case for them funding it directly is weaker, because it tends to have the property that advancing the general level of knowledge benefits everyone, not only you, and you don't know decades in advance which specific knowledge you'll eventually need, anyway.

>Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment.

Respectfully, that statement doesn't make sense. (Bear with me.)

Whether an investment is good or bad is orthogonal to whether the returns manifest in the short or long term: any calculation of investment return will discount value that we have to wait for.

Maybe you mean that the payoffs don't come in the short term. But, at a societal level, so what? As long as the expected payoff (appropriately discounted) is large enough, that's what matters.

That is my objection to FD3SA's comment that "Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment." and my objection to FD3SA's comparision to art.

Just because science's financial payoff is long term does not mean it isn't a good investment. To confuse the two issues is illogical, in an important way - which is what I'm trying to object to in FD3SA's comment.

I'd accept the argument that it is difficult to capture privately the return from fundamental science. That might be a reason why much science has been government funded. But, again, that's a different issue.

Governments should continue putting money into science because it is a good investment - it has a high expected return, over the long term. And, in fairness, substantial public money, globally, is still invested on this basis.

>In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.

How our economy is managed in the short term is a different issue from whether the long term expected return of science is positive.

Maybe you mean that the way our economy is currently managed, it doesn't make sense for private actors to do science. But that's a totally separate issue from whether the societal return is positive. Almost regardless of how the economy is structured in the present, if science has a high enough long term return, its still a good investment, at a societal level.

Someone could argue that funding art has not produced meaningful financial gain - if they were very 'practically oriented' (for want of a better term) - but the same argument would not apply to science which has produced huge returns.

Even today, there is a massive delta between the funding science and arts gets - find me the arts' equivalent of NASA or CERN - because the long term return of science is recognised.

Still, we still favour short term over long term. First because the future in uncertain, and long term predictions are less reliable. That basically introduces a discount rate, which any long term investment have to overcome.

Second, there are other specific mechanisms that favour short term over long term. For private companies, it's the desire of the stakeholders for fast return on investment. They want their dividends now, not in 10 or 20 years for now. We only live so long, after all —for now. For public funding, the government favour anything further than the next elections. That spurs decisions that may be rational for egotistical individuals, but which are nuts at a societal level.

If our society really were rational, it would fund basic anti-ageing research more, and basic AGI and FAI research much more. Not to mention cryonics. But what would you expect? Most people are sufficiently nuts to still believe in the supernatural anyway.

Pssst! Try to keep it a little more secret that you joined the LessWrong Cabal for Taking Over the World! And it's your turn to bring snacks to the next meeting. The password will be, "My birthday is on Schelling Day."

Don't worry, you'll learn to speak Normal again someday.

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