Let Researchers Try New Paths (nature.com) 116
Writing for Nature journal, scientists and professors Tolu Oni, Fabio Sciarrino, Gerardo Adesso, and Rob Knight, discuss an issue researchers have been facing a lot lately. The scientific enterprise is stuck in a catch-22, they say. Researchers are charged with advancing promising new questions, but receive support and credit only for revisiting their past work. They say that often times while examining one thing researchers are able to uncover several other important things, but deviating from the path is something frowned upon for various reasons among the industry. From the article (condensed): Most striking are the barriers to achieving impact. Our research often led us to questions that had greater potential than our original focus, typically because these new directions encompassed the complexities of society. We realized that changing tack could lead to more important work, but the policies of research funders and institutions consistently discourage such pivots. When reviewers assess grants or academic performance, they focus largely on track records in a particular field. Young scientists, who must focus on developing their careers, are thus discouraged from exploration. Our own experiences provide a glimpse of the well-intentioned forces that can keep researchers from trying other paths. This challenge is not new. Physicist-turned-structural biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who is president of the Royal Society, worked for several years in a job with funding that was contingent on a steady stream of publications. This forced him to ask safe but incremental questions. To pursue what became his Nobel-prizewinning work (on the structure of the ribosome), he moved to another institution where he could ask the questions that interested him, irrespective of the chances for publication. As he describes in his Nobel biography, the decision required an international move and a large pay cut.
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That is the single, most stupid take on research I have ever heard. If people like you were running the show, we would still be living in caves.
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NSF is training researchers in marketing (Score:2)
That is the single, most stupid take on research I have ever heard. If people like you were running the show, we would still be living in caves.
Not really, when that first researcher came along and proposed making an artificial man-made "cave" wherever wood could be found, it probably would have piqued the interest of the grant committee. :-)
By the way, the National Science Foundation is training researchers in marketing and other traditional business skills. They want to improve the success rate of moving research out of the lab and into the marketplace so they are teaching researchers to do customer discovery, an iterative product development
Re:NSF is training researchers in marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
By the way, the National Science Foundation is training researchers in marketing and other traditional business skills. They want to improve the success rate of moving research out of the lab and into the marketplace so they are teaching researchers to do customer discovery, an iterative product development cycle, realistic planning to move from early adopters to a more mainstream market, etc.
This approach is founded on two false premises:
1) The only valuable scientific research is that which results in immediately marketable ideas, processes, and products
2) We have the ability to know beforehand which avenues of inquiry are likely to result in profitable results
Scientific inquiry is terribly distorted when it's results-driven rather than exploratory. Any work that doesn't seem to have good money-making prospects will be abandoned or, worse yet, never undertaken. Ironically, when we reject science that might help humanity or that just seems to satisfy curiosity, (but which some crystal-ball gazer deems unprofitable), we may also end up not following up on ideas that might well be very profitable. That's because we think we can predict the future, but we can't. As I said in an earlier comment, "we don't know what we don't know".
Besides all that, do we really want those sharp and capable scientific minds having to spend time marketing themselves and their work? Wouldn't we be better off letting them get on with what they're already good at and passionate about?
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Scientific inquiry is terribly distorted when it's results-driven rather than exploratory. Any work that doesn't seem to have good money-making prospects will be abandoned or, worse yet, never undertaken. Ironically, when we reject science that might help humanity or that just seems to satisfy curiosity, (but which some crystal-ball gazer deems unprofitable), we may also end up not following up on ideas that might well be very profitable. That's because we think we can predict the future, but we can't. As I said in an earlier comment, "we don't know what we don't know".
The obvious rebuttal is that we don't have infinite resources to throw against the unknown and never have. I'll also point out that scientific progress has always had near future application and it remains foolish to ignore that.
Besides all that, do we really want those sharp and capable scientific minds having to spend time marketing themselves and their work? Wouldn't we be better off letting them get on with what they're already good at and passionate about?
Which sharp and capable minds should get the money? For what purpose? You're asking us to make decisions of considerable import without thinking about the decisions.
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Which sharp and capable minds should get the money? For what purpose? You're asking us to make decisions of considerable import without thinking about the decisions.
That's a fair point. And yes, there should be some kind of vetting process to determine the likely validity of a given scientific pursuit. The point I'm trying to make is that we should be funding based on potential benefit, not just on potential profitability. A good example is plant-based pharmaceuticals; another one is new treatments using old medicines whose patents have expired. In both cases funding is deficient because the private sector won't devote significant funding to something it can't make a k
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A good example is plant-based pharmaceuticals; another one is new treatments using old medicines whose patents have expired. In both cases funding is deficient because the private sector won't devote significant funding to something it can't make a killing on.
Your pharmaceuticals market is different from mine. The latter, new treatments for old medicines is a huge market since it has vastly cheaper R&D and testing costs than a brand new drug target would have and they can patent the new use, of course.
As to plant-based pharmaceuticals, we have the enormous herbal medicine market. Regulation not lack of profit is what keeps that pot from boiling.
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The obvious rebuttal is that we don't have infinite resources to throw against the unknown and never have.
There is a lot of room between severely limited resources and unlimited resources. Sufficient resources is doable in many cases if we had the will to invest in the future as a society instead of leaving the funding of science to profiteers.
I'll also point out that scientific progress has always had near future application and it remains foolish to ignore that.
Where did you get that idea? I worked for a foundation that was funded in large part by donors who believed in basic science research. The foundation continues, but papers published 40 years ago are still cited by others that have moved from the basic to the applied. The
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There is a lot of room between severely limited resources and unlimited resources. Sufficient resources is doable in many cases if we had the will to invest in the future as a society instead of leaving the funding of science to profiteers.
Last I checked as a percentage of GDP (keep in mind that GDP has been increasing for everyone as well over the span of decades), research funding, including public funding, is as high as it's ever been outside of the Second World War (such things as the Manhattan Project). I can't find any support for that, but I do see solid indications that research spending has been going up over the recent past (here [oecd.org] and here [worldbank.org]).
Maybe more money isn't going to fix a problem that wasn't due to level of funding in the fi
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Maybe more money isn't going to fix a problem that wasn't due to level of funding in the first place?
That was sorta my point. Of course, that doesn't mean more money wouldn't help.
I was responding to a false either-or often put forth when it comes to resources which contrasts the current-limited vs the unrealistic-unlimited. The argument ignores the limited-but-sufficient possibility and the limited-but-differently-applied possibility.
The "how much" component to funding is not the only thing to consider. It may be more important to consider why we invest in the first place. There are some benefits of the c
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I was responding to a false either-or often put forth when it comes to resources which contrasts the current-limited vs the unrealistic-unlimited.
Ok, I was responding in the first place to a post which characterized any attempt to discern utility of potential research as based on false premises. Plus, as my more recent post indicates, I don't believe funding for research is "severely limited" either. Our societies have been creating scientists at a far greater rate than funding has been increasing. The high competitivity and difficulty of obtaining funding is a natural consequence of that.
There are some benefits of the current science-as-profit-sector culture, but there is also mounting evidence that this culture might be hurting both science and humanity more than helps.
I think rather the problem is that there's too much public fun
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What other way is scientifically valid to justify science than some variation of material return? If scientists had to eat their own dog food and justify their work by the same methods and ideals they conduct research by, what would remain?
Humans like to hear cool sounds in interesting pleasing patterns which we call music. It has no "material value," yet we pay for it because it makes us feel and think things. Same goes for art in all its forms. We like fictional stories--sometimes really silly, unrealistic ones.
We are also curious. We like to know stuff. That is what science does.
Sometimes music, art, stories, and knowing stuff helps us in our daily lives, but if everything must have obvious "material value" before we go into the recording
Re:NSF is training researchers in marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Quantum mechanics? Relativity? Newtonian gravitation? There's been a lot of basic research with no apparent near future applications.
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Quantum mechanics?
X ray imaging of the human body, better model of the atom and chemical reactions, and the cathode ray tube.
Relativity?
Radio communications, fission/fusion power, and part of the theory of the photoelectric effect (justification for why photon energy is proportional to frequency of the photon). It also explains why things seem to propagate no faster than the speed of light in vacuum.
Newtonian gravitation?
More accurate cannon fire and good explanation of the motion of the planets, including practical applications such as time keeping. For ex
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You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications, which means that near-future applications are useless as a method of funding research projects.
Quantum mechanics: Roentgen developed the X-ray tube as a practical outgrowth of his work with vacuum tubes, and the theory followed considerably later. Better understanding of the atom had no practical effects at the time. Chemical reactions were still worked out in chemistry labs for a long time thereafter.
Relativity has nothi
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You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications
You can't evaluate the near future application of technologies by ignoring them.
Relativity has nothing to do with radio communications
It explained why radio waves propagated at the speed of light and implied that it would be fruitless to look for faster than light communications with the physics of the time.
The more accurate cannon fire didn't matter until the Twentieth Century
Needless to say, it mattered at the time which was well before the 20th Century. For example, a key observation was that no matter how the cannon was designed, the range of the weapon was fixed by the initial velocity of the projectile. Second, Newtonian gr
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Relativity didn't explain why radio waves traveled at the speed of light. It was not developed for any near-term applications. It was developed as a response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which had no practical applications. Quantum mechanics was a way to explain some puzzling results, but didn't do anything useful for some time, nor was it clear what use it was.
Newtonian gravity didn't affect gun accuracy before the very long ranged guns in WWI, for which the difference between an elliptical an
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Relativity didn't explain why radio waves traveled at the speed of light. It was not developed for any near-term applications. It was developed as a response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which had no practical applications. Quantum mechanics was a way to explain some puzzling results, but didn't do anything useful for some time, nor was it clear what use it was.
And I already have corrected this assertion. I might add that explaining puzzling results that just so happen to then result in considerable near future economic value is precisely why scientific research gets funded.
And your assertion that quantum mechanics didn't do anything "for some time" ignores the near future applications I have already mentioned. The TV was invented (1925) about a decade after the Bohr model of the atom and 30 years of the discovery of the electron, for example. The first electr
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We seem to be using different definitions of near-term benefits. This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done. I was also thinking, apparently incorrectly, that you were talking about practical results, instead of answering questions. The immediate benefit of Special Relativity, for example, was that it explai
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This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done.
I'll point out that you've claimed a number of things weren't predictable. But given that they came so soon after the relevant basic science issues, then maybe they weren't so unpredictable in the first place. The TV, for example, had prototype equipment dating back to near the turn of the century and the cathode ray tube goes back further (it was even considered a rival to the light bulb for a time). But with the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics, they were able to underst
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Typically, things are less predictable than they look in retrospect, not more predictable. The human mind is great at adjusting narratives to things, and if you give the beginning of a story to people, and different endings to different people, and ask them about it, they'll have good-looking reasons why each ending is predictable from the beginning.
Michelson-Morley didn't kill off the aether model by itself. It just added a big problem to the pile. Nor was Special Relativity that influential at the t
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By the way, the National Science Foundation is training researchers in marketing and other traditional business skills. They want to improve the success rate of moving research out of the lab and into the marketplace so they are teaching researchers to do customer discovery, an iterative product development cycle, realistic planning to move from early adopters to a more mainstream market, etc.
This approach is founded on two false premises:
1) The only valuable scientific research is that which results in immediately marketable ideas, processes, and products
That is a false narrative, a straw man. If you had bothered to read the NSF's opening statement you would have known that the goal is to recognize commercial value when present. Please note such words as "can" and "also":
"This program teaches NSF grantees to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to participants by combining experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs through a targeted curriculum.
While knowledge gain
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You obviously are not a scientist working within the system. The funding situation in science within the US now is almost the worst I have seen in the last 30 years. It is not only very difficult to get any kind of funding, but in many cases you also have to have already shown that something conclusively occurs to get funding to study if it occurs. This dramatically limits funding for many cutting edge projects.
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Those inclined to do research well (some idea what they were doing, enjoyed it) would come to the people with resources with good ideas. The people with resources, as long as they agreed the ideas were good, would fund these "researchers"...
What makes you think the "people with resources" can reliably evaluate whether or not an idea is good? Even scientists can't do that - not because of a failure on their part, but because "we don't know what we don't know". Science progresses by following curiosity while maintaining rigorous experimental and observational practices. It's a process of discovery, and it doesn't move forward by attempts to divine the future. You can't draw the map until you've explored the territory. You won't know whether ther
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The one before you is a fool and his mind-set is what is causing the current crisis. He probably has never heard of science being funded by patrons, not because they bought a specific outcome (which is not science), but because they recognized a great mind and wanted a bit of that to rub off on them. With all the funding bullshit and worthless incremental "research" done today, there are basically no great minds left in science because the border-conditions suck too badly. Incidentally, the great minds in t
Re: Researchers need to learn marketing (Score:2)
Then you should be happy! A large fraction of a scientist time is dedicated to writing grants, which is basically asking for money like you want - typically not to the public though. I personly consider it stupid. After having shown that you are able to produce very good reseach - and requiring basically just that to get a position - your job becomes teaching, marketing (grants), supervision and a small amount of research.
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Here are some steps we need to take:
1. All publicly funded research should be published openly, with free access for anyone.
2. All publicly funded research should be published, even (or especially) if the results are negative.
3. Raw data for all publicly funded research should be publicly available.
4. Peer review should not hold up publication or act as a "gateway". Research should be published on-line, reviewed, revised, reviewed again.
5. Funding should be shifted from a "before" model to an "after" model.
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So if my research proves that the universe inflated rapidly after a big bang, who exactly am I going to sell that astounding new advance in knowledge to?
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So if my research proves that the universe inflated rapidly after a big bang, who exactly am I going to sell that astounding new advance in knowledge to?
The same people that currently fund that sort of research: NASA, the NSF, private foundations, etc. But instead of getting your money upfront for being good at writing grants, you would get it for producing useful results. The same money would still be distributed, but the results would be better because the best researchers would actually be doing research, rather than writing grant proposals.
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If I had mod points, I'd mod this up.
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Sure, as soon as we stop government from giving corporations subsidies in the form of patent protection.
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Please, explain, why one must depend on the other.
If anything, the opposite must happen — those entrepreneurs spending their money on research need reassurance, the fruits of their investment will be theirs to rip.
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Because you're all about the private sector, but want government subsidies for corporations.
You don't see a little problem with that?
See, without government, without regulation, there are no markets, and the private sector would be little more than subsistence farmers. All of those private sector companies that are going to use Capitalism to do research wouldn't do a goddamn thing. Even the very idea of a "corporation" requires government to exist.
Do you
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You missed:
- Computers.
I expect that one would have happened eventually, but it got an awful lot of government money early on.
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That's not true at all. Law-enforcement is a government's duty regardless of who is (or would be) the victim — a KKKorporation or a homeless. Can't you win an argument without false accusations?
Nice conflating "government" with "regulation" there. But you are caught red-handed.
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No, all I need to prove is that "these nice things" didn't happen until government got involved.
So yes, maybe they might have happened someday, just as SpaceX is almost to the point of putting a human into space, something that government did half a century ago. But the fact is that private industry didn't make them happen. And you can see from that list just how valuable tha
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No. For all we know, it could've happened just as well without the government's involvement. Maybe, it would've happened later. Or, maybe, earlier.
Correlation, famously, is not causation — you've listed some nice things, that got invented while the government was funding most of the research. You are yet to prove, the inventions would not have happened with government minding just the police, the courts, a
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If you think the space program was for "no benefit whatsoever", you should go back and take a look at the list I provided earlier.
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Not until you prove — or, at least, come close to proving — the listed advances would not have happened without government funding, with the funds remaining instead in the pockets of taxpayers free to spend them however they pleased.
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And thereby you kill fundamental research, which is the basis of all other research, completely. Stupid. And incidentally at the very root of the current problems as you currently have to promise research results for funding. If you already know the results, it is not research. It is development, and it has no long-term value, unlike actual research.
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Non-sequitur. Does not follow.
Why would not an entrepreneur — like Bezos, Gates, or Musk — invest in fundamental research?
But, if nobody would do it voluntarily, why do you think it fair to compel you and me to pay for it at gun-point?
Re: End taxpayer's financing of research (Score:2)
Ok, why would anyone fund Galileo's telescope? He didn't find anything anyone could profit from for 100years.
Who would build the large hadron collider?
Why would anyone fund any of our current large telescopes? There is no immediate profit to uncovering some esoteric anomaly in the diskoseismology of the accretion disc around a black hole. But maybe 100years from now someone will figure out a new theory of gravity based on that knowledge that will allow us to have flying cars or unlimited energy.
Nobody has
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Galileo funded his own endeavors hoping, it would pay off. A good example.
The same guys, who are paying for travel to Mars — they aren't going to live long enough to travel there themselves either. And yet, they do it — with their own monies.
Now, please, answer the question I posed — and you ignored:
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Building a telescope for Galileo is cheap. It can be self funded.
"The same guys, who are paying for travel to Mars — they aren't going to live long enough to travel there themselves either. And yet, they do it — with their own monies."
READ THIS LINE CAREFULLY: NOBODY is building a rocket ship to Mars with their own money. Boeing, SpaceX/Elon's entire space program is funded by government buying rides on his rockets. Who do you think will fund 20+ billion to go to Mars except government(s)? How
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Funny, it was your own example — now you are walking it back?
That government is one of the customers — even a major one — does not contradict the fact, that these are private companies invested in (and even sponsored by) private interests. Voluntarily. Earlier, USPS may
"Bridge" between research and private investors (Score:2)
Private entrepreneurs, hoping to profit from research by promising researchers should be the ones financing it.
Not quite. The National Science Foundation provides an interesting "bridge" between basic research and an investible opportunity. The goal is to help NSF funded research "escape" from the laboratory. Sometimes a commercialization effort is too early or too high risk for the private investment community. This is where the NSF steps in with SBIR, to help scientists get from pure research to a point where private investors see opportunity. NSF SBIR is a bridge from the lab to Angels and VCs.
https://www.nsf.go [nsf.gov]
It's supposed to be hard (Score:1)
Look, I get it, everyone wants to come up with the next huge breakthrough. As you become an expert in a field, however, you find that the most value often does come from pushing the boundary forward a little bit. Everyone doing this together keeps a steady march forward. As you establish yourself as a competent researcher who knows your field, it becomes easier to push the envelope. If you do have a eureka moment, that's awesome, but you'll have to work extra hard to support it, and that involves greater ri
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I completely disagree. From my experience, "incremental research" universally means irrelevant research, as there is only so much you can do incrementally into a direction that actually promises results. Hence people go into directions where they can "increment" and publish long-term, but where nothing useful ever comes out. In fact, solving an issue can cost a scientist his job as there is then no more chance to do irrelevant increments!
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Supposedly, the best way to get a Nobel in Economics is to pick a topic that "isn't economics" or is obvious or is obviously false, or otherwise is a dumb idea.
The only example that comes to mind at the moment is behavioral economics, but this tendency has popped up more than once in the podcasts at http://econtalk.org/ [econtalk.org] .
If you want to go looking for other examples there, its probably best to skip the podcasts about the economics of pirates, and the manufacturing of potato chips, and of car parts. (Proba
Science used to be an art form (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays universities in USA have turned into money making businesses which are all focused on whether a professor can bring grants or profitable patents disregarding long term benefits for exploring new paths.
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It's not an inherently bad idea, people are sick and dying now, having everyone work on pie-in-the-sky stuff that might pan out 30 years from now isn't great either, but I'm not sure the balance is working out. I don't know how one measures that either except for 30 years in the future. And I think that if something really is ready t
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Some time ago tenure system was devised to protect researchers who explore new paths.
In modern times, that is not enough. Much modern research requires millions in equipment and staffing. Tenure just keeps you from being fired. It doesn't give you funding.
I was thinking of going into comp sci academics (Score:2)
Because I figured that I could actually get time to get some work done, because I wouldn't need millions in equipment, just a few computers.
Then I realized that you're expected to be a "small business owner" funding a posse of grad students, and I imagine if you didn't keep grinding the grant mill for that, you'd be forced out through all kinds of nasty subtle tricks that academic departments have to force people out these days, whether it's denying tenure track or doing a negative performance review proces
Capitalism is killing science. (Score:5, Insightful)
What we're seeing is the result of capitalism's reach getting to scientists. The focus of institutions has moved from discoveries of research to the monetary benefits of research. The reason for this is plain as day, a lack of funds. The question is, who is restricting funds and what is their motive. If you find this, you'll discover the problem.
Capitalism has it's place but using it everywhere will lead to disaster.
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Indeed, it does. Even getting applied research funding requires you to lie convincingly these days, as the ones evaluating the applications seem to think they are buying a finished product. I have just been through this utterly stupid thing again. No surprise science is utterly broken today. Smart people move out of it as soon as they can. The rest cannot really do well.
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Academic research proposals are peer reviewed, so you are not complaining about capitalists or investors, you are complaining about people like yourself. Even the nominally non-peers (like DARPA program managers) usually started out as academics.
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Fail, and fail. Impressive. This is about a government grant in applied research and it is _not_ peer reviewed. It gets reviewed by bureaucrats and that is one thing I will never be.
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Then it isn't relevant; TFA is about basic research.
Being an academic and a bureaucrat are not mutually exclusive. In fact, almost all government research grants are reviewed by experts.
Perhaps not. If you keep failing to get grant funding, even the academic bureaucrat career is likely closed to you. Have you consider driving for Uber?
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Hahahaha, funny. You are badly off on all counts. Simply incompetent, or malicious liar? Not that I care much.
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You evidently go back and forth between both.
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What we're seeing is the result of capitalism's reach getting to scientists. The focus of institutions has moved from discoveries of research to the monetary benefits of research. The reason for this is plain as day, a lack of funds. The question is, who is restricting funds and what is their motive. If you find this, you'll discover the problem.
Capitalism has it's place but using it everywhere will lead to disaster.
Because today, science and advances take an extremely remote second place to servicing the stockholders. Once upon a time, there were places like Bell labs where a lot of research was done. Then there was a shift to Universities. This helped fo ra while, but now the Universities are groaning under the weight, are in some cases employing more managers than any other field, except for possibly accountants and fundraisers. http://www.bain.com/publicatio... [bain.com] warning - thi sis plenty dry stuff here.
The fix? I
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What stockholders? Most people working in basic science work at universities and research labs; they don't have any "stockholders".
Bell Labs was funded by a monopoly on telecommunications, something that kept prices for telephone calls astronomically high, stifled innovation, and delayed the start of the Internet revolutio
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What stockholders? I have no idea what libertarian fappoff you are doing, but your replies to me don't have anything to do with what I wrote.
You make a ridiculous mistake in trying to say that I wrote that scientists are somehow stockholders. But I think you are smarter than that, and are just one of those peopel that like to latch onto a couple words then act like the other person is an idiot. I have a guy like that who worked for me for a while. A rather short while. Now if you want to discuss like a grownup, we can. But you got off on a wildass tangentt, and it only got worse from there. Point is, basic research doesn't have an immediate profit, so is not a real good candidate for free market principles. Good day sir.
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I literally quoted you. Would you like me to quote you again?
That is copied and pasted you.
I pointed out that there are no stockholders involved in gover
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Would you like me to quote you again?
My goodness, the derp is strong in you. Capitalism is all about making money, both for the corporation, and for the stockholders. Do you deny that?
Science is a job for scientists. Scientists are generally not stockholders, in their field because they tend to work for Universities, Universities that do research tend to not be corporations. Therefore, capitalism, which is all about money, is not good grounds for science. Not now. Whereas the US at one time had a fair amount of money that for profit compani
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You are missing the point. The article complains about bad rules imposed on scientific research that is government funded. Those bad decisions have nothing to do with either capitalism or stockholders; they are the bad decisions of politicians and bu
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There is no capitalism in academic research. Capitalism means that the people who spend money on research benefit from its success and pay for its failures. But the funding sources for academic research don't take any risks with their own money, they take tax dollars and hand them out to academic researchers based on scientific fashion and political objectives.
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There is no capitalism in academic research.
[...]
Correct. Academic funding decisions are largely made by other academics themselves, by the US government, and by politicians. And that's where the problem is.
it's hilarious that you think politicians aren't tied to capitalism. who do you think pays for their campaigns? what do they do to get that money? it's capitalism all the way down and if you disagree then you are obviously ignorant of the truth, lying or stupid.
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People with money also shit and fuck; that doesn't make shitting and fucking capitalist activities.
Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Paying money to politicians in order to get them to interfere in the economy is the opposite of ca
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Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Paying money to politicians in order to get them to interfere in the economy is the opposite of capitalism.
This is true if favorable laws aren't viewed as a good and individual politicians as the private owners of the legislative gateway. However, I live in the real world and in the real world, favorable influence are bought and sold, be it indirect.
We could solve this in a number of ways like making political donations anonymous to the recipient. However, a better way would to make donations into a shared pool for all candidates. Unsurprisingly, when they tried these measures, corporate donations ended.
it's capitalism all the way down and if you disagree then you are obviously ignorant of the truth, lying or stupid.
I for
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No, it isn't true "if" you view something some way; that's how capitalism is defined.
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This is true if favorable laws aren't viewed as a good and individual politicians as the private owners of the legislative gateway.
No, it isn't true "if" you view something some way; that's how capitalism is defined.
Which part of the definition says favorable bills to be voted into law (aka favorable laws) can't be a good? Bills aren't part of the state until they are passed into law and politicians are individuals first and part of the state second. Anyway, like I said before, I live in the real world where economic theory meets reality.
You can also simply go to mandatory public financing of campaigns,
Indeed, this would be an excellent option.
now, instead of private money influencing elections, you have a self-perpetuating political class.
True but there there will actually be a variety of political parties that are able to compete instead of the current monoparty system with c
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The issue isn't the scientist's salary, its funding for experiments. I work in a national lab which is a somewhat different environment, but there are some similarities. I can only work on and buy hardware for approved funded projects. The approval process is very slow, and the entire system is not set up to let scientists pursue interesting things as they develop.
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I work in accelerator physics. Experiments are much too expensive to fund out of my own pocket.
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Sure sounds like you've ever invested ten minutes in framing a less vapid question.
Most young scientists have already invested twenty years in their education (the best of their youth), uprooted themselves multiple times in the process (this places no strain on your love life whatsoever), accumulated a huge heap of student debt, and their future career prospects hang the balance. So, absolutely, the problem here is pie-ey
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Most young scientists have already invested twenty years in their education (the best of their youth), uprooted themselves multiple times in the process (this places no strain on your love life whatsoever), accumulated a huge heap of student debt, and their future career prospects hang the balance. So, absolutely, the problem here is pie-eyed intellectuals with not enough skin in the game.
I have to agree with the grandparent. If research is so valuable that you spent 20 years trying to learn how to do, then it's probably valuable enough for you to attempt on your own even without significant funding.
It's cultural (Score:1)
The root problem (I speculate) is the same one that afflicts companies looking ahead only to the next quarter, schools teaching only prescribed and minimally challenging material, the slow strangulation of endless safety regulation, etc. We're short-sighted, and can't fathom even a slight risk of negativity. As long as the next increment turns out OK, we figure we'll be just fine. That works, so long as the path you're taking doesn't lead you off a cliff or to stagnation, but if you have to get over some ba
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On the other hand, the real breakthroughs have never been supported by conventional thinkers or their backers. Kuhn, etc. Would taxpayers accept 99% of research funding to add up to nothing for the remaining 1% to pay off 1000-fold or more? I doubt it. The angels and VCs might risk those odds, but not the standard research funding apparatus.
This is why we have a representative democracy and a civil service, rather than something more direct. That said, even in the current situation, the funding is far, far
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And which companies would that be? Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, VW, Mercedes, BMW, Exxon--pretty much any big company--invest for the long term.
Oh, that's cute, you think t
Things cost money (Score:2)
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I love the irony of someone complaining on the internet of all things about funding of science and how the scientists are all egotistical eggheads. You do realise that the internet was originally a research project and you're using the fruits of the research to complain about it, right?
Let researchers waste money. (Score:2)
However I would say that a lot of funding is currently miss-allocated towards politically expedient research rather than something actually useful. About 90% of climate research funding, for example
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I totally agree that researchers should go down new and interesting paths, most of which will lead nowhere. The problem is the opportunity cost of letting them do so.
But you're ignoring the opportunity cost of not doing so. The difference here is spending the money in more incremental research filling the gaps of a field that may well get obsoleted in 10 years by the next breakthrough versus trying to find that breakthrough.
A lot of breakthroughs are of course more incremental than most people would like to
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Modern day scientific research (Score:1)
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Well yeah. How many MPs are there with a scientific background in the house of commons?
The problem here is not with the scientists.
sounds like a dog whistle (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Why do you always drag social justice issues up in irrelevant threads? It's almost like you're fighting for it. A warrior or something.
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Why do you always drag social justice issues up in irrelevant threads? It's almost like you're fighting for it. A warrior or something.
Amazing, isn't it?
You have anything relevant to add to what I posted?
One of the very important parts of science is to ask questions and discuss, not question motives.
Here's how it goes:
Someone complains about how science is done, and that it isn't allowing researchers to explore things they want to explore.
Okay, but there are some troubling aspects here. From the article:
We, the authors of this Comment, met earlier this year, having been selected by the World Economic Forum as part of a group
"the industry"? (Score:2)
Academic researchers are primarily funded and promoted by (1) government and (2) other researchers. "Industry" has little to do with it.
Industrial researchers tend to work on whatever is actually important to their company and tend to be flexible in terms of research directions.
Tenure = Brain Death (Score:2)
This article describes precisely my reason for not pursuing a tenure-track position. Choosing tenure-track – aside from the known committee obligations, teaching, and so on – almost always results in most of your ideas being still-born.
That is, you get a startup package, and eventually manage to build up a several million $$$ capability for a single, specialized purpose. Soon enough, you have tenure. Soon enough, you solve the Grand Challenge in your subject area. You can write funding pro