From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.
Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money.
You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
I agree with the trend you're describing although I slightly disagree with the absolutism (i.e. "every incremental discovery" and "no longer possible"). Still, regardless of this increasing demand for funds, there are other ways to procure funding other than taxation.
There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary.
First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.
Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds.
Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.
Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to?
A "large hadron collider" funded by private industry would never have happened, or if it did, it would have a significantly different mandate. As far as we can tell, here's no money to be made with Higgs bosons.
That is, there's no money to be made today in that.
Eighty years in the future we might realize some commercial applications, just as how we're still mining theoretical research done eighty years ago when building new integrated circuits or optical switching technologies.
There is an enormous amount of government funded work out there that, while not always glamorous or even practical, provides a huge boost to future initiatives that can leverage it. Developing commercial applications is made easier, more frictionless, because researchers don't have to do this work themselves.
Increased costs are not a sign of a lack of innovation. It's a sign that people are compelled to tackle larger problems. All the easy stuff has already been done.
A hundred and fifty years ago you could tinker around with random radioactive compounds in your garage and win a Nobel Prize. Today you'll have to work pretty hard to find something that hasn't already been experimented with.
Here is another data point for you. I went to grad school with public funding and obtained a PhD in CS. I'm one of these who worked for "close to minimum wage".
Would I have done it if my research was to be used to further the profits of a corporation instead of being released free to the world?
Not a chance.
What if they were willing to pay 10x what I earned? Would I do it then? Maybe, though perhaps not even then. I'd sooner work for myself.
I don't think I'm alone either. Among my peers, nobody wanted corporate grants. The sentiment was that they would rather just quite and get a job for full pay if a corporate grant where their research went to the corporation was the only option.
Further, I'd argue that corporations today simply do not do any science at all. They do engineering, sure, but very little science. You might counter and point to drug companies, but the work they do is highly criticized as is with claims that they outright won't work on cures because cures don't make them ongoing profits. They also won't work on any disease that is not extremely common. The days of Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are largely over with few holdouts still doing interesting work that is released for the public good (Google, Microsoft).
Public funding has yielded huge numbers of scientific and mathematical advances over the years. Many people here have given plenty of examples already, though there are a great many more too.
This is why I was careful with my words about where the research would end up, and where the funding would come from.
These examples along with government funding are distinct in that they are not motivated by profit, the overall theme of the discussion. Suffice to say, if people won't support science via government funding, I suspect they are equally if not more unlikely to do it via nonprofits. And I say that based on observations of opt-in vs opt-out that come from behavioural economics (which ironically may never have been discovered without public funding).
In short, I don't see these ever sustaining the amount of scientific work that is currently going on.
the objection to government funding science is quite simple - it's not a voluntary contribution, and is immaterial to what people would like to "see money go to"
There are other motivations for funding science besides money. It's good publicity, for example, if you're running a private research university, which is how quite a bit of research got funded in the pre-1960s era.
Finally, "good basic science" fundamentally runs counter to "good governance". "good governance" requires accountability and milestones; "good basic science" requires the practitioner to be free from accountability besides the basic one of "don't lie".
absolutely. For that reason it would be really nice to have an enumerated list of things that government should do, and a second list of prohibitions that say what lines it shouldn't cross when doing those things it has the authority to do, don't you think?
Those aren't good reasons, and at the risk of sounding more patronizing than I would prefer, I suspect that you aren't very well acquainted with the research world outside of Math/CS.
> First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.
100% of the research done x number of years ago was funded using the funding methods of x years ago; the existence of successes is no indicator of the efficiency of the process. Plenty of alchemists threw their funding away on projects that would never meet the standards demanded by the NSF, NIH, and DOD.
We both know that science funding would fall precipitously if it were left to the private sector. Do you really think that money would go to a better use?
> Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics.
This is the reason why I accused you of not being well acquainted with modern research. The set of subjects in which science is cheap looks more like {CS, Math} than ~{Physics}. Chemists have to buy (pay the depreciation of, if you insist) their spectrometers (NMR, IR, mass), chromatographs, calorimeters, Schlenk lines, proprietary reagents, and gloveboxes. Biologists rely on sequencers, synthesizers, designer enzymes & antibodies, synchrotrons (monochromatic X-ray sources for crystallography), nanofab tools for microfluidics (all insanely expensive because of the semiconductor industry), patch clamps, and a million specialized commercial assays and imaging techniques. Astronomers depend on tons of custom made hardware: mirrors, specialized ASICs/FPGAs/CCDs, lenses, buildings in the most inhospitable places on earth, not to mention their space platforms. Ecologists and geologists need to travel to exotic locations almost by definition (requiring specialized transport & shelter) to set up sensor networks and the like.
Although data-crunching is important, it doesn't even constitute the bulk of the scientific process. You can't replace academia with a bunch of weekend-warriors on laptops (outside of CS, that is).
> Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.).
Theorists have the most impressive long-term returns. By definition, they define their fields. This says very little about science in general or the utility of intermediate physical results, which inevitably guide the development of the underlying theories. Thought alone can't tell you which theories are right; at some point you have to test them. Einstein would have been ridiculed had it not been for the availability of ludicrously precise measurements of Mercury's precession and the Michelson-Morley experiment, both of which failed to match any metric of usefulness before their importance was understood. Darwin was inspired by his travels and Maxwell essentially had the E&M problem dropped in his lap by the experimentalists. Quantum Mechanics managed to derive macroscopically useful results (MO theory, semiconductor & condensed matter models, etc) by puzzling over observed atomic spectra. Who would have wondered why the rainbow had holes in it if nobody bothered to go look? Nobody.
The "huh?" always precedes the theoretical explanation and the "huh?" usually comes from experiment, as well as countless guiding nudges along the way that eliminate possible explanations. Theory & experiment exist symbiotically. I don't think focusing on theory to the exclusion of experiment will benefit science as a whole.
> The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.
Agreed, but I'm pretty sure the process of begging money off of rich individuals is even less conductive to scientific progress. Grant committees are much less suscept...
most of those chemistry and biology things are going down in cost. Used to be that doing PK/XG on mouse models would cost you about 200,000 per compound and now it's down to about 20k, for example, just in the last five years.
Sequencing, OMG. Primers.... Even more so.
Big equipment tends to be expensive, but that's because manufacturers can elicit however much they want off of it. If I'm writing a gov't grant, there's a line for "equipment", and if I can justify that the equipment is absolutely necessary for my experiments, then I can basically charge whatever I want (within the overall budget, of course). Plus it looks good because equipment costs typically do not generate 'overhead', which makes funding the grant look more attractive, etc. etc.
Don't worry, I wasn't proposing to cut funding. My point was simply that, if government hadn't taken over research since the 1940s, science would be in a better fundamental shape right now. Alas, that did not happen, and killing the NSF overnight is probably a worse cure than the disease. Also, science is first and foremost a possession of humanity as a whole, not a tool of industrial domination.
If you think that these researchers require more money, why not convince others of this, and ask them to donate money voluntarily? I would be happy to donate money to research scientists, if my money was not being taken by the government, and used without my consent.
I do not understand your point about microprocessor fabs at all. As the fixed costs of manufacturing silicon-based systems have increased, the industry has become less vertically integrated, and there are less companies focusing on manufacturing, and many more "fabless" companies. This is certainly different, but not necessarily better or worse.
Government is much more efficient at distributing capital like this than having scientists, who are not marketing experts or salesmen/ running around asking for money. The government agencies that have the mandate to fund research do the work of judging proposal using people who are expert in the proposal's particular field and also audit to ensure that research is being conducted and funds are used appropriately.
It's not perfect but it's something government is capable of doing well enough.
And you do have a say in how this money is being handled. You have the ability to vote and influence your representative if you live in a democratic country. And obviously you might not have as much impact as you might which but that's the reality of democracies.
"Government is much more efficient at distributing capital like this" [citation please]
Do you actually understand how grant review boards work? It's really quite nasty cronyism going on.
"And you do have a say in how this money is being handled through you ability to vote and influence your representative if you live in a democratic country."
Not really. This stuff is handled by bureaucrats, who wield a high amount of unaccountable power. These sorts of issues get by through salutory neglect. How often do you think scientific fund mismanagement is going to be a "tipping point" vote changer, versus, say, torture in guantanamo, or prosecuting an illegal war, or voting to restrict [internet/abortion/economic] rights?
Sure but do you want scientist to go around looking for money all the time or doing research? Like I said it's not perfect but doing a kickstarter type experiment to fund science research (a worthy idea) will probably not have a better success rate than grant review boards will have.
And yes I've had some experience with grant review boards and funding agencies through my past work and I've seen and yes they have many issues including cronyism (but that would occur with even private industry funding) but I still think they provide value and eliminating them in favor of a completely decentralized system would not be a good idea.
This is my opinion and I haven't done the research or the experiments to vet it so I understand if you don't agree with it.
"do you want scientist to go around looking for money all the time"
That's what they do anyways in a granting regime.
cronyism isn't a problem when it's their own money (yes, I'm sidestepping the fact that there are corporations that have very, very ill-gotten gains) they're putting up. When it's our money, taken without our consent, filtered through a barely-accountable bureaucracy... That's a problem.
I wrote it above, and I'll write it here, too - the fundamental problem is that "good basic science" really requires a certain level of budgetary and intellectual freedom and no accountability besides "don't lie". "good governance" demands for its projects an accounting of how money is going to be spent beforehand, and accountability if the project goes south - these are a little bit incompatible with how generally science projects should be run (but perfectly fine for, say, building a road, operating a judiciary, or, yes a limited subset of science projects like going to the moon).
I think this is one reason why science has been derailed of late, with record levels of fraud and misconduct.
I have a lot of sympathy for what you're saying ("If you think that these researchers require more money, why not convince others of this, and ask them to donate money voluntarily? I would be happy to donate money to research scientists, if my money was not being taken by the government, and used without my consent.") And, I'm going to be doing something about it (shameless self-pitch):
The most important sailing expeditions to the New World were funded by European crowns.
The atomic bomb was developed exclusively through government research.
The vast majority of space program was developed through government funds, and what wasn't done by them was delegated and coordinated by them (and ultimately paid for as well).
Public universities are the largest and most important institutions doing basic research, and doing a lot of the actual innovation in medical research. Fewer and fewer companies are still dedicated to that (witness HP and Xerox withdrawing from the field; IBM is pretty much the only giant still putting resources into that).
The German and Chinese governments are subsidising solar energy research to the effect that its viability as an alternative power source has increased dramatically in the last decade.
Tell me how many companies nowadays are actually spending real money into research programs where the expected outcomes will reach fruition in 20 years or more.
Most of the successful "government research" projects were to make money or engage in war better.
Those sailing expeditions were to gain resources (make money) or conquer new lands (make money).
The atomic bomb and space programs were built for military ends. The internet was built for military resiliency. GPS was for targeting and tracking.
Basic research does require a long term view.. but I would suggest that even government doesn't have that as evidenced by the financial messes they've caused because the bills don't have to be paid until "later."
You're assuming that funding basic research has anything to do with budgetary deficit. It doesn't, because basic research is a very, very small section of all research budgets, and the returns on investment are massive on the long term.
Can some kinds of projects be conducted better with government support? Yes. Should almost all scientific research depend on the same support? Probably not. Projects that are not due to realize either great profits or publicity coups within a politician's expected term of office will find government a very fickle and small-minded master.
Some governments, certainly, are fickle and small-minded. Others decidedly less so. The Harper government, e.g., has chosen a chiropractor as its science and technology minister.
I can attest to this. Over the last two years, my project support has whiplashed from "being the dark stepchild within the DOE (and hated by Steven Chu)", to after solyndra, "pitched in front of huge crowds by Steven Chu", to after his resignation "unlikely to be renewed next year".
The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.
It is actually possible for one party to be "better" than another. In this case, we are talking about science, and it is very obvious that limiting science in this way is "worse." Science doesn't respect your political bias.
I was not addressing the possibility of impartial administration of research funding. I was merely stating that, given the record of Canadian (and other) governments, impartiality is unlikely, regardless of party affiliation.
I should also state that any budget is, by definition limited, as it is an allocation of scarce resources; so any budget will "limit science".
Meh, as a Canadian I've always been disappointed in how despite spending a lot of money on government R&D we've never really got much out of it. NRC has always been a bit of a weird beast and NSERC is still around.
"... at the NSERC conference this week. It's crazy. They don't want to fund research unless it is run in collaboration with an industry partner. It's killing primary research and making all of the scientists crazy."
If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.
The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.)
It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.
I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous.
The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.
Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
The current government in Canada has been pretty hostile towards science. Do a couple of searches on how government scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the public in Canada.
I'm very aware of the common narrative. In Canadian politics, the left acts very much like the right does in the US -- hysterical stretches of the truth that would make Nixon blush, so long as it achieves the goal. There is zero ability to have a rational discussion about the Conservative party with these people because everything has to fit in laughably binary buckets, every actor turned into a caricature. It is embarrassing.
Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.
They are all concerning the same action regarding the Ottawa Museum of Civilization. I wasn't sure about the claim that they sold out "public museums", when the vast majority of Canadian museums are not at the federal level, and have zero accountability of concern about the federal government.
If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.
Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.
The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.
The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter.
It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
No, the application comes first, the theory follows.
I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first.
Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis".
They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything.
In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right?
The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
> The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with.
This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen.
Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them.
So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.
So stop spreading disinformation
I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.
Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
> The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses.
Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded.
> Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed.
This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you missed the entire fucking point. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research does have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit.
>I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.
I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'.
> If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not like it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.
Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.
Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.
This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.
Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested so it is not known what it's true costs are and whether the assumptions behind it are even valid. The only reason for pure theory to even be allowed to exist is because it might lead to application in future, but science has become so corrupt that the dominating majority of the "scientific" output is stupid theory, and actual application gets no respect at all, or as you say "is not the job of academia".
The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields, where engineering specifically meant application. But now you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.
I'll give you one of many concrete examples. Design for manufacture for antennas could really help improve wireless internet, if you could get handset antennas to narrowcast data instead of broadcasting it, thereby avoiding interference. Try pitching that to a Professor and you'll get shot down.
Next, try AI-based packet scheduling and collision prediction for wireless handsets. The topic is a complete fraud, because you have no idea when the other handset is going to transmit without knowing the future. But you can get lots of Greek squiggles out of that topic, so you'll get greenlighted.
and often times the top level academics
So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count...
You love your No True Scotsman fallacies, don't you?
You actually just used the "No YOU'RE stupid!" retort. I'm afraid I'm not the one making sweeping generalizations like "the work of everyone else is irrelevant" when speaking about the development of global agriculture.
There are so many things in your post I want to respond to I don't even know where to begin.
> Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.
All you've done is quoted me disagreeing with you and then called me an idiot. And pray tell, what exactly is your point? That deployment is all that matters? This is a pretty common sentiment among engineers... that the general edification of the human race is not a worthwhile endeavor. You know, to become smarter and better people, in addition to building bridges? Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the educated world seems to disagree.
>Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.
What does this have to do with deployment vs. theory? You're giving examples where those people worked on what you call deployment. I'm sure they also worked on theory, because you don't know what theory is going to be deployable until you work on it. Even if those guys were pure engineers, and never worked on theoretical matters, how does what some guy decided to do in triple digits BC have to do with what the NRC should/shouldn't fund now? Nothing.
> This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.
Okay just to be clear, what ideology is it that I'm pushing? That theoretical work can have some intrinsic value? People have been working on theoretical pursuits for a long time.
> Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested
Do you seriously propose to know what could come of every piece of theoretical work that could be? No? Well then you also don't know what is and is not of value. Do you disagree with that? Please explain. Also, you seem to be talking about pure theory ("hasn't been tested") on one hand, and on the other hand speaking about unproven technical work (such as AI packet inspection) that has a theoretical bent. Do you think that literally everything that is not yet working and sold is useless? I doubt you do.
>The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields
What you're seeing is engineers intelligently realizing that there is more to engineering that just jumping right into the lab.
> you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.
It sounds to me like you've had some experience asking professors to let you build something you wanted to build just because you wanted to, and they told you no, so you're angry about it. I have never heard a professor exclaim "That's not SCIENCE!" to any reasonable request. That doesn't mean I haven't heard them say "No.", but I'm sure some other folks here on HN could tune in (if anybody was still reading this thread) and back up my feeling that this sounds like fiction.
>I'll give you one of many concrete examples
I don't know anything about your specific examples, so I can't speak to the details. However, are you claiming that the antenna idea is a sure thing and needs development, yet has been shot down (you've tried?) by many professors (surely you wouldn't characterize all of science based on your experience with one person...) simply because it's not theoretical enough? That hardly seems likely.
> So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count...
I'll say it slowly point-by-point so you understand:
Point 1: Fuck your "edification".
Grandma doesn't want to be "edified".
She wants to not starve. She isn't
starving because of fertilized crops. We have
fertilizer entirely because of the
Haber Process. That's REAL science.
Also known as "deployment", "engineering"
and "application".
Point 2: The point of theory is to make
application more efficient. IE Tesla's
claim that knowing theory could have saved
Edison 90% of his labour. That's the ONLY
value it has, and the ONLY thing that makes
it different to eg Lesbian Poetry as a
discipline of study. But Lesbian Poetry sure
does "edify" Grandma.
Point 3: Theory comes from application,
not from the fever dreams of the
publish-or-perish crowd. You get math
from trying to deploy a seige engine,
not the other way around. So real science
is application, theory is just documentation.
Point 4: We don't force everybody in science
to go straight for application, because some
speculative theory may turn out to be useful
later, the way finite field arithmetic turned
out to be useful for RAID6 arrays. Most theory
without application turns out to be junk but
we could justify it having some salvage value
as insurance.
Point 5: The publish-or-perish crowd have got
Point 4 backwards. That's your crap ideology too.
They treat theoretical junk as having the only
value and they give you more credit if you
write about something than if you build the
fucking thing. You've heard about the "idea guy"
who just wants a techie to build his "vision"?
In academia, that cocksucker is the one who's
valued.
I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-counci...
It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.
A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health.
I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.
"Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success."
The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.
What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.
If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.
Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears.
Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.
I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
Your best example of the oil agenda of the government is a very long running project having nothing to do with global warming or the oil industry at all? The other one -- an arctic station built to monitor the ozone layer -- provides zero scientific measurements that aren't replicated a thousand times over by many other arctic measurement stations, but maybe that'll hide global warming?
Good stuff.
Sarcasm, a bit of a conspiratorial closing note (such a nice way of offering a counterpoint). Absolutely nothing proving anything.
And yes, I despise political-agenda driven bullshit, which is just incredibly common in Canadian politics. The misinformation and vilification for anything and everything grows tiring to anyone with a concern for discerning reality from fantasy.
Oh for heaven's sake. The NRCC is run by a non-academic oil engineer raised in Edmonton. They could have chosen almost anyone -- a university president, e.g., or even, god forbid, someone -- anyone -- with a PhD.
But they didn't. It's a conspiracy, but not the secret kind.
They could have chosen almost anyone -- a university president, e.g., or even, god forbid, someone -- anyone -- with a PhD.
Or maybe a petroleum engineer with an excellent CV and a long list of successes, most recently on environmental efforts (CO2 recapture).
This is the same garbage that has people ranting about the credentials of federal ministers (hey wait...you did that as well) when the position has never, ever, in the history of Canada, demanded specific skills for the role, and instead is a leadership and reporting position.
> and instead is a leadership and reporting position.
You're absolutely right in that the specific technical skills associated with having a PhD in, say, physics, or math, or even (heck) engineering have little to no bearing whatsoever on what the person at the top of the organization will do during their tenure.
But there are more things learned during a PhD than a bunch of technical skills. You might learn something, e.g., about the very nature of scientific inquiry. About the nature of the challenges of collecting and analyzing scientific data. About explaining complicated research to a lay audience. About trying to convince higher-ups of the scientific merits of a project even when said merits are subtle. About why something qualifies as "science" while something else doesn't -- and knowing the difference between the two decidedly does matter when you're in a leadership position.
"'Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,' John McDougall, president of the NRC."
... I don't think John Holdren would have said this. Indeed I think one would be hard pressed to find anyone with a PhD who would say this.
You appear to be knowingly disingenuous. The Cons are doing exactly what they do with their caucus and what they're trying to do to the CBC - control any message that doesn't fit Father Harper's tightly controlled script. If scientists speak out in a way that is dishonest or threatens their credibility it is the citizens of Canada and the scientific community that shall be the judge. Not the evidence-averse Conservative party.
This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money.
Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.
Another step towards the next dark age. It's sad that all the technological advancements around us are leading to a dumber anti-intellectual civilization that actually wants another period of stupidity, another dark age. Social gain is one thing, but most science that promotes economic gain is generally detrimental to society (at first) and usually not that useful in the long run as it is destructive in nature first and foremost and constructive only rarely. Science, these days, all comes from a desire for crime and its ultimate expression, war (internet, quantum computers, gps, weapons (obviously), etc.).
that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadYou see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.
Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds.
Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.
Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
That is, there's no money to be made today in that.
Eighty years in the future we might realize some commercial applications, just as how we're still mining theoretical research done eighty years ago when building new integrated circuits or optical switching technologies.
There is an enormous amount of government funded work out there that, while not always glamorous or even practical, provides a huge boost to future initiatives that can leverage it. Developing commercial applications is made easier, more frictionless, because researchers don't have to do this work themselves.
Increased costs are not a sign of a lack of innovation. It's a sign that people are compelled to tackle larger problems. All the easy stuff has already been done.
A hundred and fifty years ago you could tinker around with random radioactive compounds in your garage and win a Nobel Prize. Today you'll have to work pretty hard to find something that hasn't already been experimented with.
Would I have done it if my research was to be used to further the profits of a corporation instead of being released free to the world?
Not a chance.
What if they were willing to pay 10x what I earned? Would I do it then? Maybe, though perhaps not even then. I'd sooner work for myself.
I don't think I'm alone either. Among my peers, nobody wanted corporate grants. The sentiment was that they would rather just quite and get a job for full pay if a corporate grant where their research went to the corporation was the only option.
Further, I'd argue that corporations today simply do not do any science at all. They do engineering, sure, but very little science. You might counter and point to drug companies, but the work they do is highly criticized as is with claims that they outright won't work on cures because cures don't make them ongoing profits. They also won't work on any disease that is not extremely common. The days of Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are largely over with few holdouts still doing interesting work that is released for the public good (Google, Microsoft).
Public funding has yielded huge numbers of scientific and mathematical advances over the years. Many people here have given plenty of examples already, though there are a great many more too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell#Independent_r...
And of course, Salk made the polio vaccine, which was no small feat, with zero federal funding, and he even refused to patent the thing.
These examples along with government funding are distinct in that they are not motivated by profit, the overall theme of the discussion. Suffice to say, if people won't support science via government funding, I suspect they are equally if not more unlikely to do it via nonprofits. And I say that based on observations of opt-in vs opt-out that come from behavioural economics (which ironically may never have been discovered without public funding).
In short, I don't see these ever sustaining the amount of scientific work that is currently going on.
There are other motivations for funding science besides money. It's good publicity, for example, if you're running a private research university, which is how quite a bit of research got funded in the pre-1960s era.
Finally, "good basic science" fundamentally runs counter to "good governance". "good governance" requires accountability and milestones; "good basic science" requires the practitioner to be free from accountability besides the basic one of "don't lie".
> First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.
100% of the research done x number of years ago was funded using the funding methods of x years ago; the existence of successes is no indicator of the efficiency of the process. Plenty of alchemists threw their funding away on projects that would never meet the standards demanded by the NSF, NIH, and DOD.
We both know that science funding would fall precipitously if it were left to the private sector. Do you really think that money would go to a better use?
> Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics.
This is the reason why I accused you of not being well acquainted with modern research. The set of subjects in which science is cheap looks more like {CS, Math} than ~{Physics}. Chemists have to buy (pay the depreciation of, if you insist) their spectrometers (NMR, IR, mass), chromatographs, calorimeters, Schlenk lines, proprietary reagents, and gloveboxes. Biologists rely on sequencers, synthesizers, designer enzymes & antibodies, synchrotrons (monochromatic X-ray sources for crystallography), nanofab tools for microfluidics (all insanely expensive because of the semiconductor industry), patch clamps, and a million specialized commercial assays and imaging techniques. Astronomers depend on tons of custom made hardware: mirrors, specialized ASICs/FPGAs/CCDs, lenses, buildings in the most inhospitable places on earth, not to mention their space platforms. Ecologists and geologists need to travel to exotic locations almost by definition (requiring specialized transport & shelter) to set up sensor networks and the like.
Although data-crunching is important, it doesn't even constitute the bulk of the scientific process. You can't replace academia with a bunch of weekend-warriors on laptops (outside of CS, that is).
> Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.).
Theorists have the most impressive long-term returns. By definition, they define their fields. This says very little about science in general or the utility of intermediate physical results, which inevitably guide the development of the underlying theories. Thought alone can't tell you which theories are right; at some point you have to test them. Einstein would have been ridiculed had it not been for the availability of ludicrously precise measurements of Mercury's precession and the Michelson-Morley experiment, both of which failed to match any metric of usefulness before their importance was understood. Darwin was inspired by his travels and Maxwell essentially had the E&M problem dropped in his lap by the experimentalists. Quantum Mechanics managed to derive macroscopically useful results (MO theory, semiconductor & condensed matter models, etc) by puzzling over observed atomic spectra. Who would have wondered why the rainbow had holes in it if nobody bothered to go look? Nobody.
The "huh?" always precedes the theoretical explanation and the "huh?" usually comes from experiment, as well as countless guiding nudges along the way that eliminate possible explanations. Theory & experiment exist symbiotically. I don't think focusing on theory to the exclusion of experiment will benefit science as a whole.
> The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.
Agreed, but I'm pretty sure the process of begging money off of rich individuals is even less conductive to scientific progress. Grant committees are much less suscept...
Sequencing, OMG. Primers.... Even more so.
Big equipment tends to be expensive, but that's because manufacturers can elicit however much they want off of it. If I'm writing a gov't grant, there's a line for "equipment", and if I can justify that the equipment is absolutely necessary for my experiments, then I can basically charge whatever I want (within the overall budget, of course). Plus it looks good because equipment costs typically do not generate 'overhead', which makes funding the grant look more attractive, etc. etc.
I do not understand your point about microprocessor fabs at all. As the fixed costs of manufacturing silicon-based systems have increased, the industry has become less vertically integrated, and there are less companies focusing on manufacturing, and many more "fabless" companies. This is certainly different, but not necessarily better or worse.
It's not perfect but it's something government is capable of doing well enough.
And you do have a say in how this money is being handled. You have the ability to vote and influence your representative if you live in a democratic country. And obviously you might not have as much impact as you might which but that's the reality of democracies.
Do you actually understand how grant review boards work? It's really quite nasty cronyism going on.
"And you do have a say in how this money is being handled through you ability to vote and influence your representative if you live in a democratic country."
Not really. This stuff is handled by bureaucrats, who wield a high amount of unaccountable power. These sorts of issues get by through salutory neglect. How often do you think scientific fund mismanagement is going to be a "tipping point" vote changer, versus, say, torture in guantanamo, or prosecuting an illegal war, or voting to restrict [internet/abortion/economic] rights?
And yes I've had some experience with grant review boards and funding agencies through my past work and I've seen and yes they have many issues including cronyism (but that would occur with even private industry funding) but I still think they provide value and eliminating them in favor of a completely decentralized system would not be a good idea.
This is my opinion and I haven't done the research or the experiments to vet it so I understand if you don't agree with it.
That's what they do anyways in a granting regime.
cronyism isn't a problem when it's their own money (yes, I'm sidestepping the fact that there are corporations that have very, very ill-gotten gains) they're putting up. When it's our money, taken without our consent, filtered through a barely-accountable bureaucracy... That's a problem.
I wrote it above, and I'll write it here, too - the fundamental problem is that "good basic science" really requires a certain level of budgetary and intellectual freedom and no accountability besides "don't lie". "good governance" demands for its projects an accounting of how money is going to be spent beforehand, and accountability if the project goes south - these are a little bit incompatible with how generally science projects should be run (but perfectly fine for, say, building a road, operating a judiciary, or, yes a limited subset of science projects like going to the moon).
I think this is one reason why science has been derailed of late, with record levels of fraud and misconduct.
http://indysci.org
The atomic bomb was developed exclusively through government research.
The vast majority of space program was developed through government funds, and what wasn't done by them was delegated and coordinated by them (and ultimately paid for as well).
Public universities are the largest and most important institutions doing basic research, and doing a lot of the actual innovation in medical research. Fewer and fewer companies are still dedicated to that (witness HP and Xerox withdrawing from the field; IBM is pretty much the only giant still putting resources into that).
The German and Chinese governments are subsidising solar energy research to the effect that its viability as an alternative power source has increased dramatically in the last decade.
Tell me how many companies nowadays are actually spending real money into research programs where the expected outcomes will reach fruition in 20 years or more.
Those sailing expeditions were to gain resources (make money) or conquer new lands (make money).
The atomic bomb and space programs were built for military ends. The internet was built for military resiliency. GPS was for targeting and tracking.
Basic research does require a long term view.. but I would suggest that even government doesn't have that as evidenced by the financial messes they've caused because the bills don't have to be paid until "later."
I should also state that any budget is, by definition limited, as it is an allocation of scarce resources; so any budget will "limit science".
-- My coworker
It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.
The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.
Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
Do you have any citation or source for this?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civil...
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_e...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives...
http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa...
Maxwell "invented" the displacement current:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current
It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first.
Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis".
They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything.
In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right?
The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with.
This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen.
Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them.
So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.
So stop spreading disinformation
I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.
Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded.
> Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed.
This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you missed the entire fucking point. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research does have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit.
>I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.
I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'.
> If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not like it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.
No, but YOU are succeeding.
And he would be correct to do so
Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.
Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.
This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.
Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested so it is not known what it's true costs are and whether the assumptions behind it are even valid. The only reason for pure theory to even be allowed to exist is because it might lead to application in future, but science has become so corrupt that the dominating majority of the "scientific" output is stupid theory, and actual application gets no respect at all, or as you say "is not the job of academia".
The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields, where engineering specifically meant application. But now you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.
I'll give you one of many concrete examples. Design for manufacture for antennas could really help improve wireless internet, if you could get handset antennas to narrowcast data instead of broadcasting it, thereby avoiding interference. Try pitching that to a Professor and you'll get shot down.
Next, try AI-based packet scheduling and collision prediction for wireless handsets. The topic is a complete fraud, because you have no idea when the other handset is going to transmit without knowing the future. But you can get lots of Greek squiggles out of that topic, so you'll get greenlighted.
and often times the top level academics
So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count... You love your No True Scotsman fallacies, don't you?
You actually just used the "No YOU'RE stupid!" retort. I'm afraid I'm not the one making sweeping generalizations like "the work of everyone else is irrelevant" when speaking about the development of global agriculture.
There are so many things in your post I want to respond to I don't even know where to begin.
> Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.
All you've done is quoted me disagreeing with you and then called me an idiot. And pray tell, what exactly is your point? That deployment is all that matters? This is a pretty common sentiment among engineers... that the general edification of the human race is not a worthwhile endeavor. You know, to become smarter and better people, in addition to building bridges? Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the educated world seems to disagree.
>Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.
What does this have to do with deployment vs. theory? You're giving examples where those people worked on what you call deployment. I'm sure they also worked on theory, because you don't know what theory is going to be deployable until you work on it. Even if those guys were pure engineers, and never worked on theoretical matters, how does what some guy decided to do in triple digits BC have to do with what the NRC should/shouldn't fund now? Nothing.
> This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.
Okay just to be clear, what ideology is it that I'm pushing? That theoretical work can have some intrinsic value? People have been working on theoretical pursuits for a long time.
> Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested
Do you seriously propose to know what could come of every piece of theoretical work that could be? No? Well then you also don't know what is and is not of value. Do you disagree with that? Please explain. Also, you seem to be talking about pure theory ("hasn't been tested") on one hand, and on the other hand speaking about unproven technical work (such as AI packet inspection) that has a theoretical bent. Do you think that literally everything that is not yet working and sold is useless? I doubt you do.
>The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields
What you're seeing is engineers intelligently realizing that there is more to engineering that just jumping right into the lab.
> you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.
It sounds to me like you've had some experience asking professors to let you build something you wanted to build just because you wanted to, and they told you no, so you're angry about it. I have never heard a professor exclaim "That's not SCIENCE!" to any reasonable request. That doesn't mean I haven't heard them say "No.", but I'm sure some other folks here on HN could tune in (if anybody was still reading this thread) and back up my feeling that this sounds like fiction.
>I'll give you one of many concrete examples
I don't know anything about your specific examples, so I can't speak to the details. However, are you claiming that the antenna idea is a sure thing and needs development, yet has been shot down (you've tried?) by many professors (surely you wouldn't characterize all of science based on your experience with one person...) simply because it's not theoretical enough? That hardly seems likely.
> So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count...
Erm... I don't think you underst...
Point 1: Fuck your "edification". Grandma doesn't want to be "edified". She wants to not starve. She isn't starving because of fertilized crops. We have fertilizer entirely because of the Haber Process. That's REAL science. Also known as "deployment", "engineering" and "application".
Point 2: The point of theory is to make application more efficient. IE Tesla's claim that knowing theory could have saved Edison 90% of his labour. That's the ONLY value it has, and the ONLY thing that makes it different to eg Lesbian Poetry as a discipline of study. But Lesbian Poetry sure does "edify" Grandma.
Point 3: Theory comes from application, not from the fever dreams of the publish-or-perish crowd. You get math from trying to deploy a seige engine, not the other way around. So real science is application, theory is just documentation.
Point 4: We don't force everybody in science to go straight for application, because some speculative theory may turn out to be useful later, the way finite field arithmetic turned out to be useful for RAID6 arrays. Most theory without application turns out to be junk but we could justify it having some salvage value as insurance.
Point 5: The publish-or-perish crowd have got Point 4 backwards. That's your crap ideology too. They treat theoretical junk as having the only value and they give you more credit if you write about something than if you build the fucking thing. You've heard about the "idea guy" who just wants a techie to build his "vision"? In academia, that cocksucker is the one who's valued.
I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.
The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.
What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.
If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.
Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.
I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
Your best example of the oil agenda of the government is a very long running project having nothing to do with global warming or the oil industry at all? The other one -- an arctic station built to monitor the ozone layer -- provides zero scientific measurements that aren't replicated a thousand times over by many other arctic measurement stations, but maybe that'll hide global warming?
Good stuff.
Sarcasm, a bit of a conspiratorial closing note (such a nice way of offering a counterpoint). Absolutely nothing proving anything.
And yes, I despise political-agenda driven bullshit, which is just incredibly common in Canadian politics. The misinformation and vilification for anything and everything grows tiring to anyone with a concern for discerning reality from fantasy.
But they didn't. It's a conspiracy, but not the secret kind.
Or maybe a petroleum engineer with an excellent CV and a long list of successes, most recently on environmental efforts (CO2 recapture).
This is the same garbage that has people ranting about the credentials of federal ministers (hey wait...you did that as well) when the position has never, ever, in the history of Canada, demanded specific skills for the role, and instead is a leadership and reporting position.
You're absolutely right in that the specific technical skills associated with having a PhD in, say, physics, or math, or even (heck) engineering have little to no bearing whatsoever on what the person at the top of the organization will do during their tenure.
But there are more things learned during a PhD than a bunch of technical skills. You might learn something, e.g., about the very nature of scientific inquiry. About the nature of the challenges of collecting and analyzing scientific data. About explaining complicated research to a lay audience. About trying to convince higher-ups of the scientific merits of a project even when said merits are subtle. About why something qualifies as "science" while something else doesn't -- and knowing the difference between the two decidedly does matter when you're in a leadership position.
"'Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,' John McDougall, president of the NRC."
... I don't think John Holdren would have said this. Indeed I think one would be hard pressed to find anyone with a PhD who would say this.
Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.
Government funding should be un-economic.