7 ms·

We Need More ‘Useless’ Knowledge

103 points by Petiver 10y ago

sriku 10y ago
"premium content for subscribers"
- jjawssd 10y ago
  what do you mean by that?
  - 27182818284 10y ago
    Article seemed to load fine for me even in Incognito.
    - donohoe 10y ago
      Me too
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Maybe it's geofenced unless you're subscribed. "Freeofenced?" ;)
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  I could read it just fine.
leggomylibro 10y ago
I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending and entitlement programs, but I would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded initiative designed to funnel money towards anybody who wanted to put it towards use in citizen science or research. I'm not sure what a program like that could look like in practice, though. You could put money directly into peoples' pockets through a sort of grant-like application process, ("I want to buy $250 worth of resistors, capacitors, chips, wire, and breadboards to make a new kind of fitbit prototype") but that would be an easy system to game, and a lot of the costs associated with experimenting with theoretical ideas comes from equipment anyways. Because not everyone can afford or find room for a scanning electron microscope or a CNC lathe, right? Many cities have hackerspaces, but their capabilities often stop at hand tools and working with thermoplastics unless you're very lucky. So what about universities? They're present throughout the entire nation, often already publicly funded, and have access to functional research and manufacturing equipment. Sadly, my experience trying to get even a few hours' use of any sort of university equipment, whether supervised, paid, through night classes, or otherwise, has been met with absolute stonewalls. If you don't pay full tuition, you can fuck right off. So I'm not sure what the solution here is. What's an average person who wants to get into science supposed to do, besides be independently wealthy?
- RobertoG 10y ago
  "I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending and entitlement programs [..]" It worries me how that assumption is never challenged even by people who "would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded initiative ". The deficit-mania narrative is really hegemonic nowadays.
  - mtdewcmu 10y ago
    I was going to say something similar. We could do a lot of good just by shoveling more money to NSF and other established programs, like Obama did in the stimulus. It's a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      You can build a million roads and learn almost nothing. You can send a single probe to Venus and learn enough to fill entire books and launch a thousand careers. Some things have higher yields than others.
  - leggomylibro 10y ago
    I don't think we need to cut programs, I just think that our current programs aren't administered effectively. We spend trillions and it seems like there's just so much graft and waste.
    - bbctol 10y ago
      Sure, but waste doesn't mean we're "creaking under their load," especially when it comes to entitlement programs. If we just wanted to double the amount we spend on science, energy, and the environment, we'd have some inefficiencies but make a small dent in the overall budget.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > it seems like there's just so much graft and waste. I hear this claim, but I've never seen evidence of it. How much graft and waste is there? In which department? Every large organization has some of it - name one that doesn't. I have yet to see evidence of how relatively efficient or uncorrupt the U.S. government is. I do know that anti-corruption groups generally rate it highly relative to other governments worldwide, but many of those governments are in poor countries with high corruption (the latter being a major cause of the former).
komali2 10y ago
"the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The institute was the brainchild of its first director, Abraham Flexner. Intended to be a "paradise for scholars" with no students or administrative duties, it allowed its academic stars to fully concentrate on deep thoughts," I highly recommend reading "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. The basic premise is there are institutions known as "Maths" that are essentially walled temples, the gates of which only open once every 1, 10, 100, and 1000 years (outermost gate annualy, 2nd innermost decmntennially, etc). Inside, a bunch of monks hang around studying "useless knowledge," which in this universe includes things such as particle physics (there's one "thousander" temple in which the monks just sit deep in a mountain staring at a giant pool of water to see if they can glimpse a flash of light). I always thought it would be really cool to have something similar in our world, I hadn't realized it's been pursued before.
- beloch 10y ago
  In Anathem, there was a global catastrophe of an unspecified nature caused (or at least blamed on) science. Physicists, mathematicians, etc. are segregated from broader society (and high technology) to prevent future reoccurrences of this because their disciplines are viewed as being too dangerous to allow in the "saecular"(sic) world. A mountain retreat for "useless" science is a nice idea, but Anathem's "Maths" were something else entirely. They were actually quite dystopian.
  - komali2 10y ago
    I don't know if they were necessarily dystopian. In the book, the Maths survive throughout global wars and other saecular catastrophes. So sometimes they'd come out of the gate and everyone would be cavemen, other times, 1980s style civilizations with televisions and cars. Seems like a pretty rosy situation to me.
    - db48x 10y ago
      Yea, they are a weird mixture of prison and lifeline for civilization. Until they get Sacked.
  - 10y ago
ChuckMcM 10y ago
It worked for me, but the summary is that in the past there has been a place for 'pure' research (which is to say not motivated by a particular financial goal and without restriction). The article argues that the good that has come of that has been greatly in excess of the investment and so "we" should do more investment like that. I don't disagree, and open ended research is really helpful in furthering the good of the community. It is also not possible to predict which means typical economic forces are not present to keep it funded. I've wondered sometimes if the lottery proceeds would be better spent on this sort of activity rather than public schools. The reasoning for that is that the public schools don't have any visibility into how much (or how little) they will get from the lottery in a given year so they have a hard time allocating funds for on-going projects, instead doing one-offs like new classrooms or some other self contained project. Whereas if you dumped that money into a grant pile and people could apply for grants out of it for research, that might work better. Sadly, because (and the article points this out) you can't say definitively "this research is going to give you these benefits in 10 years" you can't really say that you haven't just wasted all the money you spent. And that is where unconstrained research gets killed.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Perhaps public schools should be funded with something more fair and reliable, such as income taxes. (I'd go for wealth taxes as more fair, but that's a long shot.)
teddyh 10y ago
The article heavily promotes the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J, where both the authors of the article are situated. Richard Feynman rather famously argued against places like that: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm “Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!”
- js8 10y ago
  I didn't read it completely yet but the opening sentence "At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution" is resonating with me strongly. Coming from an academic family, I tried to do PhD but it was just 2 years of procrastination. So I decided, screw it, I'll find a job, and I am a programmer in a corporation since. It's pretty good, but somehow I wish I had more time to pursue things that go beyond one quarter. So I wish, like Feynman did, there was a place where I could do normal programming most of the time and yet when I have an idea, to pursue that idea. Google 20% time comes close (although it has really been dead for maybe 10 years), but it's still not quite that. And you could have that for any field, not just software. So perhaps we don't need ivory towers where people pursue basic research full-time, but something more balanced.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    20% time isn't dead, but it's also not useful for what you want it for. 20% time rarely works for projects that stretch much beyond a quarter. The amount of attention you can devote to them prevents you from finishing them in a timely-enough manner that the initial conditions which made you think of the idea still hold. (Trust me, I spent 3 years of 20% time writing an HTML5 parser that was largely obsolete by the time it was released. It was desperately needed when I started it in 2010 and the only options were validator.nu and html5lib. It wasn't so needed by the time it was released in 2013 and you also had JSoup, Hubbub, html5ever, and probably others to choose from.) Same reason part-time startups usually go nowhere. I think that the system that actually does work is something like Silicon Valley, where if in the course of your job, you see an idea, you can just quit and try it. If it doesn't work out, there's always another job out there waiting, which won't hold the work you spent on that idea against you. Anyone with a modicum of financial discipline should also be able to save enough money off a Silicon Valley engineer salary that they have the option to go a year or two without income, too.
minikites 10y ago
> A committee of the U.S. Congress found that in 2012 business only provided 6 percent of basic research funding, with the lion’s share — 53 percent — shouldered by the federal government and the remainder coming from universities and foundations. Yet another instance where "big government" is good for society, despite the bad rap that it gets these days.
debt 10y ago
I feel like HN is a huge repository of genuinely 100% useless knowledge on most days. Hopefully this dude is right.
devindotcom 10y ago
Looking forward to reading this, but as I don't see a link in the comments here or the body of the article, you really should read the essay by Flexner that's referenced in the headline. It's stored at the IAS here: https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf And it's being reprinted with commentary here (the occasion for the essay linked): http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html
nine_k 10y ago
We need more resources, so that we could dedicate more to open-ended research without expecting it to pay off in any predictable way. You literally never know what can come out of a particular purely theoretical piece of research. Well, would be great! It would be great to have such a surplus, and spend it on esoteric things that will pay off in a century or two, or mere 30 years maybe. Are you personally happy to fund it? I'm sure a number of donation programs exist. Otherwise, I'd concentrate on minimizing resource waste, especially in institutions like government, to obtain that resource surplus in the first place.
- hackuser 10y ago
  The U.S. is far wealthier than any nation ever, including the U.S. of the 1930s and 40s (it's not even comparable). Whether or not it's funded has is not due to affordability.
mtdewcmu 10y ago
In other ways, it's a great time for useless knowledge. One, barriers of entry are lower in a lot of cases (the internet, computers). Two (partly as a corollary of #1), there are more people empowered to seek useless knowledge (greater education, better communications technology). This affects some fields more than others: computer science research is cheap, but molecular biology research is still dependent on expensive equipment.
leoc 10y ago
Well, that's the most von Neumann-and-Turing-centric account of von Neumann's role in the invention of computing that I've ever seen: no trace of Eckert, Mauchly, U. Penn or ENIAC in the story at all!
vannevar 10y ago
There may even be theoretical support for this idea, in the form of Ken Stanley's (now with Uber) work with "novelty search." https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI
ganfortran 10y ago
Well we have plenty of them already. I am not worrying the ability of human producing useless things, it is in our nature.
hackuser 10y ago
Useful, applicable factoid: The Institute for Advanced Study is also in Princeton, NJ, but is not affiliated with Princeton University.
thisrod 10y ago
The humanities should get a chance here too. There's a wonderful quote from Peter Berger. Roughly, he said that sociologists had so far escaped public attention in America, except perhaps among the few southern racists sufficiently literate to read the footnotes to Brown vs. Board of Education.
JoeDaDude 10y ago
In ancient times, there was a television show called "Connections" [1] in which the host followed the multiple links and serendipitous events that led to some modern inventions, technologies, and scientific achievements. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

103 points by Petiver 10y ago

sriku 10y ago

"premium content for subscribers"

jjawssd 10y ago
what do you mean by that?
- 27182818284 10y ago
  Article seemed to load fine for me even in Incognito.
  - donohoe 10y ago
    Me too
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Maybe it's geofenced unless you're subscribed. "Freeofenced?" ;)
0xCMP 10y ago
I could read it just fine.

leggomylibro 10y ago

I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending and entitlement programs, but I would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded initiative designed to funnel money towards anybody who wanted to put it towards use in citizen science or research. I'm not sure what a program like that could look like in practice, though. You could put money directly into peoples' pockets through a sort of grant-like application process, ("I want to buy $250 worth of resistors, capacitors, chips, wire, and breadboards to make a new kind of fitbit prototype") but that would be an easy system to game, and a lot of the costs associated with experimenting with theoretical ideas comes from equipment anyways. Because not everyone can afford or find room for a scanning electron microscope or a CNC lathe, right? Many cities have hackerspaces, but their capabilities often stop at hand tools and working with thermoplastics unless you're very lucky. So what about universities? They're present throughout the entire nation, often already publicly funded, and have access to functional research and manufacturing equipment. Sadly, my experience trying to get even a few hours' use of any sort of university equipment, whether supervised, paid, through night classes, or otherwise, has been met with absolute stonewalls. If you don't pay full tuition, you can fuck right off. So I'm not sure what the solution here is. What's an average person who wants to get into science supposed to do, besides be independently wealthy?

RobertoG 10y ago
"I know that our budgets are already creaking under the load of our spending and entitlement programs [..]" It worries me how that assumption is never challenged even by people who "would absolutely love to see a taxpayer-funded initiative ". The deficit-mania narrative is really hegemonic nowadays.
- mtdewcmu 10y ago
  I was going to say something similar. We could do a lot of good just by shoveling more money to NSF and other established programs, like Obama did in the stimulus. It's a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    You can build a million roads and learn almost nothing. You can send a single probe to Venus and learn enough to fill entire books and launch a thousand careers. Some things have higher yields than others.
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  I don't think we need to cut programs, I just think that our current programs aren't administered effectively. We spend trillions and it seems like there's just so much graft and waste.
  - bbctol 10y ago
    Sure, but waste doesn't mean we're "creaking under their load," especially when it comes to entitlement programs. If we just wanted to double the amount we spend on science, energy, and the environment, we'd have some inefficiencies but make a small dent in the overall budget.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > it seems like there's just so much graft and waste. I hear this claim, but I've never seen evidence of it. How much graft and waste is there? In which department? Every large organization has some of it - name one that doesn't. I have yet to see evidence of how relatively efficient or uncorrupt the U.S. government is. I do know that anti-corruption groups generally rate it highly relative to other governments worldwide, but many of those governments are in poor countries with high corruption (the latter being a major cause of the former).

komali2 10y ago

"the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The institute was the brainchild of its first director, Abraham Flexner. Intended to be a "paradise for scholars" with no students or administrative duties, it allowed its academic stars to fully concentrate on deep thoughts," I highly recommend reading "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. The basic premise is there are institutions known as "Maths" that are essentially walled temples, the gates of which only open once every 1, 10, 100, and 1000 years (outermost gate annualy, 2nd innermost decmntennially, etc). Inside, a bunch of monks hang around studying "useless knowledge," which in this universe includes things such as particle physics (there's one "thousander" temple in which the monks just sit deep in a mountain staring at a giant pool of water to see if they can glimpse a flash of light). I always thought it would be really cool to have something similar in our world, I hadn't realized it's been pursued before.

beloch 10y ago
In Anathem, there was a global catastrophe of an unspecified nature caused (or at least blamed on) science. Physicists, mathematicians, etc. are segregated from broader society (and high technology) to prevent future reoccurrences of this because their disciplines are viewed as being too dangerous to allow in the "saecular"(sic) world. A mountain retreat for "useless" science is a nice idea, but Anathem's "Maths" were something else entirely. They were actually quite dystopian.
- komali2 10y ago
  I don't know if they were necessarily dystopian. In the book, the Maths survive throughout global wars and other saecular catastrophes. So sometimes they'd come out of the gate and everyone would be cavemen, other times, 1980s style civilizations with televisions and cars. Seems like a pretty rosy situation to me.
  - db48x 10y ago
    Yea, they are a weird mixture of prison and lifeline for civilization. Until they get Sacked.
- 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

It worked for me, but the summary is that in the past there has been a place for 'pure' research (which is to say not motivated by a particular financial goal and without restriction). The article argues that the good that has come of that has been greatly in excess of the investment and so "we" should do more investment like that. I don't disagree, and open ended research is really helpful in furthering the good of the community. It is also not possible to predict which means typical economic forces are not present to keep it funded. I've wondered sometimes if the lottery proceeds would be better spent on this sort of activity rather than public schools. The reasoning for that is that the public schools don't have any visibility into how much (or how little) they will get from the lottery in a given year so they have a hard time allocating funds for on-going projects, instead doing one-offs like new classrooms or some other self contained project. Whereas if you dumped that money into a grant pile and people could apply for grants out of it for research, that might work better. Sadly, because (and the article points this out) you can't say definitively "this research is going to give you these benefits in 10 years" you can't really say that you haven't just wasted all the money you spent. And that is where unconstrained research gets killed.

hackuser 10y ago
Perhaps public schools should be funded with something more fair and reliable, such as income taxes. (I'd go for wealth taxes as more fair, but that's a long shot.)

teddyh 10y ago

The article heavily promotes the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J, where both the authors of the article are situated. Richard Feynman rather famously argued against places like that: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/52/2/dignified.htm “Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!”

js8 10y ago
I didn't read it completely yet but the opening sentence "At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution" is resonating with me strongly. Coming from an academic family, I tried to do PhD but it was just 2 years of procrastination. So I decided, screw it, I'll find a job, and I am a programmer in a corporation since. It's pretty good, but somehow I wish I had more time to pursue things that go beyond one quarter. So I wish, like Feynman did, there was a place where I could do normal programming most of the time and yet when I have an idea, to pursue that idea. Google 20% time comes close (although it has really been dead for maybe 10 years), but it's still not quite that. And you could have that for any field, not just software. So perhaps we don't need ivory towers where people pursue basic research full-time, but something more balanced.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  20% time isn't dead, but it's also not useful for what you want it for. 20% time rarely works for projects that stretch much beyond a quarter. The amount of attention you can devote to them prevents you from finishing them in a timely-enough manner that the initial conditions which made you think of the idea still hold. (Trust me, I spent 3 years of 20% time writing an HTML5 parser that was largely obsolete by the time it was released. It was desperately needed when I started it in 2010 and the only options were validator.nu and html5lib. It wasn't so needed by the time it was released in 2013 and you also had JSoup, Hubbub, html5ever, and probably others to choose from.) Same reason part-time startups usually go nowhere. I think that the system that actually does work is something like Silicon Valley, where if in the course of your job, you see an idea, you can just quit and try it. If it doesn't work out, there's always another job out there waiting, which won't hold the work you spent on that idea against you. Anyone with a modicum of financial discipline should also be able to save enough money off a Silicon Valley engineer salary that they have the option to go a year or two without income, too.

minikites 10y ago

> A committee of the U.S. Congress found that in 2012 business only provided 6 percent of basic research funding, with the lion’s share — 53 percent — shouldered by the federal government and the remainder coming from universities and foundations. Yet another instance where "big government" is good for society, despite the bad rap that it gets these days.

debt 10y ago

I feel like HN is a huge repository of genuinely 100% useless knowledge on most days. Hopefully this dude is right.

devindotcom 10y ago

Looking forward to reading this, but as I don't see a link in the comments here or the body of the article, you really should read the essay by Flexner that's referenced in the headline. It's stored at the IAS here: https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf And it's being reprinted with commentary here (the occasion for the essay linked): http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10924.html

nine_k 10y ago

We need more resources, so that we could dedicate more to open-ended research without expecting it to pay off in any predictable way. You literally never know what can come out of a particular purely theoretical piece of research. Well, would be great! It would be great to have such a surplus, and spend it on esoteric things that will pay off in a century or two, or mere 30 years maybe. Are you personally happy to fund it? I'm sure a number of donation programs exist. Otherwise, I'd concentrate on minimizing resource waste, especially in institutions like government, to obtain that resource surplus in the first place.

hackuser 10y ago
The U.S. is far wealthier than any nation ever, including the U.S. of the 1930s and 40s (it's not even comparable). Whether or not it's funded has is not due to affordability.

mtdewcmu 10y ago

In other ways, it's a great time for useless knowledge. One, barriers of entry are lower in a lot of cases (the internet, computers). Two (partly as a corollary of #1), there are more people empowered to seek useless knowledge (greater education, better communications technology). This affects some fields more than others: computer science research is cheap, but molecular biology research is still dependent on expensive equipment.

leoc 10y ago

Well, that's the most von Neumann-and-Turing-centric account of von Neumann's role in the invention of computing that I've ever seen: no trace of Eckert, Mauchly, U. Penn or ENIAC in the story at all!

vannevar 10y ago

There may even be theoretical support for this idea, in the form of Ken Stanley's (now with Uber) work with "novelty search." https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI

ganfortran 10y ago

Well we have plenty of them already. I am not worrying the ability of human producing useless things, it is in our nature.

hackuser 10y ago

Useful, applicable factoid: The Institute for Advanced Study is also in Princeton, NJ, but is not affiliated with Princeton University.

thisrod 10y ago

The humanities should get a chance here too. There's a wonderful quote from Peter Berger. Roughly, he said that sociologists had so far escaped public attention in America, except perhaps among the few southern racists sufficiently literate to read the footnotes to Brown vs. Board of Education.

JoeDaDude 10y ago

In ancient times, there was a television show called "Connections" [1] in which the host followed the multiple links and serendipitous events that led to some modern inventions, technologies, and scientific achievements. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)