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Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment. One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant
by sidlls 10y ago
Your comment is being downvoted for a number of reasons. I'd like to use it as soapbox for a moment.
One reason I left academia was the constant cycle of grant funding proposals followed by a flurry of publication followed by more proposals. These proposals often carried some requirement for language that, in my view, was a direct response to a certain kind of taxpayer, in order to justify on some tangible level the "need" for the research to be funded.
Basic science, and theoretical research alike deserve far more funding than they get. That a significant portion of our country views the funding model we have for scientific discovery as "beg[ging]" is one of the greatest failures we have as a culture.
- zerebubuth 10y agoHow much of that attitude do you think is due to a cultural shared failure to value basic science and theoretical research, and how much is due to a failure to communicate the benefits of such activities? I think it's quite possible that when people hear "it's complicated" or "we won't see practical applications for a decade", they wonder whether it's money well-spent. Especially if funding for things which have an immediate impact (e.g: healthcare, schools) is perceived as desperately lacking. It seems to me that the joy of discovering and understanding the universe does not get communicated to the general public, and that's a failing of those who are asking that the general public fund their research (whether individual scientists or funding bodies such as EPSRC).
- sidlls 10y agoI can't disagree that there is a failure of communication as you note. Or at least a deficiency.
- ams6110 10y agoAlso I think that popular media accounts of some ridiculous-sounding research that got funding tends to get extrapolated (by at least some folks) to a characterization all taxpayer-funded research. One example I remember hearing about a few years ago was a study of how cocaine affects the sexual behavior of Japanese Quail. A lot of people hear about that sort of thing and question why their money is being spent on such useless-sounding research. And I imagine a fair number of people who are just working to get by don't see much point in the study of escoteric particle physics either. Never going to affect their lives.
- jamesdwilson 10y ago"deserve" is socialist talk. who's paying for it? why not let the market decide instead of stealing it from taxpayers?
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoWhat's the market value of General Relativity and the Standard Model? Where can I buy shares in them? What's the ROI this week?
- jamesdwilson 10y agoAsk SpaceX, General Electric, and the thousands of other companies that rely heavily on science.
- nananonymous 10y agoThat's the problem. They can't answer that question and neither can the market. The market is great at assigning value to things based on scarcity and demand, but there will never be scarcity of the Navier-Stokes equations because they can just be copied and shared so the market is useless for saying what they're worth. And before a discovery is made literally nobody knows how it might change the world. I somehow doubt a thousand investors could have better predicted the future value of the transistor any better than the handful of electrical engineers working on that frontier.
- jamesdwilson 10y agogood answer. thank you for taking me on. does it justify theft though?
- nananonymous 10y agoI have a hard time seeing taxation as always theft. In a democratic society the public either is or was part of the decision on whether or not to fund things like the LHC. If society agrees to pay for it then by definition there's no coercion. I think the LHC has over a dozen participating countries, each of which volunteered to be part of it. Ideally there should be checks and balances making sure a project of this scale is free from corruption.
- cestith 10y agoOh, some of it does come down to almost begging. It shouldn't, because funding discovery is important. People doing long hours of hard work for the common good shouldn't have to beg for funding. Then again, we shouldn't have to beg for school lunches or housing for military vets either but look at social media right now.
- TheGRS 10y agoI think on a philosophical level everyone should be able to justify their work at any time. But on a practical level this can be distracting to the people doing the work and it gets us into the begging/funding/publishing cycle we're stuck in now. Maybe the reward system just needs to be changed.
- UweSchmidt 10y agoGood comment. Just curious, just how much funding should basic science and theoretical research get, exactly?