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> There are a lot of good things to spend that money on, and if scientists want a piece of it they should provide a convincing justification. But that's not th
by coffeemug 8y ago
> There are a lot of good things to spend that money on, and if scientists want a piece of it they should provide a convincing justification.
But that's not the right way to frame it. We have some amount of money to spend, and we need to figure out how to deploy it. We know that in aggregate basic research has resulted in astronomical payoffs over time. Therefore it's in our interest to put money into basic research. It's not the scientists who should provide convincing justification on why they deserve our money. It's us who should provide convincing justification why more people should become scientists.
- maxlybbert 8y agoIf two basic research teams ask for a grant, assuming we only have money to fund one, how do we choose?
- coffeemug 8y agoI don't know, but I think it's an extraordinarily important question.
- perl4ever 8y agoHow can the problem of limited resources to support scientists be improved by increasing the number of scientists?
- coffeemug 8y agoI meant that separately. As in, we should encourage more people to become scientists and increase science funding. But for any given amount of funding we still have to pick how to allocate the money, which seems like a very important problem to solve to me.
- perl4ever 8y agoIf you say "all basic research is good and needs no justification", you can't thereby get rid of the threshold for what gets funded. You're just refusing to talk about what the criteria may be and what they should be.