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Can anybody briefly describe how a 3x funding increase would change things from "may not be able to invent" to "[likely] to be able to be produced in the forese
by TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Can anybody briefly describe how a 3x funding increase would change things from "may not be able to invent" to "[likely] to be able to be produced in the foreseeable future"? I'm very disappointed that news articles no longer hit on even the most fundamental questions like this. Instead articles now take a position (you should be in favor of donating money to [x,y,z]) and then go from there.
This seems to challenge belief. There are almost always rapidly diminishing returns on increasing allocation of resources once you reach a certain baseline. And almost is a weasel word there -- I can't think of anything where this is not true. Just like 50 programmers won't work 50 times faster than 1 programmer on a given task, 50 times the amount of money dedicated to a task will often provide far less than 50x the return. And the article's premise is suggesting not only a linear return on investment, but a largely exponential one.
Of course this all goes out the window when you're desperately understaffed or underfunded, but if $3 billion a year is anything remotely close to 'desperately underfunded' then it makes one wonder if that may be a product of waste and inefficiency than a lack of funding.
- thomasfedb 8y agoFor some science, the baseline is very high. You can't do X-ray crystallography of organic compounds, for example, without a synchrotron.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoAbsolutely, but I think we become desensitized to numbers. $3,000,0000,000 is alot of money. In trying to find the costs of a synchotron I came upon this article [1] that mentions the construction of an entire campus surronding a synchrotron, experimental facilities, and so on. The entire construction project and synchotron cost £263 million. That's at government level efficiency, which is to say significantly overpriced, and of course is also just a one-time expense. Even this one time inefficient cost however is only about 10% of our annual spend. The ongoing spend related to maintenance of the facility would of course be a small fraction of that upfront cost. I just don't understand how one can argue that a 3x increase in funding can be expected to yield massive exponential gains in output. [1] - https://www.theage.com.au/national/synchrotron-will-cost-taxpayers-20040212-gdxai5.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/synchrotron-will-cost-tax...
- AnthonBerg 8y agoIt’s $0.5 per person.
- ItsMe000001 8y agoThat's great in a single-variable universe, but in ours unfortunately there are a million other "it's (only) $0.5 per person" things. It's like letting the public choose what students have to learn - "but this is sooo important!" (and this, and this, and this,...). I don't understand that kind of argument. You have to choose the right level of scale for what you are looking at. I would not trust an architect (of buildings) who is a particle physicist, or a forest(-system) manager whose specialization is the cell. Some things need to be looked at the the higher (compound) level to get any useful results. EDIT (for the reply below, to which I cannot reply?): > I find it important / useful for myself to put it into context. Well, my point is that you don't.
- AnthonBerg 8y agoIt’s both a lot of money and also much less. I find it important / useful for myself to put it into context. For me the takeaway is that I went and calculated how many times richer than the average and therefore what my share of $0.5 per person would be. It still wasn’t a lot. And probably more affordable to me than the person at the middle of the income scale even then. But yes! I see the “what about all the other things” element too.
- yborg 8y agoDNA's structure was deduced from X-ray crystallography using a conventional X-ray tube, most laboratory protein crystallography doesn't require a synchrotron light source. Here's a typical unit: https://www.rigaku.com/en/products/protein/micromax007 https://www.rigaku.com/en/products/protein/micromax007
- CamperBob2 8y agoThe MicroMax™ 007 HF is the most widely used home lab X-ray source for protein crystallography and a popular source for small molecule crystallographers who need the additional flux of a rotating anode generator. Yow. I thought I had a pretty hardcore home lab with my Faxitron cabinet machine.
- thomasfedb 8y agoSorry, I meant lipid-phase organics. In any case, it is true that some science has huge initial investment cost - synchrotrons, space telescopes, etc
- wallace_f 8y agoLook at all the money thrown into all of wars. Not just the longest-running war in history in Afghanistan and the War on Terror. But the War on Drugs. War on Poverty. What about global warming--how much money is thrown into that? Are we really making progress. Meanwhile every day I see homeless people on the streets, and read about stories of police murdering, beating, or swat raiding innocent people over nothing. How far could giving a little bit of that money to protect people's supposed rights to life and liberty go? Isn't that what we are supposedly going after, anyways? Or do we just donate to who causes based on other factors. Such as who has the best fundraising? The best lobbying? Or the cause that people with money personally care about? Future generations are going to look back at us like we are psychopathic barbarians.
- hcs 8y agoA lot of money goes into taking a good idea for a vaccine to syringes ready to deploy. The actual study goes into the real detail: https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/2-23/v2 https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/2-23/v2
- antpls 8y ago> This seems to challenge belief. There are almost always rapidly diminishing returns on increasing allocation of resources once you reach a certain baseline. And almost is a weasel word there -- I can't think of anything where this is not true. Just like 50 programmers won't work 50 times faster than 1 programmer on a given task, 50 times the amount of money dedicated to a task will often provide far less than 50x the return. And the article's premise is suggesting not only a linear return on investment, but a largely exponential one. I see research, especially fundamental research, like a lottery in which we don't know what we will win. State invests X billions of dollars, and a breakthrough will likely happen, but maybe not in the expected problem (principle of serendipity). More X billions means a higher chance of breakthrough, and hopefully on the desired problem. Surely experts and thinkers looked at efficiency in research, but by definition researching is about looking at the unknown, and when there is uncertainty, a lottery model is probably a better way of thinking about it.