3 ms·
Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ON
by rowanG077 6y ago
Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ONLY invested in supercolliders after high-energy physics was very fruitful. Many other fields would have been completely starved and we would now be in the (possibly) super collider dead-end while other physics is woefully behind.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoI wonder what happens if we push 30 billion into pure non-physics math.
- HPsquared 6y agoThere's this thing called the 'white elephant' though. History tends to downplay such things.
- drdeca 6y agoWhy not evaluate (estimate) the expected value of sample information of the different experiments, and compare the costs of the different experiments to the EVSIs? Is it too difficult to estimate the EVSI ?
- rowanG077 6y agoAny metric you can imagine is nothing more then a guess. That's why it's research. The researchers guess and tests. Some guesses can be observably better but that's not quantifiable. At least that's what I think.
- newsclues 6y agoSurely you see the hazard in funding expensive wildly speculative projects? If you fail once, fail again but bigger... who cares it’s not our money and the bigger our project the more we pay ourselves...
- rowanG077 6y agoThat's why scientific projects are still judged by panels. It's not like money is thrown at any random project. It must have merit and be judged to actually be able to test a hypothesis.
- adrianN 6y agoI disagree, money should be spent were it's most likely to generate new science. But the people spending the money must take into account that we're really bad at putting good odds on where that is.