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And that’s why I was happier when basic research was mostly being carried out in public institutions.

• _Nat_ 6y ago
  Public institutions tend to observe the same policies, even when there's no direct commercial interest. For example, if you join a Math department and start publishing papers that cast the department's research interests in a negative light, that's often a good way to get fired. I mean, seriously, go ask just about any professor of any topic at any university if their field is undervalued or overvalued. They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated, and more important than people think. They deserve more funding, and you should definitely consider majoring in their field.
  • kovac 6y ago
    General proposition may be true, but how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? Like "Doesn't matter how hard we try, there are always undecidable facts in our own system"? :p I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams.
    • _Nat_ 6y ago
      > how can a math publication place the department interests in a negative light? With Math, the sensitive topic is utility. Math departments would tend to be upset by someone pushing papers that, say, call attention to the lack of social benefit relative to other fields of research that taxpayers could be funding instead. I guess a researcher could also spin a narrative about mathematicians' contributions to cryptography, examining the negative consequences enabled by stuff like Bitcoin. --- > I still have faith in the research done by hard science research teams. That gets kinda complicated. I mean, hard-science teams often rely on their expertise, as it's their unique source of value: if the area that they excel in is shown to be sub-optimal, admitting it would mean losing their current career path (and often taking a significant tumble down-the-ladder after transitioning). So hard-science teams are often largely academically honest in what they do publish, though they're often biased toward casting what they do in a positive light. For a common example, have you ever met an older computer tech who insists on using a legacy, obsoleted technology because it's what they know best? A lot of academics basically do the same thing.
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      • whimsicalism 6y ago
        It sorta sounds like you aren't familiar with how actual math departments function, just by your examples.
  • cmiles74 6y ago
    My understanding is that the Google is pressuring it's employees (who are research scientists) to refrain from publishing papers that Google management believes casts a negative light on a Google product. It's not theoretical, researchers are quoted in the article and papers have been altered. I find it difficult to come up with an analogy from a public institution. What is the product the math department would be pressuring it's members to protect? Sure, each department in a university believes it's work important. That doesn't seem even remotely similar to me as this issue with Google.
    • free_rms 6y ago
      What if it's an inaccurate negative light? The Gebru paper makes a lot of hay about carbon impact, but Google's put a ton of effort into mitigating that, they've been carbon neutral on paper since 2007: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-third-decade-climate-action-realizing-carbon-free-future/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/our-...
      • cmiles74 6y ago
        Sorry, I'm having trouble following this comment. In a public institution (as well as at Google) research papers are subject to peer review before publication. Now Google is adding _another review process_ after peer review, I don't believe this is something that would happen at a public university. Do you have an example of a public university censoring research papers that passed peer review because that university believed the paper cast "an innacurate negative light"... on what, exactly?
        • free_rms 6y ago
          The tone of parent comment was "Google should tolerate research that's critical of Google", which I'm sympathetic to. My rejoinder was that if it's inaccurately critical of Google, like hyping carbon impact without mentioning a decades-long carbon mitigation program, I get a lot more sympathetic to Google's position. Why should they pay someone to spread falsehoods about them? I don't really care about the process minutiae.
  • gowld 6y ago
    Mathematicians are pretty open about the fact that their field is unimportant and their research funding is coasting off of winning WWII with Enigma codebreaking. The only reason they deserve money is that they teach mandatory calculus to uninterested non-mathematicians.
  • bumby 6y ago
    >They'll almost universally tell you that their field is undervalued, underappreciated This is most likely due to an availability bias. They have concrete examples in their own sphere but not near as much detail about competing domains. This leads to the mistaken assumption that their own field more important than it possibly would be if viewed in the overarching context
• Laarlf 6y ago
  Oh yeah. Those are surely independent and don’t have aims at all.
  • throwaway2048 6y ago
    This sounds like the typical false equivocation about "all media being lies" when somebody brings up the danger of outright, constant propaganda like OANN. Just because bias is impossible to avoid, does not mean that all bias is the same. The goal isn't outright elimination of bias (which is completely impossible), its ensuring incentives that are aligned so bias doesn't become a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
• N1H1L 6y ago
  Yes and no. No institution (maybe 1920s Gottingen?) ever matched Bell Labs in their glory days.