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The problem here is not profit but the reverse, the corruption comes from the absence of profit. Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being s

The problem here is not profit but the reverse, the corruption comes from the absence of profit. Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. The government effectively "loses" all of it in accounting terms, but because it's tax it doesn't matter. The buyer is blind and doesn't even bother looking at the papers they've paid for, let alone caring about the quality. Now go look at the results coming out of corporate labs when the corporates actually want to use the tech. You get amazing labs that are consistently re-defining the state of the art: Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research, FAIR, Intel, ARM, TSMC etc. The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages - partly because being non-profit driven entities they have no way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth.

ModernMech 5y ago
> Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. Do research projects sometimes fail to deliver? Yeah. But that's just the reality of doing research. The problem I see is people expect research to be closer to development, with specific ROIs and known deliverables years ahead of time. Sometimes in the course of research you realize what you said you were going to do is impossible, and that's a good result we need to embrace, instead of attaching an expected profit to everything. > Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research I don't know so much about all the labs you listed, but just taking these three, they certainly don't have a good feeling for what their research is worth either. Do you think Bell Labs fully comprehended the worth of the transistor? For all the research Google does, ad money still accounts for 80% of their revenue. DeepMind is a pretty ironic choice because Google has dropped billions into them and it's still not clear where the profit is going to come from. So it's not clear anyone, even those with a profit motive, have any way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth. But that's not to say there's anything wrong with that... that's just how research works. You don't know how things are going to turn out, and sometimes it takes a very long time to figure that out, and it. This is why massive corporations like AT&T, Intel, Google, Xerox, MS etc. are able to run such labs. > The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages I've seen this happen first hand. In my experience these researchers usually go on to spend their time figuring our how to get us to click on more ads or to engage with a platform more. In one instance, I remember one of my lab mates being hired out of his PhD to use his research to figure out which relative ordering and styling of ads on a front page optimized ad revenue for Google. They paid him quite a lot of money to do that, and I guess it made Google some profit. But is the world better off?
- bluGill 5y ago
  > This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. That is pure corruption: the grant is funneling money from you to a domestic ariline. If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, and then that you found the best price. (though the grant should allow you to ignore the "skip maintenance and pilot training to give you a lower price" airline, but if that best happens to be foreign it shouldn't matter to the grant unless there is corruption involved)
  - pm_me_your_quan 5y ago
    > If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, Friend, at a certain point the overhead to administrate these kinds of checks is more costly than just letting people buy tickets to go to conferences. And at this point it isn't corruption in the university, it's in the form of handouts to large corporations.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I mostly agree, but you need to be careful as not checking means people learn they can abuse you not checking to waste money.
- native_samples 5y ago
  recipients of grants are heavily restricted They are restricted in trivial ways that are easy for a bureaucracy to mechanically enforce, as is true of employees at every institution. What I meant by accountability is deeper: people are not accountable for the quality or utility of their work, hence the endless tidal wave of corrupt and deceptive research that pours out of government funded 'science' every day. These researchers probably filled out their expenses paperwork correctly but the final resulting paper was an exercise in circular reasoning, or the data tables were made up, or it was P-hacked or whatever. And nobody in government cares or even notices, because nobody is held accountable for the quality of the outputs. Whilst DeepMind is not especially interested in profit it's true, and is just doing basic research, Google itself is an excellent example of how to seamlessly integrate fundamental research with actual application of that research. That's what profit motivated research looks like: just this endless stream of innovative tech being deployed into real products that are used by lots of people, without much drama. We have come to take this feat so much for granted that you're actually asking if someone working on ads is leaving the world better off. Yes, it does. Google ads are clicked on all the time because they are useful to people who are in the market to buy something. Those ads are at the center of an enormous and very high tech economic engine that powers staggering levels of wealth creation. If I understand correctly, a lot of academic papers are actually never cited by anyone - a researcher who optimises search ads by just 1% will have a positive impact on the world orders of magnitude greater than that.
SantalBlush 5y ago
>Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. No, grants are not a firehose of tax money with no accountability--not even close. You completely made that up.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Then where is the accountability for the people who take grant money and produce useless or deceptive research papers?

ModernMech 5y ago

> Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. Do research projects sometimes fail to deliver? Yeah. But that's just the reality of doing research. The problem I see is people expect research to be closer to development, with specific ROIs and known deliverables years ahead of time. Sometimes in the course of research you realize what you said you were going to do is impossible, and that's a good result we need to embrace, instead of attaching an expected profit to everything. > Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research I don't know so much about all the labs you listed, but just taking these three, they certainly don't have a good feeling for what their research is worth either. Do you think Bell Labs fully comprehended the worth of the transistor? For all the research Google does, ad money still accounts for 80% of their revenue. DeepMind is a pretty ironic choice because Google has dropped billions into them and it's still not clear where the profit is going to come from. So it's not clear anyone, even those with a profit motive, have any way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth. But that's not to say there's anything wrong with that... that's just how research works. You don't know how things are going to turn out, and sometimes it takes a very long time to figure that out, and it. This is why massive corporations like AT&T, Intel, Google, Xerox, MS etc. are able to run such labs. > The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages I've seen this happen first hand. In my experience these researchers usually go on to spend their time figuring our how to get us to click on more ads or to engage with a platform more. In one instance, I remember one of my lab mates being hired out of his PhD to use his research to figure out which relative ordering and styling of ads on a front page optimized ad revenue for Google. They paid him quite a lot of money to do that, and I guess it made Google some profit. But is the world better off?

bluGill 5y ago
> This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. That is pure corruption: the grant is funneling money from you to a domestic ariline. If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, and then that you found the best price. (though the grant should allow you to ignore the "skip maintenance and pilot training to give you a lower price" airline, but if that best happens to be foreign it shouldn't matter to the grant unless there is corruption involved)
- pm_me_your_quan 5y ago
  > If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, Friend, at a certain point the overhead to administrate these kinds of checks is more costly than just letting people buy tickets to go to conferences. And at this point it isn't corruption in the university, it's in the form of handouts to large corporations.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I mostly agree, but you need to be careful as not checking means people learn they can abuse you not checking to waste money.
native_samples 5y ago
recipients of grants are heavily restricted They are restricted in trivial ways that are easy for a bureaucracy to mechanically enforce, as is true of employees at every institution. What I meant by accountability is deeper: people are not accountable for the quality or utility of their work, hence the endless tidal wave of corrupt and deceptive research that pours out of government funded 'science' every day. These researchers probably filled out their expenses paperwork correctly but the final resulting paper was an exercise in circular reasoning, or the data tables were made up, or it was P-hacked or whatever. And nobody in government cares or even notices, because nobody is held accountable for the quality of the outputs. Whilst DeepMind is not especially interested in profit it's true, and is just doing basic research, Google itself is an excellent example of how to seamlessly integrate fundamental research with actual application of that research. That's what profit motivated research looks like: just this endless stream of innovative tech being deployed into real products that are used by lots of people, without much drama. We have come to take this feat so much for granted that you're actually asking if someone working on ads is leaving the world better off. Yes, it does. Google ads are clicked on all the time because they are useful to people who are in the market to buy something. Those ads are at the center of an enormous and very high tech economic engine that powers staggering levels of wealth creation. If I understand correctly, a lot of academic papers are actually never cited by anyone - a researcher who optimises search ads by just 1% will have a positive impact on the world orders of magnitude greater than that.

SantalBlush 5y ago

>Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. No, grants are not a firehose of tax money with no accountability--not even close. You completely made that up.

native_samples 5y ago
Then where is the accountability for the people who take grant money and produce useless or deceptive research papers?