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The decline of unfettered research (1995)
- danans 5y ago> It will be a long time (if it ever happens) before Netscape earns enough profit to justify its initial stock market valuation. Now that a long time has passed, I would be interested in hearing an analysis of this exactly as it is phrased: financially, with respect to profits vs valuation, and not in terms of historical impact.
- allturtles 5y agoNetscape was bought by AOL for $10B in 1999.[0] According to [1], Netscape was valued at $3B after it's IPO. So in that sense its early investors did well (not so much those who bought at the peak price later in 1995). However the natural follow-on question is did AOL actually get $10B worth of value out of owning Netscape. I would guess not, but I don't know how you'd prove it. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021707/http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=741 https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021707/http://news.morni... [1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/09/the-ipo-that-inflated-the-dot-com-bubble.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/09/the-ipo-th...
- danans 5y ago> However the natural follow-on question is did AOL actually get $10B worth of value out of owning Netscape. I suppose that at this point it is lost in the digital accounting noise, but I bet there are some people left who saw it happen and have a perspective on it.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoI'd say AOL got $10B out of owning Netscape, and then some. They bought Netscape in 1998 and, riding the hype wave, were able to buy Time Warner in 2000 — it was valued at $182 billion, but they paid nothing but AOL shares, which soon demonstrated their near-worthlessness.
- berko 5y ago"It is widely acknowledged that science made this transformation possible." Widely acknowledged by scientists, but not necessarily true. In the generation since this essay was published, could anyone argue that innovation has withered?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoPart of this is just the professionalization (bureaucratization) of research. Maybe in the future more independently wealthy people will simply do science for fun.
- blowfish721 5y agoGoing full circle then back into the old days when this was almost always the case. Sadly no matter if it’s the old way or the new way of doing research politics, ego and personal disputes will still always play a big part.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoYes, and for better and for worse. “Science is friendship” isn’t far from the mark.
- lumost 5y agoWe're going to have a relatively large number of children/inheritors to billion dollar scale fortunes within a decade or two. These individuals will have more money than they would ever need to use - however they will lack for prestige and impact. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them choose to create university positions for themselves, or otherwise "self-fund" their own prestige projects.
- Nasrudith 5y agoOne potential saving grace is in falling costs of tools from technological advancement but science is a very broad subject where material demands vary greatly. Theoretical physics may have minimal material needs. A citizen scientest might be theoretically able to do something with CRISPR to say, modify e-coli to start producing carbon nanotubes or try to evolve plastic eating bacteria. But not making their own Large Hadron Collider. One would need a very complete picture to be able to accurately generalize in such an absurdly broad area.
- visarga 5y ago> Theoretical physics may have minimal material needs. I don't buy that because it's very expensive to experimentally prove the difference between various theories.
- quelsolaar 5y agoA lot of times people are afraid of wasting money by giving research grants where it isn't clearly specified what they are to be used for. What is missed, is that there is a huge amount of waste, when researchers are forced to work on a dead end ideas, they know wont work out, just because that's what they have promised to do, while it was still looking promising. Scientists should be penalized for piloting to something new. unfettered research doesn't just let people work on what ever the want, it also lets they drop anything they don't believe in.
- temp131 5y agoYou could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund eugenics or something. There could be a whole range of topics that could be worked upon and you could allow the researcher to move freely between them,
- quelsolaar 5y agoThe thing that is needed is trust. Its by far the best way to do it, it just that going on trust sounds like the worst and most irresponsible way of doing it so people don't dare do it, and they don't dare argue for it.
- jmeister 5y ago“Erwin Griswold, who had been the Dean of Harvard Law School, had the theory that he knew which people were geniuses. If he approved of them, they would certainly do good work over time, and therefore they had to write nothing.“ https://volokh.com/2011/10/02/justice-breyer-on-tenure-standards-at-harvard-law-forty-years-ago/ https://volokh.com/2011/10/02/justice-breyer-on-tenure-stand... “The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic.” https://fs.blog/munger-operating-system/ https://fs.blog/munger-operating-system/
- kansface 5y agoI've often given thought to exactly this problem: trust in all American institutions has been and continues to decline precipitously. I can not name a single case of trust increasing anywhere within the last decade - religion and the church (catholic/Catholic/et al), government at all levels (SF on up to NASA), academia and the sciences and seemingly all forms of education from elementary school on up to University, unions, the medical establishment from local providers to the CDC/FDA/NIH, the US military, the police (although somehow, we went from the Democratic party regarding the FBI as Hoover's institute to one safeguarding Democracy), Facebook (Big Tech Everyman) went from a beacon of Democracy under the election of Obama to whatever it is considered now, corporations and Capitalism, the courts and even the founding of the country itself. For a more niche subject of personal interest, our furniture has seemingly purposefully declined in quality as we outsourced manufacturing to China via IKEA and forced everyone else to do so. I'd guess that the polarization of our society is self reinforcing, and that as it increases, our institutions follow along for one reason or another whether it be some form of "good business" or internal capture. Its probably some Internet Law that any institution not specifically devoted to staying out of it will eventually succumb, but even then you have the ACLU... and there is non-culture war decline in trust - something more like the financialization of everything or the injection of metrics into all parts of life that can be metered.... We don't value competence and accountability first; maybe this was always the case and only our narrative changed, but that's hard to imagine when we used to do things. At this point, why not Research, too?
- brainwipe 5y agoComing out of Uni with a PhD in the UK in 2003, I went looking for some "curiosity driven" research and didn't find any. The dotcom bust had sucked budgets dry and no-one was hiring. I've dipped my toe back into the market a few times and not found any. I'd have to move to the States and even then there was no guarantee of doing unfettered research. I carried on in my spare time but it's not the same as being surrounded in a melting pot of like minded (yet different subject) people.
- moffkalast 5y agoIf you try making your curiosity a bit more military related I'm sure you'll find something pretty quick haha.
- mcguire 5y agoI got a PhD in 2004 and could not find any non-academic research positions in the US. (I was pretty fed up with academia at the time, so I didn't look at those.) The closest I got was a job offer from a group at Telcordia Research, but when I went up for an in-person interview, I found the building mostly empty, most of the people there very bitter, and the only group that was hiring doing product development, not research. (And it was in New Jersey.) I declined the offer and went back to contracting. At IBM. That wasn't a smart move either.
- ketanmaheshwari 5y agoI recently proposed an idea to create a new data transfer protocol that involves drones to carry data in a medium with a prong attached to them. When the drone lands on a platform atop a building, the prong connects to a computer connected to the platform and sitting inside the building triggering a mount action. The data gets transferred to the computer. Now, whoever needs to transfer data from this building to another will use the same method to upload it. I do not think this will be the best way to move data but if a protocol is in place it could be used as a basis for future intra-campus data movement. The proposal was shot down. A schematic of the idea is drawn here: https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/datadrone/blob/main/schematic.pdf https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/datadrone/blob/main/sche...
- jcims 5y agoBuild it for transporting beer and just start attaching SSDs to the bottles.
- trzy 5y agoBut why?
- visarga 5y agoTo actually hear your data buzzing around?
- topspin 5y agoUse cases for this are easy to imagine. For example; data collected by instruments in remote locations that do not have high capacity or cost effective network connections. When collection has to be done by a human it could require days or weeks, perhaps more. Whereas an automated system could perform the task more frequently.
- ncc-erik 5y agoI took a networks class during college, and there was a homework question from the textbook about a scenario like this. It had you compare transferring a large amount of data over the Internet versus loading it onto a disk and driving a physical distance to load it onto the other computer. The answer depended on the available bandwidth against the distance to drive. And for other practical applications related to this idea: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
- daniel-thompson 5y agoNeeds a (1995) in the title.
- commandlinefan 5y agoNot that it's gotten any better in the intervening 26 years.
- Animats 5y ago(1995)
- dang 5y agoAdded. Thanks!
- reginold 5y agoI find this article a bucolic tale of tech and research. Right after WWII with the planet in shambles, living in the "winning" country, you're working on computers and found unfettered access to funds and investment? No surprise. GE in 1956? To leave out the massive macroeconomic power of GE in that day and age is shortsighted. Same with Bell Labs, et all. This was an age where military spending rose from 1% of GDP to 10%. It was military spending and military might that bought you that "unfettered research". Yes, society should be better at allocating for the long term regarding research and tech -- but 1956 GE was not some sort of utopia. We're just in a lower part of the cycle right now. Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be war. Hopefully modern financial markets will be able to create those cycles without as much bloodshed.
- whatshisface 5y agoWar only pushes the reset button in a positive way when it's WWII and you're America. See the economic consequences of the war in Vietnam for a more typical outcome of putting military spending to use.
- warning26 5y agoParent did note "living in the 'winning' country" as as precondition, so seems that you are probably in agreement to some extent
- whatshisface 5y agoOkay, economic consequences of successfully invading Afghanistan. Or Iraq.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoDo pyrrhic victories count? Seems that the data model is not clear cut.
- reginold 5y ago
- jamesmishra 5y agoI was lucky to take a grad-level math course in error correcting codes from Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, the author of the essay. I read a lot of his papers ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ ) in the hopes that I would learn something to improve my exam scores, but he has a knack for asking questions so fundamental that they have almost never even been properly formulated before. If you have some time, I recommend reading a few of his papers. He completely changed my view of mathematics.
- akoluthic 5y agoWow, what a diverse body of work. Could you give an example of a paper that you feel fits your description of having "almost never even been properly formulated before"?
- paganel 5y ago> what a diverse body of work Indeed, for example this page [1] is absolutely fantastic, it hits a lot of right buttons in my case (history of railways, history of finance/economics, a combination between history of railways and the history of finance, which is even more interesting). [1] http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/bubbles.html http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/bubbles.html
- pottertheotter 5y agoI was also in need of some 1990's WWW nostalgia tonight, which this website provided.
- miobrien 5y agoI remember coming across his essay on Newton. Very interesting. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/PT.3.4521 https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/PT.3.4521
- mmmmpancakes 5y agoScience Mart by Philip Mirowski does a good job of laying out, for those in research but also for those who are not, the political-economic changes that are responsible for this.
- dang 5y agoOnly one past tiny thread: The Decline of Unfettered Research (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2952423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2952423 - Sept 2011 (2 comments)
- sam0x17 5y agoA huge contributor to this imo is the grant system and how it works particularly at very large research institutions and universities. Typically the only people with the means and time to do "just for curiosity" / fundamental research are people in long-term professor / research positions where they are allowed to pursue whatever they want (as long as they are frequently published). Grants work against this, as they create an incentive to work on specific, often more short term projects / applications rather than fundamental questions. In this way, injecting money into academia via grants actually reduces the amount of fundamental research being done, because a majority of researchers are going to chase the grants aka the short term interests of corporations and governments rather than do less financially rewarding fundamental research.
- Robotbeat 5y agoWithout grants, those people would just not have a job in the field.
- sam0x17 5y agoThat's really not true. My advisor in undergrad publishes 5-6 papers a year and has never bothered to seek grants in his entire career because he works at an institution that actually emphasizes teaching and compensates it's professors accordingly.
- m0zg 5y agoWhat he described in the beginning of that essay is how Microsoft Research worked just 15 years ago. Maybe it still does, I wouldn't know. Yes, you are judged by your results. But beyond that and beyond some flimsy constraints dictated by what "team" you were on, there were no limitations whatsoever. This was the most productive and enjoyable time of my entire 25+ year career, and a staggering contrast to how the rest of Microsoft works. And the people were by far the smartest I have ever met, and this was not the only lab I worked at. Most of them weren't genius level (although they were still unusually smart), but some very clearly were, to the point where I'd sit in some meeting and lecture and think "what the fuck am I even doing here". Too bad most of the stuff they do never ends up in products - the rest of Microsoft can't tell a gradient from a hole in the ground, with very few exceptions (basically just Bing and some parts of Ads).
- hyperpallium2 5y agoFrom the perspective of stability-loving wealth, unfettered research is opening pandora's box. At last, the internet, opium of the masses, finally neutralizes the intelligent classes. Wealth will not care for genuine research until two aliens races war bitterly over some unique natural resource we take for granted. We will not recover.
- photochemsyn 5y agoA lot of blame on the university side goes to Bayh-Dole patent laws of the 1980s which allowed patents from publicly financed research to be effectively transferred to the private sector, via the mechanism of the exclusive license. This is going on right now with vaccines and antivirals as well, but it's been a steady theme for over three decades. This could be fixed with the commonsense solution of requiring public access to publicly financed research and patents without burdensome fees. This would have allowed numerous private entities to begin their own development and manufacturing processes without worrying about patents and IP lawsuits. Unfortunately, the end result wa the rise in power of the academic Intellectual Property Office which oversees the licensing (and gathers in the percentages). The UC and MIT systems are most notorious for pushing this approach in the 1990s, but it seems to be everywhere these days. Effectively, the administrators put researchers with patent-generation potential at the front of the food line, and also pushed hard for public-private partnerships with mega-corps (UC Berkeley and BP, Stanford and Exxon, etc.) As part of that mentality, short-term profitability became the guiding light, not basic blue-skies research into whatever the researchers wanted to look at. Since much basic research generates nothing of immediate commercial interest, it was viewed as less important and even a drag on the bottom line. Running with this mentality equates to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, as groundbreaking discoveries leading to truly new technologies then become much less likely. On the business side, the large private research centers of the post WWII era seem much diminished. Giving corporations a tax exemption for increasing their R&D spending while also raising their taxes to 1960 levels might be an efficient way to reverse that trend. Elon Musk could then avoid the tax bill by putting all his money into a SpaceX R&D facility to rival the old Bell Labs, which is kind of a good idea anyway isn't it?
- JackFr 5y agoHe’s a little too casually dismissive of the end of Cold War military budgets as a driving force. He basically waves it off without explanation. (I’m always amused that the Lambda-the-Ultimate papers were paid for by the Office of Naval Research.)
- Fomite 5y agoOne of the reasons I took the position I did was that - fairly rarely for my field, which is heavily grant funded - there was enough hard money to do some curiosity driven research and methods development.
- rabbits77 5y agoI do industry R&D. I don’t think I am all that fettered. I do accept that there is a certain “social contract” involved though! I understand my employers business and my work is done with the ambition to advance the companies long term position. Practically speaking this means that my work is restricted in that it deliver something resembling a product or service within a couple of years. Even if only the thinnest of MVPs of a concept. String enough of those together and you get pretty close to something resembling “unfettered”. I suppose my point is that industry R&D is not all that bad right now, you just need to be a reasonably responsible corporate citizen.
- stagger87 5y ago> Practically speaking this means that my work is restricted in that it deliver something resembling a product or service within a couple of years. So fettered, as per the articles definition of the word fettered. It really just sounds like you don't like the word fettered for some reason. Maybe it has a negative connotation to you?
- SeanSpearo 5y agoI've got to say, that 4th paragraph is, or at least should be, the modus operandi of every scientist in any related field. >In this style of work, the researcher is allowed, and even required, to select problems for investigation, without having to justify their relevance for the institution, and without negotiating a set of objectives with management. The value of the research is determined by other scientists, again without looking for its immediate effect on the bottom line of the employer. The assumption that justifies such a policy is that "scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity." It's sad the current state of science doesn't appreciate the work done purely through curiosity, and instead want to milk professionals for other means and agendas. The paragraph sheds a light on what science really is, and what's kept fueling it for millenia, curiosity. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come from curiosity in answering burning questions. Yes we still have some great discoveries, but not as much now I would think. Most of what science today seems to be is just proving or disproving agendas with clear incentives. There are some that seem to be born out of organically produced work, but it's hard to know because who knows the incentives and agendas behind the scenes.