4 ms·

Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific r

Suppose they got absolutely nothing out of it. This shouldn't matter. You cannot easily predict what rewards will come as a result of cutting-edge scientific research. It's a gamble. However, due to all the technologies we have right now as a result of expensive government spending on research, the general consensus is (or at least should be) that the benefits FAR outweigh the costs.

jamesaguilar 15y ago
> It's a gamble. Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or via its successor events and discoveries), then I do question whether it's wise to spend money on it.
- wtallis 15y ago
  If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering. You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to. That history primarily shows two things: sustained serious scientific research correlates with technological advances and breakthroughs, and governments are usually the only ones willing and able to throw large amounts of cash at a project for a long time before the results start coming in or making money.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    > If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.
    - wtallis 15y ago
      They only calculated one side of the equation. What would have been the long-term effect if the Manhattan Project experiments had produced negative results and falsified the quantum mechanical models of the time? You can't just ignore that possibility and still have a valid expectation.
      - jamesaguilar 15y ago
        I don't really understand. My point is that they had some guesses about the possible uses if the experiments bore out. It's a disproof of the claim that you can't make some kind of predictions about these things. Whether the predictions are always correct is a completely different question that I am not trying to answer.
        wtallis 15y ago
        Often, we do have a fairly good idea what the ramifications will be if an experiment goes a certain way. But we almost never also have a good idea what the ramifications would be if things go the other way. Without knowledge of what the benefit might be if the outcome surprises you, how can you say that the experiment doesn't have enough potential benefit to be worth the time and money? There's no way to place an easy upper bound on the payoff of the less-expected outcome, so your cost-benefit analysis can't simply ignore the possibilities that you consider unlikely.
jerf 15y ago
At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib generalities about how wonderful science is or vaguely handwaved "benefits" far outweighing the much-harder-to-handwave "costs". I'm not saying these questions can't be answered. I'm saying the glittering, glib generalities being offered here ring very hollow against that level of real cost, and you need to brush your arguments up. (Also, feel free to apply this to any other billion dollars you care to name. I think we take our spending of billions and trillions way too casually, personally. We can and in some sense must spend it (dollars can be hoarded but much of what they represent, like man-hours, can not), but more thought put into it would be nice.)
- fragsworth 15y ago
  Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?) What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?) Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.
  - bane 15y ago
    "Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?" Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.

jamesaguilar 15y ago

> It's a gamble. Even gambles have odds. And, to me at least, it does matter if we get something valuable out of our tax dollars. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some slobbering hard-line libertarian who believes that any experiment with a negative result is wasted money. On the other hand, if the odds are that a positive or negative result is nowhere likely to benefit the public in a concrete manner (either directly or via its successor events and discoveries), then I do question whether it's wise to spend money on it.

wtallis 15y ago
If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. It would be engineering. You can't make valid predictions about the expected benefit of any single experiment before running it for the first time. All we have to go on is the history of major scientific undertakings, and the technologies they have eventually lead to. That history primarily shows two things: sustained serious scientific research correlates with technological advances and breakthroughs, and governments are usually the only ones willing and able to throw large amounts of cash at a project for a long time before the results start coming in or making money.
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  > If you could know the odds or expected payoff in advance, then it wouldn't be cutting-edge science anymore. Not so. For example, it was hypothesized long before the first human-initiated fission event that the energy from fission would possibly be useful for creating a bomb. The research and physics that went into actually developing the thing was still cutting edge even though predictions had been made about its long term practical applications.
  - wtallis 15y ago
    They only calculated one side of the equation. What would have been the long-term effect if the Manhattan Project experiments had produced negative results and falsified the quantum mechanical models of the time? You can't just ignore that possibility and still have a valid expectation.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      I don't really understand. My point is that they had some guesses about the possible uses if the experiments bore out. It's a disproof of the claim that you can't make some kind of predictions about these things. Whether the predictions are always correct is a completely different question that I am not trying to answer.
      - wtallis 15y ago
        Often, we do have a fairly good idea what the ramifications will be if an experiment goes a certain way. But we almost never also have a good idea what the ramifications would be if things go the other way. Without knowledge of what the benefit might be if the outcome surprises you, how can you say that the experiment doesn't have enough potential benefit to be worth the time and money? There's no way to place an easy upper bound on the payoff of the less-expected outcome, so your cost-benefit analysis can't simply ignore the possibilities that you consider unlikely.

jerf 15y ago

At the median United States income of $40,000/year, a single billion dollars is 25,000 person-years of work dedicated solely to that billion dollars. Multiply as appropriate. Nine billion-ish in this case, according to Wikipedia. Asking what we (the human race) got for nine billion dollars (225,000 person-years of work, at a generous 50 years in the workforce the life work of 4,500 people) deserves more than glib generalities about how wonderful science is or vaguely handwaved "benefits" far outweighing the much-harder-to-handwave "costs". I'm not saying these questions can't be answered. I'm saying the glittering, glib generalities being offered here ring very hollow against that level of real cost, and you need to brush your arguments up. (Also, feel free to apply this to any other billion dollars you care to name. I think we take our spending of billions and trillions way too casually, personally. We can and in some sense must spend it (dollars can be hoarded but much of what they represent, like man-hours, can not), but more thought put into it would be nice.)

fragsworth 15y ago
Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this? What if these advanced particle accelerators reveal that we understand physics incorrectly (which would be the case if the Higgs doesn't exist)? What if, for instance, we discovered that faster-than-light travel is possible through portals that we can construct out of quantum materials? And then 10-15 years later we have a functional portal device? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs cars? planes? trains?) What if we discover a new computing method based on the research started by these particle accelerators, better than quantum computing, that eventually gives us so much computing power that we are capable of developing human-like AI? Or an AI that is many times more powerful than humans? How much would this improve our lives? (Hint: who needs to work anymore?) Who knows what we will be capable of? It's a fucking gamble. As it stands, we don't know. But the potential rewards outweigh the costs so much as to render them ridiculous.
- bane 15y ago
  "Are you aware that we might not have had the Internet if it wasn't for government funded research? How much has your quality of life improved as a result of this?" Might also be a good time to point out that the Internet did not fulfill it's intended goals either -- a communications network resistant to withstanding the loss of huge chunks of it's infrastructure most likely caused by large scale nuclear bombardment by the Soviets.