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I disagree strongly with this. Do you really think, for example, we would have the James Webb telescope if it wasn't for government funded science? I don't thi

I disagree strongly with this. Do you really think, for example, we would have the James Webb telescope if it wasn't for government funded science? I don't think people appreciate quite how much good governments funding science has done historically. People generally know that the Internet and WWW come from projects that have been funded though taxation, but a lot of people are unaware that a lot of the other elements of the infrastructure - things like media formats (JPG, MPG etc), protocols (like wifi) also come from tax funded projects. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that these things have been a huge positive in the history of mankind, and wouldn't exist without government funded research.

smitty1e 5y ago
The very internet we used got its start as a government project[1] after all. I submit that both can hold true across time and people: government does good, and government does bad. The reason, I submit with copious handwaving, is that people don't scale. The Agile ninja team kills it because it's a small group of ninjas. Throw some zeros behind the team size, make those ninjas into division leads, and watch it crumble. Many will contend that the number of communication edges in the graph of team members is the issue. That may be a significant contributor, but consider: people function at scale in military situations, with curtailed individuality and authoritarian control structures. Indeed, a subset of the population thrives like that. But it doesn't generalize. Back on topic: the militarized external threat has historically driven much innovation. Was not the internet itself born in the Cold War? Absent that external pressure, the government has drifted into subsidizing much questionable stuff. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
coldtea 5y ago
>I disagree strongly with this. Do you really think, for example, we would have the James Webb telescope if it wasn't for government funded science? Maybe not. But then again, is this particular example (as opposed to the army-research ones) really an argument? People could have gotten far more pragmatic scientific and technological bang for their tax-buck (as an opportunity cost alternative to the James Webb telescope). (Of course if one starts with the premises that "our destiny is the stars", and that that's a realistic goal, and also that we don't need to fund on far more pressing earthly things in order to survice mid-term before we manage to even get somewhat close to that destiny, then not having the telescope seems like some huge regression. But those are a lot of premises).

smitty1e 5y ago

The very internet we used got its start as a government project[1] after all. I submit that both can hold true across time and people: government does good, and government does bad. The reason, I submit with copious handwaving, is that people don't scale. The Agile ninja team kills it because it's a small group of ninjas. Throw some zeros behind the team size, make those ninjas into division leads, and watch it crumble. Many will contend that the number of communication edges in the graph of team members is the issue. That may be a significant contributor, but consider: people function at scale in military situations, with curtailed individuality and authoritarian control structures. Indeed, a subset of the population thrives like that. But it doesn't generalize. Back on topic: the militarized external threat has historically driven much innovation. Was not the internet itself born in the Cold War? Absent that external pressure, the government has drifted into subsidizing much questionable stuff. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

coldtea 5y ago

>I disagree strongly with this. Do you really think, for example, we would have the James Webb telescope if it wasn't for government funded science? Maybe not. But then again, is this particular example (as opposed to the army-research ones) really an argument? People could have gotten far more pragmatic scientific and technological bang for their tax-buck (as an opportunity cost alternative to the James Webb telescope). (Of course if one starts with the premises that "our destiny is the stars", and that that's a realistic goal, and also that we don't need to fund on far more pressing earthly things in order to survice mid-term before we manage to even get somewhat close to that destiny, then not having the telescope seems like some huge regression. But those are a lot of premises).