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I had a great conversation this evening with a marine biologist studying the recent collapse of a 100,000 sq km California kelp forest. The grants for the scien

I had a great conversation this evening with a marine biologist studying the recent collapse of a 100,000 sq km California kelp forest. The grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship are in the 10k-50k$ range. Over the past few years, something killed over 5 billion giant starfish and “science” has no idea what did it. Without the starfish, the sea urchin population exploded, turning kelp forest into desert. I love the LHC. But we need to seriously grow the science pie and prioritize the science of ecosystem collapse and management. There simply aren’t enough trained scientists.

pishpash 4y ago
To grow the science pie you need to shrink the military pie. To shrink the military pie you need to make profiting off of science much more lucrative than profiting off of slaughter.
- civilized 4y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but honestly, I'm not sure there's even that much logic to it. The US federal government seems to have a largely arbitrary budget. No real experience or rational principle restrains it. We have never seen a clear case of negative consequences related to spending too much, so no one is quite sure how much might be too much. Sometimes a politician sees political advantage in grandstanding about fiscal responsibility, but seconds later, that same politician will be found funneling some arbitrary number of billions of $$$ in pork to their district. I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care. We could and should 10x the science budget, and it would have vastly more impact than almost everything else the government spends money on. But we don't because politicians see it as some amusement to fritter a limited amount of money on. Occasionally Republicans will publish a list of ridiculous scientific projects and no one wants to be caught in the crosshairs of that -- even though tens of billions are probably being simultaneously spent on murdering people in a country you've never heard of, or flushing thousands of tons of soybeans down a toilet. Defense-related science gets an exception to this, which is why a big war is often also a big leap forward for science.
  - pishpash 4y ago
    No, politicians are very (street) smart. Science produces results in the long-term, but elections are every x years and a career is maybe y years, all of which are shorter than the time in which science will show definitive results. So politicians will just look out for themselves as much as they can. The reason militaries get funded is because it plays on the basest fear in people and the money makes it back into politicians' pockets fast without having to show any more results than a pile of rubble. You're right however, that nowadays it's structural that scientists request funding through defense, like of course it needs that cover.
    - civilized 4y ago
      Right, the problem is politicians' incentives, and since their incentive is to get us to vote for them, the problem is us.
    - phonescreen_man 4y ago
      Some good points, except the first one. Politicians are mostly not smart. It’s why they go into politics in the first place!
    - kentm 4y ago
      Militaries get funded in the USA because it’s a massive jobs program.
      - pishpash 4y ago
        Building housing and infrastructure can be a jobs program. Science itself (e.g. Apollo program, even though that's dual use) can be a massive jobs program. Being the security apparatus of the world as a pure play though is a choice, and a rather unique one.
        kentm 4y ago
        I agree that I'd prefer those sorts of job programs.
jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
Such a thing sounds disasterous. Was a private campaign organized for donations? I think you'd have a better chance convincing private citizens at this point than any government.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Yes. If you know anyone who cares about kelp forests in California, consider donating. https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/ https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/
ithkuil 4y ago
I recently heard this comment by Sean Carroll in his June AMA episode https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-june-2022/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-... --- [..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?” It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is a lesson that has been beaten home over and over again when we’ve had an expensive science project that people have campaigned against on the theory that the money could be better spent elsewhere, and the project gets cancelled, and guess what, the money does not get spent on science at all ’cause there’s no rule that the amount of money spent on science has to be fixed ---
- dekhn 4y ago
  This is not correct. There is a fixed annual amount and it is partitioned by policy and earmarks.
  - aplummer 4y ago
    At least in some countries, the government makes a yearly budget and decides what to fund, including specific projects.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      That's what I said. See the ssc as an example. Note also the nih is a massive fund (25+ billion in grants per year, all bio). Nsf is a better example because they have to fund many fields. Doe has fixed funding for nuclear, plus soft funds for scientists in many fields (they funded the human genome long before nih).
  - wslack 4y ago
    This is not accurate. There is no fixed annual amounts for anything the US Congress passes, notwithstanding the fact that the LHC is an international project.
c789a123 4y ago
Is the 10k-50k "grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship" refers to the sum of all grants to the "the science of ecosystem stewardship", or just that marine biologist got for his particular study? Is there only his team doing study in this field or there are other teams doing similar ones got separate grants?
ssss11 4y ago
I think there isn’t enough _funding _ Funding needs to come first then extra scientists if budgets permit. The problem in immunology as far as I can see from a close onlooker perspective is there is less and less funding. Staff get by on meagre wages, hoping to hold onto their role as budgets get cut and grants get smaller. Very sad state of affairs.
iuiz 4y ago
https://imgflip.com/i/6lwyle https://imgflip.com/i/6lwyle
Gareth321 4y ago
>There simply aren’t enough trained scientists. It just doesn't pay enough. Society doesn't place enough value on these roles.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  Sure, that doesn't help. Most scientists don't do it for the money though, so that doesn't have to be an issue per se. The barrier to entry for becoming a scientist, however, is extremely high and not filled with equal opportunity. One example is a female friend of mine with two Master's degrees who's currently not getting paid a lot in a government job. She would love to do a PHD and start doing research in the areas she's been educated in and worked in, but she hardly gets invited to interviews and when she does, she never seems to get the job, because she lacks research experience. The longer she works outside of research, the less of a chance she gets to actually get hired for a research position. I understand that there have to be high barriers to entry, because quality needs to be high, but I feel like the balance currently might not be right.
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    Believe it or not, scientists need to eat, want to own homes, have vacation, and buy things like everyone else. There's a selection bias in "scientists don't do it for money"--the scientists that don't do it for the money tend to be the most successful because they're willing to undercut their competition. They're the ones who will invest significant amounts of their life towards an area of research, spend their weekends and nights pursuing some goal, sometimes even put family second. They are the entrepreneurs of science. There's a lot of other scientists who are just as skilled, may have just as good ideas, as so on. They view their work as work, enjoyable for some or just a job for others (though these are very few as by this point they just find something less stressful that pays). So it's not that the lack of money doesn't help, it basically shapes the entire labor pool of scientists selecting for the most passionate, the ones who might not be making much over a small resturaunt manager when you normalize their time spent to comp. Skilled scientists who want a life and see other opportunities tend to leave science as it's high risk low reward and apply their skill elsewhere. It's a lot to science. If you look at CS, the research community is almost starving as most leave for big tech or others that can comp 3-5x what academia can provide. I suspect big pharma is a hit the same.
7thaccount 4y ago
Kinda sad when the government wastes millions in the funding of worthless R&D projects. I've never been more disappointed to see that such a huge portion of the whitepapers in my field aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They have also spent like $40M on certain rounds of funding to groups and it doesn't go anywhere as anyone in industry can clearly see that the projects are completely useless and don't solve any kind of real industry problem besides getting large amounts of cash.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
The amount of money that goes into these unuseable results is just sad. This and astrophysics of remote galaxies. Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors. Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students. We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator. For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.
- pif 4y ago
  I have a PhD done in CERN, too, and I can state that your remark is idiotic. Money was not spent in order to confirm that the Higgs boson existed: rather, it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy. Whether the Standard Model is validated or challenged, it matters as much as a grain of sand on top of the Himalayas.
  - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    > I can state that your remark is idiotic. Thank you for the kind comment. > it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy. What part exactly is humanity going to enjoy? The 8 T magnet? Where do you envision using the technology to drive particles? Or, to be fair, which technology from the LHC was ever used for humanity? Anything you do in biology today can have a direct effect OTOH.
    - gen220 4y ago
      For what it’s worth, a very close friend of mine got his Physics PhD at CERN in the late 80s (high energy particle physics) where he witnessed the birth of HTTP. This experience, coupled with the US government’s decision to not build an equivalent super collider in the 90s, led him to switch to computer science, where he had a bit of a “head start” due to his experience at CERN. He always said the data analysis, measurement, and collection stuff was more advanced than anything else in the world at the time. The original “big data”. But in 2022, this is less of a distinguishing feature in his opinion. Also, Bell Labs probably faced similar issues. I asked, and he agrees that he’d do molecular biology if he were starting over today. So you’re not at all crazy!
jiveturkey42 4y ago
I always wonder if the implicit telos of modern science is space colonization (leave this planet behind), and what the ramifications of that mindset is. Is this a dogma that can be challenged? We've still barely scratched the surface of ecological sciences
- MockObject 4y ago
  Yes, and it's the same telos driving all life, which has spread to every possible corner of the globe, and now will spread throughout the galaxy. I don't think anything that fundamental should be challenged.

pishpash 4y ago

To grow the science pie you need to shrink the military pie. To shrink the military pie you need to make profiting off of science much more lucrative than profiting off of slaughter.

civilized 4y ago
I get where you're coming from, but honestly, I'm not sure there's even that much logic to it. The US federal government seems to have a largely arbitrary budget. No real experience or rational principle restrains it. We have never seen a clear case of negative consequences related to spending too much, so no one is quite sure how much might be too much. Sometimes a politician sees political advantage in grandstanding about fiscal responsibility, but seconds later, that same politician will be found funneling some arbitrary number of billions of $$$ in pork to their district. I suspect the truth is that politicians mostly just don't care that much about science because they aren't smart enough to understand its value, or decent enough to care. We could and should 10x the science budget, and it would have vastly more impact than almost everything else the government spends money on. But we don't because politicians see it as some amusement to fritter a limited amount of money on. Occasionally Republicans will publish a list of ridiculous scientific projects and no one wants to be caught in the crosshairs of that -- even though tens of billions are probably being simultaneously spent on murdering people in a country you've never heard of, or flushing thousands of tons of soybeans down a toilet. Defense-related science gets an exception to this, which is why a big war is often also a big leap forward for science.
- pishpash 4y ago
  No, politicians are very (street) smart. Science produces results in the long-term, but elections are every x years and a career is maybe y years, all of which are shorter than the time in which science will show definitive results. So politicians will just look out for themselves as much as they can. The reason militaries get funded is because it plays on the basest fear in people and the money makes it back into politicians' pockets fast without having to show any more results than a pile of rubble. You're right however, that nowadays it's structural that scientists request funding through defense, like of course it needs that cover.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Right, the problem is politicians' incentives, and since their incentive is to get us to vote for them, the problem is us.
  - phonescreen_man 4y ago
    Some good points, except the first one. Politicians are mostly not smart. It’s why they go into politics in the first place!
  - kentm 4y ago
    Militaries get funded in the USA because it’s a massive jobs program.
    - pishpash 4y ago
      Building housing and infrastructure can be a jobs program. Science itself (e.g. Apollo program, even though that's dual use) can be a massive jobs program. Being the security apparatus of the world as a pure play though is a choice, and a rather unique one.
      - kentm 4y ago
        I agree that I'd prefer those sorts of job programs.

jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago

Such a thing sounds disasterous. Was a private campaign organized for donations? I think you'd have a better chance convincing private citizens at this point than any government.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Yes. If you know anyone who cares about kelp forests in California, consider donating. https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/ https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/

ithkuil 4y ago

I recently heard this comment by Sean Carroll in his June AMA episode https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-june-2022/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/13/ama-... --- [..] we do not have a fixed pot of money that we sit down and say, “What is the best way we can spend this on research?” It’s not like there’s a fixed number of dollars and we say, “Okay, biology gets so many and chemistry gets so many, and particle physics gets so many.” This is a lesson that has been beaten home over and over again when we’ve had an expensive science project that people have campaigned against on the theory that the money could be better spent elsewhere, and the project gets cancelled, and guess what, the money does not get spent on science at all ’cause there’s no rule that the amount of money spent on science has to be fixed ---

dekhn 4y ago
This is not correct. There is a fixed annual amount and it is partitioned by policy and earmarks.
- aplummer 4y ago
  At least in some countries, the government makes a yearly budget and decides what to fund, including specific projects.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    That's what I said. See the ssc as an example. Note also the nih is a massive fund (25+ billion in grants per year, all bio). Nsf is a better example because they have to fund many fields. Doe has fixed funding for nuclear, plus soft funds for scientists in many fields (they funded the human genome long before nih).
- wslack 4y ago
  This is not accurate. There is no fixed annual amounts for anything the US Congress passes, notwithstanding the fact that the LHC is an international project.

c789a123 4y ago

Is the 10k-50k "grants for the science of ecosystem stewardship" refers to the sum of all grants to the "the science of ecosystem stewardship", or just that marine biologist got for his particular study? Is there only his team doing study in this field or there are other teams doing similar ones got separate grants?

ssss11 4y ago

I think there isn’t enough _funding _ Funding needs to come first then extra scientists if budgets permit. The problem in immunology as far as I can see from a close onlooker perspective is there is less and less funding. Staff get by on meagre wages, hoping to hold onto their role as budgets get cut and grants get smaller. Very sad state of affairs.

iuiz 4y ago

https://imgflip.com/i/6lwyle https://imgflip.com/i/6lwyle

Gareth321 4y ago

>There simply aren’t enough trained scientists. It just doesn't pay enough. Society doesn't place enough value on these roles.

donkeyd 4y ago
Sure, that doesn't help. Most scientists don't do it for the money though, so that doesn't have to be an issue per se. The barrier to entry for becoming a scientist, however, is extremely high and not filled with equal opportunity. One example is a female friend of mine with two Master's degrees who's currently not getting paid a lot in a government job. She would love to do a PHD and start doing research in the areas she's been educated in and worked in, but she hardly gets invited to interviews and when she does, she never seems to get the job, because she lacks research experience. The longer she works outside of research, the less of a chance she gets to actually get hired for a research position. I understand that there have to be high barriers to entry, because quality needs to be high, but I feel like the balance currently might not be right.
- Frost1x 4y ago
  Believe it or not, scientists need to eat, want to own homes, have vacation, and buy things like everyone else. There's a selection bias in "scientists don't do it for money"--the scientists that don't do it for the money tend to be the most successful because they're willing to undercut their competition. They're the ones who will invest significant amounts of their life towards an area of research, spend their weekends and nights pursuing some goal, sometimes even put family second. They are the entrepreneurs of science. There's a lot of other scientists who are just as skilled, may have just as good ideas, as so on. They view their work as work, enjoyable for some or just a job for others (though these are very few as by this point they just find something less stressful that pays). So it's not that the lack of money doesn't help, it basically shapes the entire labor pool of scientists selecting for the most passionate, the ones who might not be making much over a small resturaunt manager when you normalize their time spent to comp. Skilled scientists who want a life and see other opportunities tend to leave science as it's high risk low reward and apply their skill elsewhere. It's a lot to science. If you look at CS, the research community is almost starving as most leave for big tech or others that can comp 3-5x what academia can provide. I suspect big pharma is a hit the same.

7thaccount 4y ago

Kinda sad when the government wastes millions in the funding of worthless R&D projects. I've never been more disappointed to see that such a huge portion of the whitepapers in my field aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They have also spent like $40M on certain rounds of funding to groups and it doesn't go anywhere as anyone in industry can clearly see that the projects are completely useless and don't solve any kind of real industry problem besides getting large amounts of cash.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

The amount of money that goes into these unuseable results is just sad. This and astrophysics of remote galaxies. Either we have a breakthrough that shakes physics and that leads to brand new discoveries that further shake engineering, or it is a waste of time. Between ~1870 and ~1950 we had a fireworks of discoveries that wee shaking our view of the world. And explained transistors. Today? Nothing special except for a bunch of people and PhD students. We are just starting to scratch the surface of biology - this is where we need to invest. Solid state physics could be another one. But not particle physics with their crazy energies that are completely unreachable outside of an accelerator. For context, I have a PhD done in CERN. If I were to choose again, I would bo for bioinformatics or biophysics.

pif 4y ago
I have a PhD done in CERN, too, and I can state that your remark is idiotic. Money was not spent in order to confirm that the Higgs boson existed: rather, it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy. Whether the Standard Model is validated or challenged, it matters as much as a grain of sand on top of the Himalayas.
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  > I can state that your remark is idiotic. Thank you for the kind comment. > it was invested in order to improve technology to such a degree that we could have an answer. That is what people paid for, and that is what humanity will enjoy. What part exactly is humanity going to enjoy? The 8 T magnet? Where do you envision using the technology to drive particles? Or, to be fair, which technology from the LHC was ever used for humanity? Anything you do in biology today can have a direct effect OTOH.
  - gen220 4y ago
    For what it’s worth, a very close friend of mine got his Physics PhD at CERN in the late 80s (high energy particle physics) where he witnessed the birth of HTTP. This experience, coupled with the US government’s decision to not build an equivalent super collider in the 90s, led him to switch to computer science, where he had a bit of a “head start” due to his experience at CERN. He always said the data analysis, measurement, and collection stuff was more advanced than anything else in the world at the time. The original “big data”. But in 2022, this is less of a distinguishing feature in his opinion. Also, Bell Labs probably faced similar issues. I asked, and he agrees that he’d do molecular biology if he were starting over today. So you’re not at all crazy!

jiveturkey42 4y ago

I always wonder if the implicit telos of modern science is space colonization (leave this planet behind), and what the ramifications of that mindset is. Is this a dogma that can be challenged? We've still barely scratched the surface of ecological sciences

MockObject 4y ago
Yes, and it's the same telos driving all life, which has spread to every possible corner of the globe, and now will spread throughout the galaxy. I don't think anything that fundamental should be challenged.