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What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
by __loam 3y ago
What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
- echelon 3y agoCapitalism can hill climb most gradients incredibly fast. War and existential threats can do so even faster. Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
- scarmig 3y agoCapitalism is excellent at local gradient descent, better at it than governments. But it gets caught in suboptimal local minima (and, worse than that, it tends to warp the space in its current local neighborhood to make escaping that dip harder). But the more capital you have accessible, the more you can overcome steeper wells. Effective governments can deploy resources to get out of very steep wells.
- latency-guy2 3y ago[flagged]
- edgyquant 3y agoHow would that result in a better system exactly? The money going into research each year would grow and no would ever admit if the thing was impossible as it would mean willfully ending a jobs program.
- rgmerk 3y agoThat’s not how publicly funded research works. Most research projects are competitively funded by grant money on short timelines, and researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. University professors with tenure are the exception rather than the rule. Research projects regularly get canned because priorities change or the work just isn’t sexy enough.
- Nasrudith 3y agoWhat is stopping funding more publicly funded research right now? It isn't the existence of billionaires in spite of the innumerate rhetoric ad nauseam otherwise. There isn't any "doing instead". There being billionaires or not has absolutely nothing to do with the question of why they aren't allocating "doing it instead". That is putting aside that the public and private sector fund research differently with different priorities which results in both discoveries one would make that the other wouldn't and in flaws and anti-patterns observed. Private funding would be more likely to have arbitrary favoritism based on personal biases vs the public sector playing politics in a "lets play pin the jobs on the congressional districts" way.