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Japan can be a science heavyweight once more if it rethinks funding
- dang 2y ago[stub for offtopicness] [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018086 for why]
- ninetyninenine 2y agonah. It's not funding. It's more a side effect of japans economic problems.
- TheCleric 2y agoIt can probably become a science heavyweight simply by being here at the moment when science funding in the USA is about to collapse.
- nickff 2y agoThe USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds. That said, it would probably take some time (and some pain) to readjust, and theoretical/arts research would likely be dramatically reduced.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago> The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal government became the dominant source of funds. For my own curiosity, when did that transition occur?
- epistasis 2y agoCan you share any pointers on this topic about applied research success, I'm guessing in the pre-WW2 era? I have not heard anything about that and have not been able to locate supporting resources by a web search just now.
- ghc 2y agoEdison, Bell, IBM, Morse, US Steel, Wright, Sikorsky, Westinghouse, Marconi, Dictaphone, Goodyear...there's a lot, any many of the companies are still household names even if they don't exist anymore. How did these R&D operations get their start? The same as universities at the time: they were funded by private backers, often family, or the parent corporation of the R&D Lab (IBM Research, Bell Labs, General Electric, etc.). It's Vannevar Bush who spearheaded the creation of the federal research funding system as we know it today, for the sake of the war effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush. As a side effect, basic research is now mostly government funded, and the peer review system was created to ensure taxpayers were "getting their money's worth". A more interesting question is: why did it work then, and could it work today? My (admittedly pessimistic) view is that life-changing innovations were a lot easier (read: cheaper) to create back then. Continual breakthroughs in materials science, transportation and communications technologies left a lot of "white space" to innovate in.
- vuln 2y agoPerhaps US Universities should tap into billion dollar endowments or slash the administrative headcount instead of raising tuition yet again. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-trump-university-crisis/681634/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-trump...
- fisherjeff 2y agoBut the point of an endowment is to have a relatively stable funding stream in perpetuity - if you start dipping into the principal, the funding stream starts shrinking and is no longer perpetual. Harvard’s endowment, for example, already funds a little less than 40% of its budget, and should be able to continue doing so indefinitely. If you bump that to even, say, 50% there’s a good chance it won’t have any endowment (or funding stream!) at all in the year 2100.
- criddell 2y agoArguably, the USA did even better with the feds funding research. I don't know of any program that had a higher ROI than DARPA's VLSI Project.
- Jalad 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project > The VLSI Project is one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history. Its offspring include Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix, the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor concept, many computer-aided design (CAD) tools still in use today, 32-bit graphics workstations, fabless manufacturing and design houses, and its own semiconductor fabrication plant (fab), MOSIS, starting in 1981.[2] A similar DARPA project partnering with industry, VHSIC had little or no impact. Wow that's insane, I never knew that
- dang 2y agoPlease don't take HN threads on generic tangents. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) It's clear why this happens and of course it's not ill intended. The mind naturally follows the most-traveled association path from a new stimulus back to something familiar. Unfortunately, that is the anticurious direction. Swapping out a specific new topic for the nearest familiar one means replacing a potentially new and interesting discussion with a repetitive old one. These large generic themes are like black holes: if you fly too close to one, you get sucked in there instead of going wherever else you might have explored, and then no new information emerges. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- JoelMcCracken 2y agoI do get your point, and generally think it makes sense, but in this case it seems extremely relevant: There is a global competition for intellectual capital, and at the moment, the US' position here seems at the very least uncertain, given all that is happening.
- caminante 2y ago> I do get your point, [...] but in this case it seems extremely relevant Not sure you do. At a minimum, they could rephrase for better discussion v. a snarky, low effort claim that the sky is falling.
- 9283409232 2y agoThe sky is indeed falling. You not wanting to look up doesn't change that.
- caminante 2y agoYou're still not taking a hint [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018477
- coliveira 2y agoAt this point is the US that needs to rethink funding if it wants to continue to be competitive. The US funding for universities has been frozen (adjusted for inflation) for the last 20 years. It was enough when the rest of the world invested much less in science. But nowadays China is moving faster while US funding is still the same. Giving money to tech companies is not a substitute, because they only care about short term gains.
- Hammershaft 2y agoIt's ridiculous that returns on public basic research have been so great and yet funding has been so neglected. The chips act was a small positive step.
- coliveira 2y agoThis was the biggest change I expected from Biden, however it seems that giving hundreds of billions to big companies is the priority, instead of supporting national research institutions.
- melagonster 2y agoI want to point out that money is not the only reason why Samsung and TSMC accept this idea. Political reasons should play an important role here, too.
- epicureanideal 2y agoWe can also improve the efficiency of allocation of existing funds.
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- Danieru 2y agoThis article seems interested in suggestion Japan abandon its unique approach and adopt the approach used by other nations. That is silly. Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research. It funds large physics experiments. It has a long history of semiconductor innovations. MEXT scholarships have proven a brilliant method to attract smart men and women from around the world. Here in Touhoku I've met so many bright international students on MEXT scholarships doing research within those exact project-funded teams. Switching to person-focused funding would be silly, do you really think a smart guy from Congo is going to be able to win funding? That Japan has a system where the product/team can focus on an established topic, then backfill with smart researches, is a strength not a weakness. Of course Nature is in the business of publishing papers, not science. So it makes sense they would be blind to the reality of science: you measure it in results not papers. The academics I know are all focused on achieve specific goals, they rarely talk about the papers in the way the Canadian Acedemics I know did back home. Think "I want to automate boar trap monitoring so that farmers do not need to check it everytime, and so that non-boars do not get trapped". That is the sort of highly practical research you get when a supervisor knows their field and knows their country. It might not pay off in papers, but it will pay off for Japan as a country. The world should be taking lessons from Japan, not the other way around. Team based funding. Scholarships for bright students from any country. Deep funding for physical research other than just ITER and LHC.
- Prickle 2y agoThat's interesting. Japanese discussions I have had, and articles in Japanese seem to say the opposite. That Japan needs to invest more; because many talented Japanese researchers are emigrating to the USA or China. The main topic that comes up is that both China and the USA provide better wages, as well as greater funding for projects overall. But I'm just a local, and certainly not a researcher. Thanks for your POV!
- Danieru 2y agoTo be honest, those are all valid points which I think are true. I've never met an academic who thinks their country should reduce science funding. And the personal incentives do push researchers overseas for higher wages. Personally though, I think how a country uses the money dominates over how much. Most countries have a pretty consistent level of funding. Sure some countries might double others, but overall funding tends to follow GDP. No country is spending 10%+ of GDP on research, nor do I think is that justifiable. Thus the differences come from effectiveness of spend, not volume. Japan has an advantage here in the low English proficiency: you cannot be headhunted by the Americans if you cannot speak English. Thus when Japan does focus on specializations, as it did in the past with semiconductors, those researchers cannot be headhunted away.
- suruki 2y ago[dead]
- merillecuz56 2y ago[dead]
- trumpvoter 2y agoI don't follow what this article is trying to say - if the point is to have more interdisciplinary research, isn't project-focused funding precisely what's needed? Researcher focus seems like it would focus on that researcher's discipline, not an interdisciplinary team. In fact, my experience in a Japanese lab made me feel funding precisely goes towards researchers rather than projects if professors count as researchers. Professors get funding for their labs, and while there will be project proposals the perceived value of that professor is key for closing it. Maybe the article is focused more on private research labs than universities though.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoNobody can be a real scientific heavy weight anymore, whatever filters against that is in the culture ,in the institutions. we filter for knowledge reproduction automation .
- biohcacker84 2y agoJapan used to be known as the one nation in the world where old people were fans of bran new tech. However, today it would seem that's because that generation lived through the great changes Japan experienced. Extremely quickly going from a pre-industrial civilization, to a post-industrial one. And so despite Japan's great traditionally intense conservatism, they were fans of technological innovation. With that generation fading away, it seems Japan is returning to being hyper conservative in every way. And falling behind technologically. The story of Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the blue LED, is interesting. The company founder supported his experimentation, but the next generation, the son of the founder, wanted to Shuji Nakamura to stop. Faith in innovation vs pessimism.