There's one big difference to taxpayers: the psychologists and biologists don't cost billions of dollars. National funding agencies are fundamentally in the bu

There's one big difference to taxpayers: the psychologists and biologists don't cost billions of dollars. National funding agencies are fundamentally in the business of choosing "this not that" because of the constraints of finite funding. Just like with VC math, it's difficult to imagine the benefits of the billion dollar collider outweigh the opportunity cost of investing in a large nation's worth of researchers to explore smaller, cheaper ideas.