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You're not wrong, however, who would have funded lasers? What about CRISPR funding? Most scientists are focused on status, however, many revolutionary discoveri
by abirch 1y ago
You're not wrong, however, who would have funded lasers? What about CRISPR funding? Most scientists are focused on status, however, many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies.
- naasking 1y agoThe original laser was built by the research arm of Hughes Aircraft, so I'm not sure I see the issue there. Even if Hughes was partly funded by defense, I don't really classify defense under the same category as other types of pure research funding because there's typically an actual purpose, which fits the "short-term profit" rather than "long-term benefit of humanity". Re: CRISPR, wasn't that discovered at least 3 different times on completely independent lines of research? That suggests to me that it's sufficiently "obvious" it would have eventually cropped up in many other areas. > many revolutionary discoveries come out of basic research paid for by the government and not companies. Yes. I took no position about this in this specific thread, but I will just say that "X happened this way" is not an argument that X could not have happened any other way, nor that in a world where we didn't discover X because we didn't fund it publicly, we wouldn't have had just as impactful a discovery Y. There are opportunity costs to public funding and tying up intelligent researchers to goals that don't have realizable goals in the near future.