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No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

• rthrfrd 1y ago
  Startup = disruption = threat to existing control. If you love control and have control, why would you want to create fertile ground for startups? (This was meant as devil's advocate, not my personal point of view).
  • aeonik 1y ago
    That's short term thinking. You can't stop innovation across the planet, you will lose control over time as adversaries continue to innovate and subsume antiquated control structures.
    • rthrfrd 1y ago
      Oh I completely agree.
    • api 1y ago
      Yet it’s a mistake companies and societies repeatedly make, because human brains are wired for zero sum games and paranoia. When you have it, the instinct is to clutch and guard and hoard not grow and expand. When a company or a society is threatened the usual response is to double down on things that accelerate decline like killing novelty and innovation. These things worked when we were small primates fighting over limited food sources on the savannah. Our brain stems don’t know what millennium they are in and still run those programs.
    • teeray 1y ago
      > That's short term thinking. Which is exactly what our system encourages. You don’t need to think beyond the next quarter / election cycle. You’re only in it to extract as much wealth in the short-term as possible and secure your chair before the music stops playing.
    • ortusdux 1y ago
      Everything that is happening in the US screams short term thinking. It feels like the scramble after a leveraged buyout.
      • bluecalm 1y ago
        Currently the biggest US companies are throwing hundreds of billions into an uncertain bet that may pay off in a decade or so while everyone around is screaming "bubble" at them. It looks like long term risky bet on new technology to me - exactly what you want those rich capitalist do.
      • terminalshort 1y ago
        Funny that you mentioned an LBO, which is a strategy that requires long term success to succeed.
    • Larrikin 1y ago
      All the people in charge currently are banking on being rich, enjoying society as they have made it, and then dead before it personally affects them.
      • ninetyninenine 1y ago
        Nah it’s more complicated than that. They need to lie to themselves first. They need to build a scaffold of logic that proves and justifies there actions before they do it. Hitler for example thought he was justified. And so do all the people who claim global warming isn’t real.
      • dexwiz 1y ago
        I dunno about the last part. Rich people under 60 seem to be under the impression they might live forever, either biologically or digitally. Within our lifetime we see people trying to make their digital twin their legal heir.
        • portaouflop 1y ago
          I get the longevity angle (even if I think it’s not possible or even desirable) but digital twin I don’t understand. It’s like a different person altogether. Even if it was possible to completely clone a persona digitally it would not be you but someone else.
          • nemomarx 1y ago
            Much like grooming a natural heir, you can hope that someone will keep your legacy going, make decisions you would make, run your business, and so on. I can see it as a rational strategy if you're worried successors won't be up to the job.
          • dexwiz 1y ago
            I totally agree with the ridiculousness of it, but that's not going to stop people with outsized egos from trying. Or companies that are trying to ride the coattails of a cult of personality.
• terminalshort 1y ago
  > In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done in at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al. This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly Basic Science in corporate research all but disappeared. Companies focused on Applied Research to maximize shareholder value. In its place, Theory and Basic research is now done in research universities. I'm not seeing how you get from share buybacks to a shift in priorities in corporate research. If there's a fundamental reason why it can't be done now how it was before the 80's it's not that.
  • hiddencost 1y ago
    Why not? Suddenly they had a more lucrative was to spend their money, so they did.
    • computerphage 1y ago
      Because before buybacks there were dividends. Did the difference between buybacks and dividends really make the difference between doing basic research and not?
      • Retric 1y ago
        It’s likely, dividends provide higher levels of exponential growth long term for an otherwise steady state company. It makes them more compelling than many long term investments. Convert X% of a stocks value into a dividend and you pay taxes on that before you can buy more stock, but someone who keeps buying stock sees an exponential return. (Higher percentage of the company = larger dividends) A company buys back X% of its stock functions like a dividend w/ stock purchase, but without that tax on dividends you’re effectively buying more stock. Adding a tax on stock buybacks could eliminate such bias, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
    • 7thaccount 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• echan00 1y ago
  this is great except nobody who should read this article is reading it
  • fundad 1y ago
    The people who should read this article and won't are actually an anti-growth movement. The silicon valley bros I work with are lapping up the sabotage because they want a lower standard of living in America and less science and innovation because they are already comfortable enough. Their sites are set only on the short-term gains of anti-Muslim and anti-abortion sentiment and "though talk" on immigration. Results are not that important. They claim that there would be enough funding if universities funded it with their endowments. The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat. Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.
    • terminalshort 1y ago
      SV bros want less science and innovation, and are anti-abortion / anti-immigration? Have you been to SV?
      • utopiah 1y ago
        Maybe they meant before X/Twitter.com, before Google, before Meta, before... wait, what's left? PayPal mafia much? Anduril? Oh you meant startups? That will then be bought by those? There is an ideal of SF but SV isn't SF, definitely not non-tech SF. So... you might think of a version of SV that existed, maybe, at some point. It might even still exist as some rebellious employees of those large corporations but in practice people with the money and power in SV I believe now are pretty much with such a stance, yes, sadly IMHO. Wind has turned, in SV too.
      • aredox 1y ago
• oldpersonintx2 1y ago
  [dead]
• zkmon 1y ago
  >> Scientists are driven by curiosity Ok, then why do they get affected by funding? The truth is, today there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding. The era for curiosity-driven science is was over a long time ago. The direction of research or science is all driven by funding.
  • ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Everything in the world is driven by money. There was never such a thing as curiosity driven science. What pays for your leisure time so you can be alive and not starve? Money. Nobody on the face of the earth can just be curious and do science and not starve.
  • barkingdog48 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • holden_nelson 1y ago
    if scientists are so curious, why do they have to eat??? checkmate atheists Less snarky: getting funding and making a living in academia, which is the most accessible way to be a scientist, has been cutthroat since long before this administration. If it were more accessible, or if staying alive weren't so damn expensive, I think we'd see more curiosity-driven science being performed. Also, I don't believe one negates the other. As an engineer, my work satisfies my curiosity / desire to build, and I would do it for $50k, but I'm not gonna take a pay cut to prove how curious I am.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • vanviegen 1y ago
    I believe that most scientists start out being driven by curiosity. Just like most politicians start out being driven by ideology. Unfortunately, we've created a system that wears them down to being driven largely by self-preservation. Many people eager to better the world come of age every second. It's just that once they've amassed enough power to make a dent, most of them have been worn down.
• throwaway091025 1y ago
  Maybe we shouldn't have required 'kissing the ring' segments in every scientific grant proposal
  • fundad 1y ago
    The utter lack of self-awareness needed to post something like this now should humiliate them, of course it's a throwaway account.
    • mikestew 1y ago
      With all those pronouns and not an antecedent in sight, what and who are you taking about?
  • Ar-Curunir 1y ago
    Er what? This is very vague.
• ultrablack 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • galoisscobi 1y ago
    Why do you think they don’t teach critical thinking?
    • flanked-evergl 1y ago
      We have all met college graduates.
      • galoisscobi 1y ago
        I don’t understand, can you elaborate? I’m trying to understand your perspective. New college grads I generally meet and work with are bright, hard working, curious and have a deep desire to learn. I don’t think we’re having the same experiences so I want to know more about yours.
        • flanked-evergl 1y ago
          Most fresh college graduates I have worked with are anxiety ridden wrecks incapable of developing skills on their own and lack fundamental knowledge of industry practices.
          • galoisscobi 1y ago
            Makes sense. I think they're lucky to be around you. Since you're hanging out on HN, I'd imagine you care about tech, doing things well and have a natural curiosity. Back when I started out, I was deep in debt, insecure about my skills and being around highly skilled people who had many more years of experience only deepened those insecurities. Luckily, people were kind and patient with me and gave me the apprenticeship I needed. They deeply cared about technical expertise and doing things well, probably like you if I am guessing right. I have my dream job today, and I am in a position to mentor new grads. I continue to pay it forward as the senior engineers did when I started out. Not all my colleagues do this, but I see so much potential around me and I try to grow it. It's one of the most satisfying when I get a note from a new grad/junior engineer on how they've grown after our work together. Thank you for caring! On a side note, I can't imagine the anxiety they must go through now between the economy being what it is and AI exacerbating the gaps in technical skills. Seems like a scarier time than when I graduated. It's harder to mentor in this environment, but it's a fun challenge to learn how to mentor in this environment.
• flanked-evergl 1y ago
  Academia has become a racket that is actively hostile to technological progress. I want them to get exactly 0 of my tax money for anything.
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    I understand why academia might be a racket. But why do you think they are actively hostile to technological progress? Are we including all the premier institutions in that claim?
  • LogicFailsMe 1y ago
    Tenured academia, sure, burn it to the ground, no survivors, mostly a temple of mean girls and enablers of those mean girls. Adjunct and other non-tenure track professors, however, not so much. They do the real work along with the postdocs and grad students. And they get the least recognition. And oh the bellyaching when they leave academia with no hope of a tenured position and 10x their salary by pivoting to industry.
  • Vektorceraptor 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • knowaveragejoe 1y ago
      The only people using the term NPC in this manner are, themselves, the real NPCs the term was devised to skewer
      • Vektorceraptor 1y ago
        If you can't take an insult - then you are an NPC
• j2kun 1y ago
  > Engineers design and build things on top of the discoveries of scientists I agree with a lot in this post, but I think it's also worth mentioning how this is a two-way street. Practical considerations often drive theory research as much as the other way around.
  • MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
    I like to imagine that thermodynamics happened because industrial metallurgy and boiler design advanced to the point where people started asking "what are the fundamental constraints?" There's a chance that it didn't actually happen that way, though. edit: I also heard that Louis Pasteur did work for breweries, answering the question "Why do some batches come out nasty while most are fine, given the same inputs?"
    • ludicrousdispla 1y ago
      The history of steam engines would suggest that our understanding of thermodynamics developed out of a large base of first-hand experience. Same story for Calculus. And the t-statistic was developed by a QA guy (student) at Guinness.
• fidotron 1y ago
  There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately. It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades. Switching a non functioning system off does at least allow it to be replaced by something that risks doing things when something comes back. Of course many pure scientists will, legitimately, argue that innovation isn't the point in the first place, and that is a far more solid point, but real academic diversity has been so destroyed by the global consensus making peer review process that much of their progress has effectively stalled.
  • nemomarx 1y ago
    How's China doing? They seem to have a lot of research going on that feeds into their manufacturing fairly quickly from the papers I hear about
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Notably China is a big country and Canada is a small country. If there is some innovation that is going to improve productivity globally by %X the amount of benefit that goes to China is always going to be bigger than the benefit that goes to Canada.
    • fidotron 1y ago
      China are certainly better at turning the results of research into products, whether that research was them or anyone else. The canonical example here is 5G. Once again the US science establishment had the guy, he ends up doing the breakthroughs for polar coding, they failed to appreciate him, he left and ended up being funded by Huawei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdal_Ar%C4%B1kan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdal_Ar%C4%B1kan The US science establishment isn't broken as an innovation engine because of Trump - it's because they're clearly rewarding the wrong things. What isn't so clear is if Chinese science is creating Chinese startups. It may yet happen.
• jovial_cavalier 1y ago
  >Engineers design and build things on top of the discoveries of scientists. In the last 80 or so years, this has been the case, but I don't think it's historically the norm. It just so happens that through whatever accident of scientific history, we were set up perfectly for a series of discoveries in basic theory that lent themselves well to immediate implementation and productization. We had a "science cycle" to match the business cycle that looked like this: Come up with a theory -> works? (yes: proceed, no: start again) -> publicize result -> collect huge sums of money -> plow that into new experiments -> find a problem with current theory -> start again. I don't think there is much disagreement that this cycle has slowed down considerably over the last 30-40 years. Science by its nature is descriptive. As a discipline, it isn't actually geared towards discovering maxima in a space of design possibilities. No scientist invented the automobile or the airplane or the steam engine. A more typical mode is that engineers demonstrate that something is possible, and scientists recapitulate/integrate it into theory.
• rob_c 1y ago
  I thought this was going somewhere rather than aiming to be a dictionary with pictures or am I missing a key paragraph?
  • Vektorceraptor 1y ago
    [flagged]
• cjs_ac 1y ago
  > Countries that neglect science become dependent on those that don’t. U.S. post-WWII dominance came from basic science investments (OSRD, NSF, NIH, DOE labs). After WWII ended, the UK slashed science investment which allowed the U.S. to commercialize the British inventions made during the war. > The Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected failure to convert science into sustained innovation, during the same time that U.S. universities, startups and venture capital created Silicon Valley. Long-term military and economic advantage (nuclear weapons, GPS, AI) trace back to scientific research ecosystems. The US has an extremely entrepreneurial culture, which is why Americans are so good at building innovative businesses. In the UK, money is seen as grubby and the class system has consistently placed barriers between those with ideas and those with money. Similarly, the Soviet Union struggled to make use of its innovators due to the strictures of central planning. Australia punches well above its weight in scientific research but is unwilling to engage in any economic activity other than digging rocks out of the ground and selling them to China. So the idea that scientific research is a limiting factor in economic growth is not general; it's specific to the US and countries with that same entrepreneurial culture.
  • howerj 1y ago
    The UK has an extremely entrepreneurial culture as well, which is shown in the data (number of businesses registered, number of startups, both per capita), it ranks very highly, along with other indicators of innovation, it might not be as entrepreneurial as the USA, but globally it ranks very highly. The fact that you mention the Soviet Union and its central planned economy and the (outdated and stereotyped view of the) British class system almost like they are equivalent really undermines your point as well.
• intalentive 1y ago
  "Government funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.
  • pkilgore 1y ago
    "Venture funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.
  • ModernMech 1y ago
    That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programming languages research gets funding is planning the economy. I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.
    • mike_hearn 1y ago
      The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics. Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no skin in the game themselves.
      • ModernMech 1y ago
        Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.
• jldugger 1y ago
  This seems quite adjacent to today's Nobel Prize announcement that sustained growth comes from understanding why an innovation works, so we can apply it in new domains.
• sherinjosephroy 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • constantcrying 1y ago
    >The argument that the shift from corporate research labs (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) to stock buybacks killed basic science investment is compelling. It is not compelling at all. The difference between dividends and share buybacks are not big enough to explain this at all. The argument is totally absurd, companies could always reward their shareholders with their profits. Bell Labs did not end because of share buybacks, it ended because Bell was broken up and their free money printer did no longer exist. >If the US is increasingly relying on universities for foundational research, and corporate R&D is only focused on short-term, applied projects, we're definitely running the innovation engine on fumes. Why? This is just total nonsense. The only difference is the physical location of basic researchers. And that the government decides what to fund. That is literally it. Basic university research is still funded by corporations. Only they are paying the money to the government, which then decides what to fund.
• ilamont 1y ago
  Universities spend ~$109 billion a year on research. ~$60 billion of that $109 billion comes from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) for biomedical research, National Science Foundation (NSF) for basic science, Department of War (DoW), Department of Energy (DOE), for energy/physics/nuclear, DARPA, NASA. Let's talk about the other $49B. I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields, as the history department or psychology professors are unlikely to require huge investments in new buildings, specialized equipment, etc., yet they pay the same tuition fees as STEM majors. Families/students paying full freight at a private university are looking at undergraduate degrees that cost $250k-$400k all in. That can't be the whole picture, as money also flows from rich donors, corporate partnerships of various types, and at some schools such as MIT licensing fees. It doesn't seem like tuition can keep growing at the rates that it has to make up the shortfall from government research cuts, but what about the other areas?
  • echelon 1y ago
    > I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields Diploma mill universities in my state are consolidating the smaller STEM universities and trade schools to build football and sports programs, gyms, and "lifestyle" amenities. This university in particular [1] mints basket weaving degrees and has used consolidation to build sports programs [2] and lavish facilities for sports. It's also been a revolving door of politician to high-ranking, high-compensation executive staff positions. This university [3] has used funding to acquire properties from the state, such as the 1996 Olympic Stadium [4]. Neither of these universities does real, impactful research. The latter is ranked as an R1, but everyone at the "real" R1s in our state will tell you this is a fabrication. They're diploma mills and extract six figures from their student body. They turn this money into sports facilities and upper level faculty pay. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_University [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_Owls_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_State_Owls_football [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_State_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_State_University [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Olympic_Stadium
• jleyank 1y ago
  If you want new disease treatments and cures, you need to fund applied science (using the aforementioned definitions). Follow-on compounds can almost be engineered, but finding novel targets and coming up with candidates is a research problem. And dealing with the side-effects that appear can flip back from engineering to science. The Ozempic class of compounds has done wonders driving research in obesity and (I think) addictive behaviours. Bringing it to market requires money and management and luck. Many/most of the promising candidates fall out along the way.
• Agraillo 1y ago
  When dealing with patents, public interest, and their consequences, Bell Labs should be treated separately imo. My vague recollection of the book The Idea Factory [1] and a brief search indicate that AT&T was always treated as a special case due to its status as a regulated monopoly. This status at least culminated in the 1956 Consent Decree [2], which required making all prior patents royalty-free and (as I read elsewhere) mandated that all future patents be licensed on reasonable terms. Given Bell Labs' well-known portfolio-including the transistor, laser, CCD, DSP, and fiber-optic-related patents, this shows a significant exception to how other companies might have innovated and monetized their innovations. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decre...
  • sillywabbit 1y ago
    Not to be confused with: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262731423/the-idea-factory/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262731423/the-idea-factory/
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  It feels like in the past 20-ish years, maybe longer, game-changing innovations have become rarer, making science lower ROI. If that’s true (maybe it’s not? all I have is vibes!), if it is indeed true, and science is becoming less able to convert into invention- it stands to reason that at some point it becomes rational for a country to direct resources elsewhere. Political will becomes strained, and politicians decide it’ll be popular to defund and discourage science. And maybe that is how the US got here.
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    Maybe but the successful part of the US got there through science and tech. So I think more science and tech is a better prospect long term.
  • Nasrudith 1y ago
    It depends upon the field you are talking about for diminished return and less innovations. Returns have been thoroughly diminished when it comes to raw power in weaponry for instance. With anti-ship missiles already it is rather 'you get hit and you die'. Railguns haven't really been working out well for instance, and even if they did succeed all they would do is create 'stable magazines' while adding 'unstable' additional power production. Precision is the area where real work is being done, lumping in drones as an example of precision compared to say missiles or bombs which just explode at a destination, or mines which just explode when anything triggers it. There are some major advancements in biotech for instance that are nothing to sneeze at, and even more in the pipeline (which admittedly may not pan out). Organs may not qualify as an invention technically, but being able to manufacture them certainly does. Not to mention how environmental tech is needed now more than ever. Science being less convertible to inventions could have counterintuitive effects if it were true. Like smaller nations being in a 'don't even bother' situation while superpowers gain a literal monopoly on invention due to the rareness raising the barrier to entry to get anything meaningful out of it. Politicians defunding and discouraging science is based more around memes and suppressing dissent than anything concrete. The reason not to create such 'stability' is generally that when the rest of the world passes by it will not be kind to you. But even if science somehow became literally useless tomorrow (an impossibility, of course), I highly doubt that politicians would not be such rigorous cost-oriented stewards that they would consider it worth the political capital to uproot the entrenched bureaucracies which no longer serve a purpose. Even if they knew it for certain was useless they might consider the spending a worthy price to pay for false hope. Crowds get real ugly when you tell them that things will never get better.
• hobobaggins 1y ago
  > Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. ... followed by lots more words that don't support this premise.
• up2isomorphism 1y ago
  The science research today in most universities are not driven by curiosity at all. It is most funding drive and in a lot of cases researchers has even less freedoms than an industrial professionals.
  • Vektorceraptor 1y ago
    [flagged]
• SushiMon 1y ago
  TBH, it makes sense for large incumbents to sell out science on the altar of politics because they are now will profit more from rent seeking than from innovation.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • noobermin 1y ago
    The gravy train will crash. Fortunately, given many of those who facilitated it will die within 20 years, and then that will be someone else's problem.
    • 11101010001100 1y ago
      The good news is that you can't 'theoretically' stop a gravy train.
• quantummagic 1y ago
  Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever. Maybe if science depended on the average Joe actually having a living wage, enough to donate some directly to science, the incentive structures of our society would become more healthy than they currently are. Rich people, worrying about rich people jobs and outcomes, is getting a little tiresome. We don't care about your women's studies "research" grants. Maybe something will actually be done about income inequality, if you want to save the things you actually care about. Until then, let it burn; a lot of us will barely notice the difference.
  • astrange 1y ago
    Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014. Wage inequality severely decreased between 2019 and 2023. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010 Sometimes good things happen!
  • khafra 1y ago
    > Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever. I do. I'm not one of these wealthy startup founders, just a guy earning a salary--but I've donated to foundations doing basic research many times; and even to individual researchers when they lost a grant but were doing work that I wanted to see the results of. However, funding science in general this way is likely to miss a lot of value. Not everyone makes basic research a priority in their charitable giving. More importantly, not everyone has my impeccable research taste: not to sound elitist, but if the average American's priorities determined the directions for basic research, we'd have thousands of studies on why vaccines cause autism, an nothing on weird stuff like the medical potential of gila monster saliva.
  • guywithahat 1y ago
    Not only that, but science was largely a privately-funded industry until a few decades ago, and many would argue governments do a bad job of funding science because a lot of nonsense gets wrapped up in it. It's frustrating because people will whole-heartedly claim science research needs more funding, and then hand the funding over to John Money so he can publish what happens when you sexually abuse children (spoiler: they committed suicide). I don't think a lot of the people defending government backed research understand everything they're defending
• arunkd13 1y ago
  I think to prosper out of science / innovation you need cheap energy. I really think, Trump realizes that the age of cheap energy has past.
• lutusp 1y ago
  > But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works. * Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence. * The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true. * Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false. * A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics. This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing. In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data. The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation. That is science.
• lgleason 1y ago
  What almost nobody in SV wants to talk about it the gutting of STEM in the early 90's when real wages for STEM began it's decline in the US via labor arbitrage. Of course Blank and most of Silicon Valley benefited from this, because it allowed them to get cheap, compliant labor. Eric Weinstein did a great paper on this years ago https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhow... . Looking at the current unemployment in STEM, which is higher than the national average, this arbitrage has just hit a point where it has killed the goose that laid his golden egg.
• rester324 1y ago
  What pisses me off the most about this, is that CEOs still preach about how life-long learning is a must. Stop that fucking bullshit, will ya? If you as a CEO don't give a flying fuck to invest in knowledge, than you have no right to preach from that high horse of yours to do that myself. edit: to clarify I am arguing against putting in the effort on my own expense which benefits the company because I need to foot the bill which the company should have, so I am not arguing against such self-improvement which obviously benefits me
• Peteragain 1y ago
  I do feel this is a case of Americans believing their own propaganda. What the US does well is efficiency. The problem is, capitalism has pushed the time to ROI (return on investment) to get shorter. 5 years is what venture capitalists were working on. At one point there was status for a corporation to have a research lab of quality - in the same way as corporations had glorious architecture for their headquarters, Bell labs was about status. These research labs provided a safe space for curiosity driven scientists. In the interests of efficiency (and because it no longer had kudos) the labs were abandoned and - in a classic US way - it was decided the State should do the science. The trouble now is that the Universities are thinking about their ROI. Curiosity driven science has no home at the moment.
• utopiah 1y ago
  Oh no, Steve Blank is now pro big government like Mariana Mazzucato! /s PS: teasing aside she did write The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths in 2013 on the topic.
• Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  My brain reads “No science, no startups” — alarm bells. This kind of mono-causal oversimplification can only be anti-Trump clickbait — I ignore the post. A few seconds later, guilt kicks in — “Don’t be so ignorant!” — I click the link. Literally the ninth word is Trump. My brain: “Alright, that says it all.” I scroll a bit — should I really read this? My brain: “No, let ChatGPT analyze it critically.” Conclusion: The same kind of simplistic linear causality is presented without substance — no sources, no data, no valid projections — uncritically carried through. Typical NPC-scripted “science,” representative of much of today’s “NPC academia.” It’s just a patchwork of general knowledge and some combinatorial creativity, pretending to be expertise, seriousness, and understanding — enumerated to suggest strange, subjective, unscientific, and mostly personal goals. This exact kind of NPC-scripted “science” needs to be exposed and discredited as pseudo. If this is the so-called “defense” of science, then it deserves to be opposed. Simple as that. PLEASE - for the love of god - spare me with this nonsense!
• wosined 1y ago
  So is gender research or feminist queer dance theory studies a part of basic or applied science?
  • Vektorceraptor 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • gizzlon 1y ago
    > feminist queer dance theory studies I dunno, but how many % of research in terms of money and effort do you think is spent on that? 0,0001 % ?
  • dxdm 1y ago
    > So is gender research or feminist queer dance theory studies a part of basic or applied science? People's ideas about how humans should live together can be beneficial for the wealth and well-being of whole societies and its members. Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science? We can wonder about how useful certain efforts are, of course, especially in all their extent; but I don't know how wise it is to dismiss things _wholesale_, just because their application is not immediately apparent and the rejection fits into the political current. The unnecessary snark is just sad to see here.
    • ryandv 1y ago
      > Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science? This one is easy - neither. The term "science" has gone through semantic dilution in a manner similar to how everyone is now an engineer - software engineer, prompt engineer, sanitation engineer. Falsifiability is one of the key distinguishing characteristics of a proper science, as famously propounded by Karl Popper. "Gender identities" not only can not be falsified, they should not be falsified, because that would amount to transphobia; denying the existence of someone's felt and lived gender identity is the definition of transphobia. Since they cannot be falsified, nor even directly observed, measured, nor quantified, they are not scientific notions. The closest most well-studied analogue to the "gender identity" is the legacy religious notion of "the soul," to which you will see you can ascribe most, if not all, of the same attributes as ascribed to the "gender identity."
• Timsky 1y ago
  Your article strongly consonated with the ideas I often try to communicate to those around me. I wish there were more open discussion about biases related to PhD qualifications and the growing influence of venture-capital-style practices in science. Many researchers dedicate themselves to exploring new and uncertain areas of knowledge, yet their work is sometimes undervalued by hiring managers and industrial professionals. I personally know HRs who consider the "PhD" tag in a CV a red flag. There is also a tendency to overlook the fact that pursuing a PhD is a form of professional work, comparable in commitment and responsibility to other careers. Sometimes 699, sometimes 700. Academia can indeed be a challenging environment, and not everyone contributes in the same way—some may prioritize credentials over substance, and cases of research misconduct do exist. However, these examples definitely do not represent the academic community as a whole. Regarding the venture-capital approach, in applied sciences, researchers are increasingly expected to present their ideas in short, pitch-style formats. At some point, this process itself becomes the goal of the work. I can imagine this encouraging concise communication. Still, it also shifts part of the management responsibilities—such as market analysis and outreach—onto scientists, which does not align with their core expertise or professional goals.
  • ethbr1 1y ago
    As many gripes as there are about the competitive grant process, at least in the US it was formerly adjudicated by scientific experts. (Yes, subject to groupthink and overweighting en vogue topics, but still by experts)
  • t_mann 1y ago
    > I personally know HRs who consider the "PhD" tag in a CV a red flag. Which should only tell us what a cancer HR departments are. Filtering someone from talking to the hiring department, for the crime of doing a PhD, and telling others about it - to me this sounds more likely like someone getting a kick out of wielding the bit of power they have over others than a useful contribution to society.
    • kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Fwiw everyone I knew in undergrad who ended up in HR that was basically their only option. They already got slammed in stem classes in HS or even first year or two in college so that was a nonstarter. They weren’t creative people so arts or humanities were out. They didn’t grasp business concepts so finance and other avenues in the business school were out. They landed an hr internship in their junior year then the rest is history. It is bewildering to me that HR is responsible for hiring anyone outside the HR department.
• vinorathna-r 1y ago
  Nice article, I completely agree that government funding is essential for America to sustain its technological advancement.. After reading it, we need to validate the following points: 1.The government should periodically review how many funded research projects are successfully completed and lead to tangible outcomes. 2. The government should ensure that research funding is properly utilized for the intended purposes, so that resources are used effectively and efficiently. 3. It is necessary to study how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to reduce the cost and duration of research while accelerating scientific experimentation.
  • croes 1y ago
    Giant magnetoresistance was discovered in 1988, it became useful in HDDs in 1997. If they had evaluated 1993 the discovery would be called useless and a waste of money.
    • vinorathna-r 1y ago
      I agree that basic research like the discovery of GMR often has an unpredictable timeline and shouldn't be judged too early.. However, I still believe that a light-touch monitoring system is important. It's not about evaluating the usefulness of the discovery in the short term, but rather ensuring that: Funds are being used for the stated research goals (fiscal responsibility). The project is making scientific progress as defined by its own milestones (accountability).
      • runako 1y ago
        > The project is making scientific progress as defined by its own milestones (accountability). Not a researcher, but my perception is that this is already part of the process. Is it not?
      • BobaFloutist 1y ago
        > The project is making scientific progress as defined by its own milestones (accountability). How do you differentiate between pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be incorrect (an essential part of science if we want to actually learn anything new) and failing to make scientific progress?
• whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  Just seems a very idealistic and almost simplistic view of how a thing should work best because it feels like it should work but the reality is academia gets completely outpaced by private companies. SpaceX, GPT4, Ozempic, list goes on.
  • gizzlon 1y ago
    > academia gets completely outpaced by private companies Outpaced? What does that even mean? The whole point is they have different roles and goals. And you need them all, if you cut basic research all the downstream stuff will suffer.
  • Ar-Curunir 1y ago
    All of those are based on basic academic science… What you’re describing is at least partly engineering and product design, not pure science
  • runako 1y ago
    There is no SpaceX without the ability to build on the (public) advancements of NASA and the public willingness to pay SpaceX taxpayer dollars for speculative flights. There is no Ozempic without federal funds for basic research to identify GLP-1. (Nordisk started their research downstream of the US taxpayer's contributions.) GPT-4, as its builders would certainly admit, is a descendant of early work in the field. This work involves a significant amount of work funded by DoD. None of this is to detract from these products. But there is no point in pretending that e.g. rocket research is not generally funded by militaries (governments), on which SpaceX built. In general, if you a citing something with a brand name and a trademark, you are talking about something that is not basic research. Basic research in the US is overwhelmingly government-funded for the simple reason that companies do not invest on the time horizons required and in general cannot take on the amount of risk entailed.
• ktosobcy 1y ago
  Hush hush... the startups that aim to "disrupt" running on burning VC funds will definitelly improve our lives! Pinky promise! /s
• mindscrawler 1y ago
  The race for quick profits is eating away our future innovations.
  • DarkNova6 1y ago
    *The race for quick profits is eating away our future.
• AfterHIA 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCR_Licklider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCR_Licklider https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield If you know; you know. #ARPA
  • ricksunny 1y ago
    I remain perpetually perplexed why people who invoke Mansfield's name almost universally shrink from describing why they feel it is relevant to invoke Mansfield's name. Yes, there was a Mansfield amendment and a would-be 'nother Mansfield amendment. It had some (waves hands) ever-unarticulated effect on defense funding of research. Motivations of Mansfield are never articulated. Seems so self-defeating to not describe.
    • AfterHIA 1y ago
      Going into the specifics of what motivated Mike Mansfield requires going beyond the conversation we're having about R&D into the domain of politics and ideology. I want to stick to relevant realities related to people in technology: 1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decline in technology and science innovation that has occurred since the beginning of the neoliberal assault. In 1961 we get SketchPad at the University of Utah. In 1968 we get the Mother Of All Demos. What's been developed since with the same kind of impact? I'd argue, "not a whole lot." 2) This has inevitably led to a decline in the public's enthusiasm for technical innovation. I remember the early 1990's World Wide Web. I remember the feeling that a non-marginally better future was, "months away." Now the government and Google collude to spy on me and my family. Now I have a short-form video feed that is paid to deliver content meant to extremize me as a young adult. The Mansfield Amendment is the technical glitch that may have cancelled a better future for technologists and especially technology literate young adults. It's difficult to say and we may never know. My feeling is that some day some country might achieve a level of social democracy where-in, "we get back to that." Time will tell. The irony is that it's the Adam Smith Societies pushing the hyper, "privatize everything agenda" that reifies the problem. Adam Smith actually advocated for strong public institutions- especially educational institutions. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decline-in-breakthrough-innovation.html https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decl... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-annual-decline-number-phds-awarded https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-... https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151ac92/t/5f351b0d3fc33513ce384576/1597315857265/No+to+ARPA+-+Terence+Kealey+-+Ver+2.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151a...
• runako 1y ago
  Great post. I would love to see someone connect the long-term increase in Americans' wealth with our ability to develop and harness new technologies. And conversely, how much poorer we can expect Americans to become if that cycle is slowed/stopped. I've seen similar articles about trade & the UK (and now the US). I'm sure someone has done or is working on similar analysis for science & engineering.
• joseangel_sc 1y ago
  what kills me specially about the buybacks is that i’m sure even the CEOs would rather live in a world with anesthesia, MRIs, wifi, gps, etc yet they greedily prefer to personally gain money because they cannot see that they would be richer in a world with { what would be discovered if we had science } it’s just that you cannot miss what you already don’t have, if they could only see what would be possible, what we could achieve, the would go nuts about how slow we are moving
• MichaelAO 1y ago
  Reading The Economics Laws of Scientific Laws rocked my world on this topic. Tldr is that the basic to applied science pipeline proposed by Francis Bacon and now assumed as physical law is a fiction that legitimizes the state, wastes taxpayer money, and retards science. More science will happen with less government funding (see crowding out effect). This is why it's important to look not just at the intention of a policy, but at the actual outcome. This author has the tail wagging the dog. I'd rephrase it... more startups, more science.