15 ms·

Canada and science: NRC will now only do science that promotes “economic gain”

72 points by buo 13y ago

ucee054 13y ago
The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.
- mchouza 13y ago
  Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
    - ucee054 13y ago
      No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
      - kyzyl 13y ago
        > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
        ucee054 13y ago
        save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
protomyth 13y ago
I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-councils-makeover-leaves-industry-setting-the-agenda/article11745246/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-counci...
RyanMcGreal 13y ago
It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.
zeteo 13y ago
From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money. You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
  - bhb916 13y ago
    I agree with the trend you're describing although I slightly disagree with the absolutism (i.e. "every incremental discovery" and "no longer possible"). Still, regardless of this increasing demand for funds, there are other ways to procure funding other than taxation.
  - zeteo 13y ago
    There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary. First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway. Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds. Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment. Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
darxius 13y ago
As a Canadian, this makes me extremely sad. I always saw Canada as progressive ... hopefully the next government will flip this around.
- nickff 13y ago
  The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.
  - tensor 13y ago
    It is actually possible for one party to be "better" than another. In this case, we are talking about science, and it is very obvious that limiting science in this way is "worse." Science doesn't respect your political bias.
    - nickff 13y ago
      I was not addressing the possibility of impartial administration of research funding. I was merely stating that, given the record of Canadian (and other) governments, impartiality is unlikely, regardless of party affiliation. I should also state that any budget is, by definition limited, as it is an allocation of scarce resources; so any budget will "limit science".
- drpgq 13y ago
  Meh, as a Canadian I've always been disappointed in how despite spending a lot of money on government R&D we've never really got much out of it. NRC has always been a bit of a weird beast and NSERC is still around.
themstheones 13y ago
This is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to defund climate science.
- bhb916 13y ago
  If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.
  - vkou 13y ago
    The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.) It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.
- corresation 13y ago
  I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous. The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc. Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
  - pyre 13y ago
    The current government in Canada has been pretty hostile towards science. Do a couple of searches on how government scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the public in Canada.
    - corresation 13y ago
grecy 13y ago
Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.
- corresation 13y ago
  Canada have also sold out public museums.. Do you have any citation or source for this?
  - grecy 13y ago
    Sure, take your pick. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civilization-to-change-name-focus-only-on-canadian-history/article4611129/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civil... http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_ends_history_begins_at_canadas_biggest_museum.html http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_e... http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives-canadian-history_n_3208625.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives... http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-tories-aim-to-whitewash-canadian-history-1.147710 http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa-canadian-museum-civilization-becomes-canadian-museum-history.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa...
    - corresation 13y ago
      They are all concerning the same action regarding the Ottawa Museum of Civilization. I wasn't sure about the claim that they sold out "public museums", when the vast majority of Canadian museums are not at the federal level, and have zero accountability of concern about the federal government.
edmond_dantes 13y ago
If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.
freshhawk 13y ago
As a Canadian ... how are the broadband speeds in New Zealand these days?
- thangalin 13y ago
  Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.
  - geoka9 13y ago
    Citations or sources please?
cperciva 13y ago
A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health. I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.
corresation 13y ago
"Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success." The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process. What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly. If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.
- jgon 13y ago
  Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears. Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create. I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
  - corresation 13y ago
throwaway1980 13y ago
This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money. Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.
orbital303 13y ago
Another step towards the next dark age. It's sad that all the technological advancements around us are leading to a dumber anti-intellectual civilization that actually wants another period of stupidity, another dark age. Social gain is one thing, but most science that promotes economic gain is generally detrimental to society (at first) and usually not that useful in the long run as it is destructive in nature first and foremost and constructive only rarely. Science, these days, all comes from a desire for crime and its ultimate expression, war (internet, quantum computers, gps, weapons (obviously), etc.).
ronaldx 13y ago
Governments should only fund science that doesn't promote immediate economic gain - such economic gain will fund itself. Government funding should be un-economic.
- dnautics 13y ago
  that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    I'm not exactly sure if that's different from current academia :)

72 points by buo 13y ago

The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.

mchouza 13y ago
Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
  - ucee054 13y ago
    No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
    - kyzyl 13y ago
      > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
      - ucee054 13y ago
        save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.

protomyth 13y ago

I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-councils-makeover-leaves-industry-setting-the-agenda/article11745246/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-counci...

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.

zeteo 13y ago

From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.

rayiner 13y ago
Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money. You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.
- bhb916 13y ago
  I agree with the trend you're describing although I slightly disagree with the absolutism (i.e. "every incremental discovery" and "no longer possible"). Still, regardless of this increasing demand for funds, there are other ways to procure funding other than taxation.
- zeteo 13y ago
  There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary. First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway. Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds. Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment. Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

darxius 13y ago

As a Canadian, this makes me extremely sad. I always saw Canada as progressive ... hopefully the next government will flip this around.

nickff 13y ago
The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.
- tensor 13y ago
  It is actually possible for one party to be "better" than another. In this case, we are talking about science, and it is very obvious that limiting science in this way is "worse." Science doesn't respect your political bias.
  - nickff 13y ago
    I was not addressing the possibility of impartial administration of research funding. I was merely stating that, given the record of Canadian (and other) governments, impartiality is unlikely, regardless of party affiliation. I should also state that any budget is, by definition limited, as it is an allocation of scarce resources; so any budget will "limit science".
drpgq 13y ago
Meh, as a Canadian I've always been disappointed in how despite spending a lot of money on government R&D we've never really got much out of it. NRC has always been a bit of a weird beast and NSERC is still around.

themstheones 13y ago

This is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to defund climate science.

bhb916 13y ago
If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.
- vkou 13y ago
  The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.) It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.
corresation 13y ago
I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous. The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc. Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.
- pyre 13y ago
  The current government in Canada has been pretty hostile towards science. Do a couple of searches on how government scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the public in Canada.
  - corresation 13y ago

grecy 13y ago

Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.

corresation 13y ago
Canada have also sold out public museums.. Do you have any citation or source for this?
- grecy 13y ago
  Sure, take your pick. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civilization-to-change-name-focus-only-on-canadian-history/article4611129/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civil... http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_ends_history_begins_at_canadas_biggest_museum.html http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_e... http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives-canadian-history_n_3208625.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives... http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-tories-aim-to-whitewash-canadian-history-1.147710 http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa-canadian-museum-civilization-becomes-canadian-museum-history.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa...
  - corresation 13y ago
    They are all concerning the same action regarding the Ottawa Museum of Civilization. I wasn't sure about the claim that they sold out "public museums", when the vast majority of Canadian museums are not at the federal level, and have zero accountability of concern about the federal government.

edmond_dantes 13y ago

If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.

freshhawk 13y ago

As a Canadian ... how are the broadband speeds in New Zealand these days?

thangalin 13y ago
Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.
- geoka9 13y ago
  Citations or sources please?

cperciva 13y ago

A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health. I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.

corresation 13y ago

"Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success." The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process. What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly. If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.

jgon 13y ago
Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears. Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create. I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.
- corresation 13y ago

throwaway1980 13y ago

This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money. Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.

orbital303 13y ago

Another step towards the next dark age. It's sad that all the technological advancements around us are leading to a dumber anti-intellectual civilization that actually wants another period of stupidity, another dark age. Social gain is one thing, but most science that promotes economic gain is generally detrimental to society (at first) and usually not that useful in the long run as it is destructive in nature first and foremost and constructive only rarely. Science, these days, all comes from a desire for crime and its ultimate expression, war (internet, quantum computers, gps, weapons (obviously), etc.).

ronaldx 13y ago

Governments should only fund science that doesn't promote immediate economic gain - such economic gain will fund itself. Government funding should be un-economic.

dnautics 13y ago
that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  I'm not exactly sure if that's different from current academia :)