4 ms·
Here is another data point for you. I went to grad school with public funding and obtained a PhD in CS. I'm one of these who worked for "close to minimum wage".
by tensor 13y ago
Here is another data point for you. I went to grad school with public funding and obtained a PhD in CS. I'm one of these who worked for "close to minimum wage".
Would I have done it if my research was to be used to further the profits of a corporation instead of being released free to the world?
Not a chance.
What if they were willing to pay 10x what I earned? Would I do it then? Maybe, though perhaps not even then. I'd sooner work for myself.
I don't think I'm alone either. Among my peers, nobody wanted corporate grants. The sentiment was that they would rather just quite and get a job for full pay if a corporate grant where their research went to the corporation was the only option.
Further, I'd argue that corporations today simply do not do any science at all. They do engineering, sure, but very little science. You might counter and point to drug companies, but the work they do is highly criticized as is with claims that they outright won't work on cures because cures don't make them ongoing profits. They also won't work on any disease that is not extremely common. The days of Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are largely over with few holdouts still doing interesting work that is released for the public good (Google, Microsoft).
Public funding has yielded huge numbers of scientific and mathematical advances over the years. Many people here have given plenty of examples already, though there are a great many more too.
- dnautics 13y agowhy do you assume that private funding has to go to a corporation? There are nonprofits too. And then there are guys like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell#Independent_researcher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell#Independent_r... And of course, Salk made the polio vaccine, which was no small feat, with zero federal funding, and he even refused to patent the thing.
- tensor 13y agoThis is why I was careful with my words about where the research would end up, and where the funding would come from. These examples along with government funding are distinct in that they are not motivated by profit, the overall theme of the discussion. Suffice to say, if people won't support science via government funding, I suspect they are equally if not more unlikely to do it via nonprofits. And I say that based on observations of opt-in vs opt-out that come from behavioural economics (which ironically may never have been discovered without public funding). In short, I don't see these ever sustaining the amount of scientific work that is currently going on.
- dnautics 13y agothe objection to government funding science is quite simple - it's not a voluntary contribution, and is immaterial to what people would like to "see money go to" There are other motivations for funding science besides money. It's good publicity, for example, if you're running a private research university, which is how quite a bit of research got funded in the pre-1960s era. Finally, "good basic science" fundamentally runs counter to "good governance". "good governance" requires accountability and milestones; "good basic science" requires the practitioner to be free from accountability besides the basic one of "don't lie".
- tensor 13y agoThat same objection to government funding of science can be applied to everything the government does.
- dnautics 13y agoabsolutely. For that reason it would be really nice to have an enumerated list of things that government should do, and a second list of prohibitions that say what lines it shouldn't cross when doing those things it has the authority to do, don't you think?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]