9 ms·

Capitalist Science

24 points by YAFZ 13y ago

nmc 13y ago
I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity forever.
- MereInterest 13y ago
  Science does. Each discovery is the heritage of humanity, the beneficiary of being in the world that we are in. This suggestion is nothing more than an attempt to steal that heritage and dole it back out in limited amounts, expecting us to be grateful for it.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it. That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.
- CWuestefeld 13y ago
  How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products... Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general? Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.
  - dylandrop 13y ago
    The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest. (Imagine if the only crop research was done by Monsanto.) Capitalism hasn't caused basic research to go away, but if we only rely on science from capitalism, there will undoubtedly be a ton of problems to face there.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - CWuestefeld 13y ago
      Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children. the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results. Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
- ignostic 13y ago
  > *"Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science." Be careful with those broad strokes - they're likely to be a result of selective perception unless supported by external fact. I actually read the paper (not just the abstract), and I'll be the first to agree that ant that the paper is a little basic, and it makes too many "economics in a vacuum" assumptions. If you're going to take the time to disagree, though, you really should be prepared to back it up with something. Anyone can spout their opinion ("Capitalism is bad at science") as fact, but that alone is meaningless and adds nothing to the conversation.
  - parrotdoxical 13y ago
    I'd argue that a such a sweeping hypothesis as one made by the "paper" is so broad so as to be meaningless, and that you couldn't actually come up with enough facts to prove it one way or another. Just seems like troll bait, honestly.
    - ignostic 13y ago
      I'd agree that the paper makes claims it can't begin to back up in the real world - I originally said pretty much that. But to say that we couldn't come up with enough facts to prove something seems to show a lack of imagination. No one's saying it's easy, but with good data and smart people it's not an unsolveable problem. Really, though, I'm not sure the conclusion would do much to convince people. The debate between socialism and capitalism has never been purely economic. Most people's positions have a lot more to do with their core values and what they believe is fair.
      - parrotdoxical 13y ago
        When I see a hypothesis which is THAT sweeping, there's no reason to waste the time of trying to find data to support the hypothesis or a refutation of it. I mean quite literally it is so sweeping as to be meaningless. The more broad you make a hypothesis, the more difficult it is to find evidence to support it. This is especially evident in economics, which is not nearly as hermeneutic and self-sufficient as, say, physics or mathematics. You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.
zdw 13y ago
If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.
- darkmighty 13y ago
  Have you read the article? It's interesting and follows the individual reward premise of capitalism, although absolutely impracticable not to mention it only makes sense in a very limited number of fields.
zzzeek 13y ago
Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???
- dylandrop 13y ago
  If they didn't in fact fund it themselves
jerf 13y ago
Don't we already have both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated. (I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)
jk4930 13y ago
Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-science http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...
im_a_bug 13y ago
This is daft.
- twic 13y ago
  From reading the abstract, i assumed it was satire. Is it serious? See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Based on his previous two papers which detail a way of determining the value of various research projects, I'm inclined to say yes, he's serious. Either that or I'm unable to hear the whoosh.
praptak 13y ago
"The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large." Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.
mcv 13y ago
But this "capitalist science" has already existed for ages, hasn't it? Plenty of companies do science, monopolize the results through patents, and exploit them for private profit. That's capitalist science. > The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large. Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties. > Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests, No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations. > channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life. Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - alex_young 13y ago
    Patents are a legal construct designed by and for corporations for their benefit. To argue that they are somehow not capitalist is somewhat disingenuous isn't it? It always bothers me when I see absolutist statements such as this one. Are you claiming that there's some plausible 'pure-capitalism' existent outside of all laws? Isn't the basis of capitalism itself wholly dependent on the governmental construct called currency? What about policing and a court system? It's hard to imagine anything approximating the modern idea of trade without those functions. When you boil things down, 'government' is just a set of rules we all agree to. Capitalism is a set of rules we agree to in the area of trade. These are inexorably linked ideas.
    - davidiach 13y ago
      >Patents are a legal construct designed by and for corporations for their benefit. To argue that they are somehow not capitalist is somewhat disingenuous isn't it? Some people distinguish between free market capitalism and crony capitalism. Others don't. Some of the people who make the distinction do not consider crony capitalism to be capitalism. That is why you will see people who say things like patents are not capitalist or Too big to fail is anti-capitalist.
ronaldx 13y ago
Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite. Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process. Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for. Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap. (Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Maybe, but not necessarily. Let's imagine a hypothetical piece of research that every single person wants, and wants enough to willingly contribute their share (per capita, or wealth/income adjusted, whatever) if that is required in order to have the research done. However, if they value the money they would be contributing more than the marginal change in the research for lack of their funding, they might rationally choose still not to contribute unless coerced to do their part.
    - eatitraw 13y ago
      Assurance contracts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts Example: you start a project on something like kickstarter, people contribute the amount of money they like. Then after the project reaches its goal, the research starts. If goal isn't reached then people get their money back.
grimtrigger 13y ago
Article starts off with brushes that are too wide, but gets interesting around Appendix B where he talks about a sort of "Market for Hypotheses". Interesting concept, but doesn't talk much about the incentive structure needed for companies to play the game fairly. Also the market would have to be government created and run, a responsibility the ACA should make anyone skeptic of.
veganarchocap 13y ago
I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model. Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete. This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence. I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this. Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either. Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement. I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs. Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!
- brazzy 13y ago
  > I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model. I'd argue the exact oppsite: that the current private research work done especially in the field of medicine would yield vastly more benefit for lower costs if it were completely replaced by state funded research.
- noelwelsh 13y ago
  I don't recognise the world you are talking about. Particularly "the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete". On the contrary, the state funds the basic research that is then "monopolised" by enterprise once it has been sufficiently developed. The rocket tech. that Virgin Galactic is using didn't come from nowhere. Neither did the deep learning methods that Facebook is investing in.
LogicalBorg 13y ago
Maybe we should crowd-fund science projects like we do Kickstarter projects. In the Internet Age, that's about as capitalistic as you can get.
- jlcx 13y ago
  It's already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305
gehmbo 13y ago
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
denom 13y ago
Is this supposed to be a scientific research paper? > "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible" What's up with the citation to the above paragraph: > "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example." I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand. This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?
jlcx 13y ago
"Basic science is currently a socialist enterprise, funded by the taxpayer, with the results available to society at large." One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that. "Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research." Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.
- wes-exp 13y ago
  I don't think this it is the fault of patent law that companies do not fund basic research. I think is it just the fact that it is very hard to profit from basic research, fundamentally. If anything, patent law (for all its faults) at least tries to create some incentives.
mordae 13y ago
> channel more money into basic science This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.

Capitalist Science

24 points by YAFZ 13y ago

nmc 13y ago

I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity forever.

MereInterest 13y ago
Science does. Each discovery is the heritage of humanity, the beneficiary of being in the world that we are in. This suggestion is nothing more than an attempt to steal that heritage and dole it back out in limited amounts, expecting us to be grateful for it.

michaelochurch 13y ago

Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it. That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.

CWuestefeld 13y ago
How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products... Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general? Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.
- dylandrop 13y ago
  The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest. (Imagine if the only crop research was done by Monsanto.) Capitalism hasn't caused basic research to go away, but if we only rely on science from capitalism, there will undoubtedly be a ton of problems to face there.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - CWuestefeld 13y ago
    Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children. the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results. Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.
ignostic 13y ago
> *"Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science." Be careful with those broad strokes - they're likely to be a result of selective perception unless supported by external fact. I actually read the paper (not just the abstract), and I'll be the first to agree that ant that the paper is a little basic, and it makes too many "economics in a vacuum" assumptions. If you're going to take the time to disagree, though, you really should be prepared to back it up with something. Anyone can spout their opinion ("Capitalism is bad at science") as fact, but that alone is meaningless and adds nothing to the conversation.
- parrotdoxical 13y ago
  I'd argue that a such a sweeping hypothesis as one made by the "paper" is so broad so as to be meaningless, and that you couldn't actually come up with enough facts to prove it one way or another. Just seems like troll bait, honestly.
  - ignostic 13y ago
    I'd agree that the paper makes claims it can't begin to back up in the real world - I originally said pretty much that. But to say that we couldn't come up with enough facts to prove something seems to show a lack of imagination. No one's saying it's easy, but with good data and smart people it's not an unsolveable problem. Really, though, I'm not sure the conclusion would do much to convince people. The debate between socialism and capitalism has never been purely economic. Most people's positions have a lot more to do with their core values and what they believe is fair.
    - parrotdoxical 13y ago
      When I see a hypothesis which is THAT sweeping, there's no reason to waste the time of trying to find data to support the hypothesis or a refutation of it. I mean quite literally it is so sweeping as to be meaningless. The more broad you make a hypothesis, the more difficult it is to find evidence to support it. This is especially evident in economics, which is not nearly as hermeneutic and self-sufficient as, say, physics or mathematics. You may be right that I'm espousing a lack of a certain kind of imagination, but I don't want to adopt the kind of imagination that tacitly accepts the validity of a hypothesis to be explored. The willingness to accept THAT kind of a hypothesis to me, in fact, belies a different kind of lack of a imagination. I am critical of the value structure that would create the assumptions that would lead to the OP's hypothesis, and my prescription is simple: pare down the scope of the hypothesis. Be specific. It's not that the debate between capitalism and socialism has never been purely economic, but in fact has mostly been ideology driven. Statistics are contextualized in rhetoric by ideological worldviews, and I've never been a fan of arguing/accepting arguments by leaps of faith. Skepticism of the law of excluded middle and all that.

zdw 13y ago

If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.

darkmighty 13y ago
Have you read the article? It's interesting and follows the individual reward premise of capitalism, although absolutely impracticable not to mention it only makes sense in a very limited number of fields.

zzzeek 13y ago

Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???

dylandrop 13y ago
If they didn't in fact fund it themselves

jerf 13y ago

Don't we already have both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated. (I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)

jk4930 13y ago

Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-science http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...

im_a_bug 13y ago

This is daft.

twic 13y ago
From reading the abstract, i assumed it was satire. Is it serious? See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  Based on his previous two papers which detail a way of determining the value of various research projects, I'm inclined to say yes, he's serious. Either that or I'm unable to hear the whoosh.

praptak 13y ago

"The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large." Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.

mcv 13y ago

But this "capitalist science" has already existed for ages, hasn't it? Plenty of companies do science, monopolize the results through patents, and exploit them for private profit. That's capitalist science. > The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large. Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties. > Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests, No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations. > channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life. Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- alex_young 13y ago
  Patents are a legal construct designed by and for corporations for their benefit. To argue that they are somehow not capitalist is somewhat disingenuous isn't it? It always bothers me when I see absolutist statements such as this one. Are you claiming that there's some plausible 'pure-capitalism' existent outside of all laws? Isn't the basis of capitalism itself wholly dependent on the governmental construct called currency? What about policing and a court system? It's hard to imagine anything approximating the modern idea of trade without those functions. When you boil things down, 'government' is just a set of rules we all agree to. Capitalism is a set of rules we agree to in the area of trade. These are inexorably linked ideas.
  - davidiach 13y ago
    >Patents are a legal construct designed by and for corporations for their benefit. To argue that they are somehow not capitalist is somewhat disingenuous isn't it? Some people distinguish between free market capitalism and crony capitalism. Others don't. Some of the people who make the distinction do not consider crony capitalism to be capitalism. That is why you will see people who say things like patents are not capitalist or Too big to fail is anti-capitalist.

ronaldx 13y ago

Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite. Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process. Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for. Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap. (Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Maybe, but not necessarily. Let's imagine a hypothetical piece of research that every single person wants, and wants enough to willingly contribute their share (per capita, or wealth/income adjusted, whatever) if that is required in order to have the research done. However, if they value the money they would be contributing more than the marginal change in the research for lack of their funding, they might rationally choose still not to contribute unless coerced to do their part.
  - eatitraw 13y ago
    Assurance contracts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contracts Example: you start a project on something like kickstarter, people contribute the amount of money they like. Then after the project reaches its goal, the research starts. If goal isn't reached then people get their money back.

grimtrigger 13y ago

Article starts off with brushes that are too wide, but gets interesting around Appendix B where he talks about a sort of "Market for Hypotheses". Interesting concept, but doesn't talk much about the incentive structure needed for companies to play the game fairly. Also the market would have to be government created and run, a responsibility the ACA should make anyone skeptic of.

veganarchocap 13y ago

I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model. Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete. This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence. I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this. Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either. Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement. I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs. Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!

brazzy 13y ago
> I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model. I'd argue the exact oppsite: that the current private research work done especially in the field of medicine would yield vastly more benefit for lower costs if it were completely replaced by state funded research.
noelwelsh 13y ago
I don't recognise the world you are talking about. Particularly "the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete". On the contrary, the state funds the basic research that is then "monopolised" by enterprise once it has been sufficiently developed. The rocket tech. that Virgin Galactic is using didn't come from nowhere. Neither did the deep learning methods that Facebook is investing in.

LogicalBorg 13y ago

Maybe we should crowd-fund science projects like we do Kickstarter projects. In the Internet Age, that's about as capitalistic as you can get.

jlcx 13y ago
It's already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305

gehmbo 13y ago

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

denom 13y ago

Is this supposed to be a scientific research paper? > "The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible" What's up with the citation to the above paragraph: > "[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example." I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand. This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?

jlcx 13y ago

"Basic science is currently a socialist enterprise, funded by the taxpayer, with the results available to society at large." One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that. "Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research." Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.

wes-exp 13y ago
I don't think this it is the fault of patent law that companies do not fund basic research. I think is it just the fact that it is very hard to profit from basic research, fundamentally. If anything, patent law (for all its faults) at least tries to create some incentives.

mordae 13y ago

> channel more money into basic science This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.