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Name me one field of human endeavor that is not impacted by the fact that groups of humans need a process to decide which things to allocate resources to. Name

Name me one field of human endeavor that is not impacted by the fact that groups of humans need a process to decide which things to allocate resources to. Name me one field of human endeavor which is not impacted by the fact that this process is operated by humans and therefore occasionally exhibits pettiness, favoritism, dysfunction and short-sightedness. Name me one field of human endeavor without politics.

nitrogen 12y ago
Name me one field of human endeavor that should be more removed from politics than the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe. "Is" does not imply "ought". We deserve better.
- rando289 12y ago
  > Name me one field of human endeavor Tons of stuff. I'd rather politics axe "workings of the universe" than vaccinations and disease control.
  - maaku 12y ago
    Vaccinations (medical science) and disease control / pandemic response are not as divorced from "workings of the universe" as I think you think they are...
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    I'd rather fund all of those things a thousand times over just by cutting a small fraction of funding to the world's militaries.
    - rtpg 12y ago
      You seem to underestimate the cost of a lot of science (not to mention that more money doesn't necessarily mean we'll get more results, maybe just the same result duplicated). The ISS is the most expensive structure ever built, after all.
      - tobinfricke 12y ago
        The ISS is perhaps "the exception that proves the rule": its political value is vastly greater than its scientific value.
    - wdr1 12y ago
      That's absurd. The majority of budget isn't the military.
      - nitrogen 12y ago
        Welfare and social program expenditures could also be significantly reduced by reducing the cost of curing and preventing disease.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccin... Even vaccinations are used for other purposes than to keep people healthy. Clever, but likely to have a lot of adverse side-effects.
    - makomk 12y ago
      At this point we can upgrade that from "likely" to "certain", because it has had a lot of adverse effects in terms of actually being able to vaccinate people in Pakistan.
- afarrell 12y ago
  "ought" does not imply "can be".
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    I don't believe we should give up on idealism just because the end goal appears unachievable.
    - afarrell 12y ago
      hmmm... I think we might have talked past each other with these past two comments. I think you're thinking that I'm saying something like "well, if we've never made it to the moon, it sounds preposterous to think we ever will." It sounds like you think developing a politics-less way of funding scientific research is a matter of working on something to produce a new system. Please let me know if that is in fact your perspective. It is not mine. To me, the idea of not having politics be involved in science sounds as absurd as... well lets assume we're friends and imagine that you, I, and a mutual friend of ours planned to play lazor tag together. We go to pick her up and she says that she can't join us because she has food poisoning and can't come. As we are driving from her house to the lazor tag place, you say that biology shouldn't interfere with plans with your friends. Now, you just mean that it sucks that she has food poisoning and you wish that this sort of thing didn't happen occasionally. But your statement is slightly more absolute than that: biology, being fundamental to the human condition, is always involved in plans made among humans. Complex metabolic, biomechanical, and neurological processes are an inherent part of a lazor tag outing. I claim that politics is fundamental to the human condition. I claim that much like food poisoning happens occasionally, so does pettiness and favoritism. That does not mean that it is pointless to keep one's meats either freezing or cooked. That does not make it pointless to use separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables. Healthier biology is possible to achieve and so is healthier politics. But it is still politics. My saying "politics is always involved" may now seem pedantic, so here is why it is meaningful and important: If you adopt an attitude that attempts to simply avoid politics, you will likely avoid studying and paying attention to politics and group dynamics. On a pragmatic level, this will serve you poorly. But on a more idealistic level, this will serve your cause poorly because you will abandon the opportunity to create healthy politics. What does healthy politics look like? That is a subject for whole essays and whole lifetimes of study, but I suspect you can recognize a social system with healthy politics by its high degree of trust.
- pdonis 12y ago
  > the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe But that isn't what the MIT fusion reactor is doing. We already know how fusion works; we already know what conditions we need to create to make a fusion reactor self-sustaining. What we don't yet know is how to create them here on Earth. So the question isn't about fundamental knowledge; it's about engineering and economics. We've been trying to make tokamak fusion work for decades. The Alcator C-Mod experiment that's mentioned in these articles was put into place while I was at MIT in the mid-1980's, and people back then were saying we would have ignition, a self-sustaining controlled fusion reaction, sometime within the next decade. It's now been three decades and we still don't have ignition. Certainly the experiment has been upgraded and refined and has continued to yield useful data, but that's not the crucial question; the crucial question is, is it worth the taxpayer money that's been put into it? That money wasn't supposed to buy useful data, it was supposed to buy ignition. To be clear, I'm not arguing that the funds for MIT's experiment should be redirected to ITER or to the other US sites mentioned in the article. The same reasoning that I just applied to the MIT experiment, could be applied to all of the fusion research that's been done since we started doing fusion research. We simply did not realize the magnitude of the engineering problem involved in achieving a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction without a Sun's mass worth of gravity to confine it.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    The potential payoff is so huge that we simply can't leave it on the table. Should there be fewer reactors? Maybe, but certainly not zero reactors.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      In my opinion funding should rather go to Thorium and breeder fission reactors. If something has been tried for decades without a clear breakthrough, it's definitely time to try some other promising avenue.
      - tormeh 12y ago
        Well, then kill off some fusion reactors and divert funding to Thorium and breeder, but let's not cut out fusion completely.
Retric 12y ago
Writing fanfiction? Your prohibited from making money from it so it's rather insular.

nitrogen 12y ago

Name me one field of human endeavor that should be more removed from politics than the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe. "Is" does not imply "ought". We deserve better.

rando289 12y ago
> Name me one field of human endeavor Tons of stuff. I'd rather politics axe "workings of the universe" than vaccinations and disease control.
- maaku 12y ago
  Vaccinations (medical science) and disease control / pandemic response are not as divorced from "workings of the universe" as I think you think they are...
- nitrogen 12y ago
  I'd rather fund all of those things a thousand times over just by cutting a small fraction of funding to the world's militaries.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    You seem to underestimate the cost of a lot of science (not to mention that more money doesn't necessarily mean we'll get more results, maybe just the same result duplicated). The ISS is the most expensive structure ever built, after all.
    - tobinfricke 12y ago
      The ISS is perhaps "the exception that proves the rule": its political value is vastly greater than its scientific value.
  - wdr1 12y ago
    That's absurd. The majority of budget isn't the military.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Welfare and social program expenditures could also be significantly reduced by reducing the cost of curing and preventing disease.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccinations-osama-bin-ladens-dna http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vaccin... Even vaccinations are used for other purposes than to keep people healthy. Clever, but likely to have a lot of adverse side-effects.
  - makomk 12y ago
    At this point we can upgrade that from "likely" to "certain", because it has had a lot of adverse effects in terms of actually being able to vaccinate people in Pakistan.
afarrell 12y ago
"ought" does not imply "can be".
- nitrogen 12y ago
  I don't believe we should give up on idealism just because the end goal appears unachievable.
  - afarrell 12y ago
    hmmm... I think we might have talked past each other with these past two comments. I think you're thinking that I'm saying something like "well, if we've never made it to the moon, it sounds preposterous to think we ever will." It sounds like you think developing a politics-less way of funding scientific research is a matter of working on something to produce a new system. Please let me know if that is in fact your perspective. It is not mine. To me, the idea of not having politics be involved in science sounds as absurd as... well lets assume we're friends and imagine that you, I, and a mutual friend of ours planned to play lazor tag together. We go to pick her up and she says that she can't join us because she has food poisoning and can't come. As we are driving from her house to the lazor tag place, you say that biology shouldn't interfere with plans with your friends. Now, you just mean that it sucks that she has food poisoning and you wish that this sort of thing didn't happen occasionally. But your statement is slightly more absolute than that: biology, being fundamental to the human condition, is always involved in plans made among humans. Complex metabolic, biomechanical, and neurological processes are an inherent part of a lazor tag outing. I claim that politics is fundamental to the human condition. I claim that much like food poisoning happens occasionally, so does pettiness and favoritism. That does not mean that it is pointless to keep one's meats either freezing or cooked. That does not make it pointless to use separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables. Healthier biology is possible to achieve and so is healthier politics. But it is still politics. My saying "politics is always involved" may now seem pedantic, so here is why it is meaningful and important: If you adopt an attitude that attempts to simply avoid politics, you will likely avoid studying and paying attention to politics and group dynamics. On a pragmatic level, this will serve you poorly. But on a more idealistic level, this will serve your cause poorly because you will abandon the opportunity to create healthy politics. What does healthy politics look like? That is a subject for whole essays and whole lifetimes of study, but I suspect you can recognize a social system with healthy politics by its high degree of trust.
pdonis 12y ago
> the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe But that isn't what the MIT fusion reactor is doing. We already know how fusion works; we already know what conditions we need to create to make a fusion reactor self-sustaining. What we don't yet know is how to create them here on Earth. So the question isn't about fundamental knowledge; it's about engineering and economics. We've been trying to make tokamak fusion work for decades. The Alcator C-Mod experiment that's mentioned in these articles was put into place while I was at MIT in the mid-1980's, and people back then were saying we would have ignition, a self-sustaining controlled fusion reaction, sometime within the next decade. It's now been three decades and we still don't have ignition. Certainly the experiment has been upgraded and refined and has continued to yield useful data, but that's not the crucial question; the crucial question is, is it worth the taxpayer money that's been put into it? That money wasn't supposed to buy useful data, it was supposed to buy ignition. To be clear, I'm not arguing that the funds for MIT's experiment should be redirected to ITER or to the other US sites mentioned in the article. The same reasoning that I just applied to the MIT experiment, could be applied to all of the fusion research that's been done since we started doing fusion research. We simply did not realize the magnitude of the engineering problem involved in achieving a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction without a Sun's mass worth of gravity to confine it.
- tormeh 12y ago
  The potential payoff is so huge that we simply can't leave it on the table. Should there be fewer reactors? Maybe, but certainly not zero reactors.
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    In my opinion funding should rather go to Thorium and breeder fission reactors. If something has been tried for decades without a clear breakthrough, it's definitely time to try some other promising avenue.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Well, then kill off some fusion reactors and divert funding to Thorium and breeder, but let's not cut out fusion completely.

Retric 12y ago

Writing fanfiction? Your prohibited from making money from it so it's rather insular.