tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post2416815397085457731..comments2024-03-28T03:15:14.875-07:00Comments on Unenumerated: The trouble with scienceNick Szabohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16820399856274245684noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-23939704073698013212007-07-01T16:55:00.000-07:002007-07-01T16:55:00.000-07:00If anything, government-sponsored research, partic...If anything, government-sponsored research, particularly in things like physics, is going to have to <I>increase</I> if further progress is going to be made. What corporation, or group of corporations, would fund the Large Hadron Collider? Its construction costs are in the billions. None of the work has any useful application in any corporate reasonable time horizon. The next collider will cost even more. Without these colliders, important chunks of theoretical physics can't get any experimental confirmation. <BR/>But let's put this aside, as you might think that we ought to spend less on high-energy physics and more on cheaper science. Surely some of it is such that research divisions of various corporations would have some interests in contributing to the research, either with money to universities or with their own efforts. However, it should be noted that a great deal of such science has zero use value for a majority of corporations. Who will fund that work? Or how about just the very low-probability work?<BR/>It is also notable that, in the Modern era, there have been two main locations for a great deal of scientific work (and particularly in Physics). First, Germany and Austria. Most of the Quantum Revolution came from people that worked through the German educational system and had German funding. This is in contrast to the lots of smart English folks who were all "gentleman scientists" as there was no funding agencies at the time - science was largely a rich man's hobby. Not surprisingly, Germans accomplished a lot more. After WWII, the power in science has been the United States. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that many national science funding sources were established. In fact, it is not difficult to make the argument that our current economic success is in large part due to the huge basic research subsidy provided by the US Government, which allowed thousands of companies to thrive. As we were undoubtedly more laissez-faire as a country prior to FDR, we should have seen a significant drop in innovation. But we see precisely the opposite. More government funding, more good science. <BR/>Of course, the relevant question to ask is, if corporations and scientists in some sense share the interest of having more diversity of funding sources, because this would lead to higher-quality science, why has this not already happened? There is nothing prohibiting any organization from providing scientific funding. And no doubt, scientists would accept more money. So if this is the more efficient solution, why hasn't the market already moved to it?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-39953340573727643532007-04-23T14:00:00.000-07:002007-04-23T14:00:00.000-07:00Nick,I suspect you've already found Climate Audit,...Nick,<BR/><BR/>I suspect you've already found <A HREF="http://www.climateaudit.org" REL="nofollow">Climate Audit</A>, but if it not it may, um, sharpen your perception of the problem...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-73852519054514131062007-04-18T08:39:00.000-07:002007-04-18T08:39:00.000-07:00Market based science in the current corporate clim...Market based science in the current corporate climate wouldn't actually be too terribly different from government dominated science. But I don't think that's the point Nick is making. He's saying the incentives are messed up when science is done institutionally.<BR/><BR/>Look at the great theorists and experimenters of science's infancy. None of them ran huge research labs, and most weren't even full-time scientists. But the discoveries they made lasted because they had a personal passion for the process of scientific inquiry. They were also more inclined to do "pure science" than research as tribute to centralized institutions with an agenda.<BR/><BR/>This idea that science can only be done by large scale institutions and multi-million dollar budgets assumes that the interests that motivate science (and, for that matter, "progress" in general) are fixed. They are not. As Lewis Mumford has argued, technological progress can occur in a variety of ways depending on what the needs to society are. <BR/><BR/>So: if we have a bunch of big players in the game - privileged, outsized corporations, governments, bloated educational institutions - who all press for the kind of science that's done to promote their agenda, we miss out on science done according to a smaller scale, decentralized agenda pursued by a wide variety of researchers. Government / corporate funding doesn't just corrupt science - it moves science in a different direction than even scientists might otherwise pursue. The implications, especially with regard to intellectual property and military applications, should be obvious.<BR/><BR/>Even now there are alternatives, such as wiki-science and amateur research. If those concepts have disadvantages, we should not ignore their inherent advantages. Most of all, we should not treat them as less scientific - science is largely a process disconnected for particular priorities, and there's no reason we can't have a market in those priorities.Jeremyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08046932749797197182noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-80463274335689342052007-04-03T21:18:00.000-07:002007-04-03T21:18:00.000-07:00Let me pass on the "which is more dangerous" issue...Let me pass on the "which is more dangerous" issue, since you may be right and in any case it threatens to turn into a standard boring argument.<BR/><BR/>The point I really wanted to make is this: funding pure scientific research requires serious surplus capital, since science is not something that has a short term economic payoff. Pure science is a) risky, b) has a long time horizon, c) even if successful might not have any concrete economic impact, and d) whaever economic good it produces is not ownable. So, the only entities that can afford to fund long-term pure science are a) governments, b) rich private individuals or charities, or c) monopolies. The product of science is a classic public good and its production is not readily privatized. Monopolies are freed from the constraints of competition and so can afford to invest in things that may not pay off and in any case can't be owned.<BR/><BR/>Thus, any corporation that could afford to fund a group of theoretical physicists is probably a monopoly or near-monopoly already (and the casees that I can think of where private firms have done serious basic physics research, AT&T and IBM, fit that mold). <BR/><BR/>The institutional problems you bring up with big science may be real, but that doesn't mean that a science driven by market forces will be better. In fact, I can't see how it could work at all, and I'd say the burden of proof is on you. <BR/><BR/>You'll also need to make a much better case that government funding is somehow stultifying multiple points of view. As far as I know, both string-theorists and anti-string-theorists can get government grants. Also I think your dismissal of diversity in government funding sources is too glib. Yes, everybody is biased towards inflating their own self-importance -- the scientists and funding agencies both. That's a human universal. But that's not the problem you are addressing. The only real problem i see in the sort of hierarchical meritocracies that rule science is that it's possible for an orthodoxy to capture the sources of funding and prevent heterodox opinions from being developed. Undoubtadly this happens sometimes, maybe even frequently. But a diversity of funding agencies mitigates against it.mtravenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-46855648626129336582007-04-03T12:22:00.000-07:002007-04-03T12:22:00.000-07:00David Cooke -- thanks for the clarification. I wa...David Cooke -- thanks for the clarification. I was using "theoretical physics" in the sense Smolin was using it; a better phrase may be "fundamental theoretical physics" to distinguish it from other kinds like the condensed matter physics you discuss.<BR/><BR/>mtaven, the different government programs provide a very limited variety. They all come with a very consistent bias -- they all have an incentive to increase their revenue by exagerating problems, an incentive that is unmitigated by market forces. And why do you say that "private concentrations of wealth that are that large make me more nervous than the government"? Historically, governments have imprisoned, killed, and otherwise destroyed the lives of far more people than the greediest of corporations. Where governments have controlled science they have abused it in a wide variety of ways, ranging from turning science into state-sponsored dogma (e.g. Lysenkoism)to the racial theories of National Socialist Germany and the subsequent concentration camps, genocide, and grotesque experiments on unwilling victims. I am not aware of any similar abuses by a corporation. Under modern laws private entities can get away with far fewer abuses than can governments, and competition mediated by a vast market is a strong force for balancing and cancelling out biases which is largely absent from the D.C. insider culture and hierachical scientific elite that largely determines scientific fundingNick Szabohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16820399856274245684noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-84311124865239919652007-04-03T11:34:00.000-07:002007-04-03T11:34:00.000-07:00This is written as if there was just one monolithi...This is written as if there was just one monolithic entity in the world called "The Government". In fact, there are multiple governments funding science (mainly in Europe and Japan), and within the US government there are multiple funding agencies with their own priorities. Don't know about physics, but in biology you have funding from NSF, NIH, NIST, DOE, and probably others.<BR/><BR/>Private funding of research comes when it's in their own interest, or when the industry has a near monopoly and can afford to act like a government (the old Bell Labs, the old IBM, the current Google). Or when some private individual amaasses enough surplus that they can be a major charity (The Bill Gates Foundation). That's all very well but not likely to compete with the government any time soon. Nor should it, IMO -- private concentrations of wealth that are that large make me more nervous than the government.mtravenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02356162954308418556noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17908317.post-40426591334874863112007-03-22T04:07:00.000-07:002007-03-22T04:07:00.000-07:00I agree that the string theorists have probably st...I agree that the string theorists have probably strayed too far from "testable" path. However, they are only a small minority -- there are many more theoretical physicists working in condensed matter than in string theory. In my department, there are 8 theorists on the faculty, of which only one is a string theorist. (I'm not counting the astrophysicists or cosmologists, as they tend to get huffy when you do that.) Most of them are working in condensed matter. The distribution of graduate students is even more one-sided. The American Physical Society's March meeting, which is mostly condensed matter, this year ran 44 sessions in parallel, four times a day, for a week. The April meeting (pretty much everything else in physics) will run about 16 sessions in parallel. (And the PDF for the conference program is about 7 times larger for the March meeting.) Condensed matter is, of course, not as sexy as string theory.<BR/><BR/>In terms of funding, who would fund these kinds of endeavours? For some things, there are funds available from industry, as there obvious short-term applications. However, a good portion is just basic physics, which may (or may not) have applications 50 years down the road. These long-term projects with unpredictable results are not usually interesting to industry with short-term goals in mind.<BR/><BR/>Also, theorists are relatively cheap: give them money for some computers, a few graduate students and postdocs, and they're mostly happy. Compare this to experimental physics, for which they need the preceding, but also expensive equipment and materials (huge particle accelerators, neutron beamlines, NMR machines, technicians to run things, to name a few).<BR/><BR/>I agree that scientists working for the government should be more separated, and less susceptible to political pressure. Those are the ones that make the news, though: scientists working in universities aren't prone to the same type of interference.David M. Cookehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04128601416939098949noreply@blogger.com