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Similar things happened in Canada under the Harper government. When everything is viewed from a monetary gain perspective, a lot of research that has no foresee

Similar things happened in Canada under the Harper government. When everything is viewed from a monetary gain perspective, a lot of research that has no foreseeable innovation or gain becomes obsolete, but this viewpoint is extremely distorted. Imagine if Einstein had only worked on theories that had foreseeable monetary gain. We would never have the theory of relativity and decades later we would have not had satellites in space.

dnautics 11y ago
the government is caught in a bind with basic science. Let's say it puts its money into science with no concrete outcome. How can we be sure that taxpayer money hasn't gone to some 'scientist' that just happened to have political connections instead of scientific qualifications? Or maybe the scientist was an eminent and qualified scientist who frittered away the money on a lark. There's no accountability in basic science, and a lack of accountability is anathema to good governance. Hell, that even happens in non-basic science. How do we expect basic science to be any better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbkvCMuU5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbkvCMuU5A
- vkou 11y ago
  There's no basic accountability in the private sector either. Money does not necessarily flow to people who provide social value - if this were the case, a number of extremely scummy, value-destroying industries would not exist.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    yeah, but at least it's not "taxpayer money" (or really printed money, which screws over the poor the hardest)
    - vkou 11y ago
      The poor are already the ones more affected by the predatory industries I'm thinking of. And I'm having a hard time understanding why inflation eating at your savings is harmful... When you are a person who has no savings. Edit: You are quite right in that pensions, entitlements, and the minimal wage needs to keep pace with inflation.
      - dnautics 11y ago
        >And I'm having a hard time understanding why inflation eating at your savings is harmful... When you are a person who has no savings. Check your rich person privilege. This should be obvious. If inflation didn't hurt the poor, then why do we have to keep raising the minimum wage?
        svachalek 11y ago
        Very broadly speaking, inflation is a spiral of wages and prices that devalues money itself while leaving the relative value of labor and goods equivalent. In this sort of inflation, the value of saving and the cost of debt are reduced. Many economists view this as encouraging investment and as an overall public good provided the rate is slow enough to inflate everything more or less evenly. Minimum wage is by definition not a market rate, therefore when wages and prices inflate, minimum wage and other fixed benefits are left behind. This is not so much inflation hurting the poor but rather the government choosing to help them less, in a nicely passive "don't blame me" sort of way.
        dnautics 11y ago
        that's not correct. Government is not a passive actor in the inflation game, it is not true that simply through inaction does less to help out the poor. Government takes an active role in creating inflation for several social engineering reasons. The fiscal reason is to pay for government spending above what it takes in in income taxes. The monetary reasons are to lower the strength of the dollar and create competitiveness in international trade and to modulate employment, and the investment reason you state (basically that's a writ large transfer of wealth to the rich). There's also a third reason in that if it doesn't, the current system of fractional reserve lending will collapse catastrophically (but that's complicated) http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher-inflation/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hig... "It’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis." Parse that really carefully and read between the lines. The policy reason for inflation is to cheat wage earners and laborers out of the real value of their earning (out the gate, not as saved in a bank) in order to bolster employment numbers.
    - kaonashi 11y ago
      There is no such thing as a distinction between 'unprinted' and 'printed' money.
- lutorm 11y ago
  Science has a concrete outcome: knowledge. And there are established procedures for evaluating it, things like peer reviews of research proposals. The procedure surely has its flaws, but I doubt they are more significant than the problem of evaluating whether some commercial invention actually was beneficial to society.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    leave basic science to private nonprofits. It's not impossible. Peter Mitchell discovered the chemiosmotic effect (how the mitochondrion worked) using a private nonprofit... Janelia Farms is working on some groundbreaking neuro stuff. Peer review of research proposals. It's seriously one of the most broken 'established procedure' out there. There is not a single scientist out there that doesn't whine about the capriciousness of the grandfunding process, there's even a coined term "grantsmanship" which refers to one's skill in essentially scamming the government into funding what you want to work on by shoehorning it into their call for proposal.
    - lutorm 11y ago
      Proposal funding breakage notwithstanding, are you saying that there is a working procedure for figuring out what "profitable" research should be? (It's not even clear to me what you mean by that, should it be profitable to the government, to a few individuals, or to the nation as a whole?) Personally, I think you've got it completely backwards. I'm confident that we can leave the commercializable science to those wanting to make a buck. Public funding for basic science is the only workable way. Sure, nonprofits help in certain areas, but those are also usually "earmarked" for specific fields or tasks. I don't think society's avenues of exploration should be decided by a few rich people.
      - dnautics 11y ago
        You don't know your science history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell > I don't think society's avenues of exploration should be decided by a few rich people. And having it decided by popular people (politicians), spending other people's money, is any better? Moreover, just because science is privately funded doesn't mean that it's coming from rich people.
- vacri 11y ago
  The CSIRO is (was) a prestigious institution that had an excellent reputation for producing solid work. It was gutted for political reasons, by a Prime Minister who campaigned on the 'horror' of the opponent party kicking out their chosen PM in his first term... and then being such a bad specimen himself, was kicked out in his first term. With the exclusion of the government propaganda around the time of the gutting of the CSIRO, I've never heard anyone (domestic or foreign) speak of the CSIRO with anything but respect. Accusations of fat-cat scientists feathering their nests doesn't fit.
  - blorgle 11y ago
    Unfortunately the new CEO of CSIRO is a VC, not a scientist. Fits perfectly with the "innovation" hype the Turnbull government is selling. Short termism wins again.
ken47 11y ago
If you're familiar with the notion of a greedy algorithm, that is capitalism in practice -- easy to find local optima, but in the case of humanity, very unlikely to find the global optimum.
- ken47 11y ago
  I'm getting a strong mix of upvotes and downvotes. I understand that achieving a true global optimum is likely intractable, so I thought I'd clarify my statement, and hopefully solicit some real responses. The most influential players in capitalism, not in theory, but as it is practiced in the real world today, are measured by their performance during financial quarters, or political terms. Such an incentive structure is not going to encourage long-term optimization.
Shiva2012 11y ago
Sigh... sorry but Einstein had nothing to do with putting satellites in space. If anything you're talking about the working of the GPS system and even in that case, the effects of gravity are below the error of the device. (clock drifts dealt with via regular ground synch) The only appreciable effect is the ephemeris calculation which uses relativistic doppler calculations. Unfortunately the difference between normal doppler and relativistic doppler is minuscule at these speeds and are also within error ranges... So ultimately even the GPS argument doesn't hold water.. So... like, go with Jonas Salk who gave away the fortune that was the Polio vaccine. That's a real hero.
- dnautics 11y ago
  Except Jonas Salk didn't take government money. The money to research the Polio vaccines (salk and sabin) was raised through a private nonprofit called the March of Dimes.
  - Shiva2012 11y ago
    Hmm... good point, but I think it's about valuing the advancement of knowledge over monetary issues that is the heart of the matter right?
- burkaman 11y ago
  Do you have some source for the claim that relativity doesn't really matter for GPS? If I google "GPS relativity", I get results from several universities, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Wired, etc. that all disagree with you. I don't know the science well enough to figure it out myself, but I can't find any trustworthy source that contradicts this idea.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    See my reply to LeoPanthera. Shiva2012 doesn't claim that GR effects can't be detected using GPS satellites, he's saying they are already corrected in a way that doesn't require understanding GR at all: by regularly re-syncing the clock with ground. In a hypothetical world without GR, this would be a mysterious drift rather than a non-mysterious one, but it wouldn't make GPS any less possible. Do you have a link from any of those prestigious places that says GR is actually necessary for making GPS work?
fiatjaf 11y ago
The same old "oh, you don't understand, we are scientists, we need your money because we do things no one want to pay for, but I'm pretty sure they are important!" talk.
jusben1369 11y ago
It's interesting you mention Canada. Canada, like Australia, had a wonderful 10 - 15 years selling huge quantities of natural resources to China. Weaker societies, like Brazil, have basically gone off the edge of a financial cliff with the significant retraction in China. Australia and Canada are better prepared but nonetheless I'm not surprised to see hard cost cutting decisions having to be made. Live by the sword....
lintiness 11y ago
you don't need a government paycheck to break ground scientifically, and government sure as hell isn't immune to "profit".
cam_l 11y ago
You don't need to appeal to Einstein.. Csiro invented WiFi.

dnautics 11y ago

the government is caught in a bind with basic science. Let's say it puts its money into science with no concrete outcome. How can we be sure that taxpayer money hasn't gone to some 'scientist' that just happened to have political connections instead of scientific qualifications? Or maybe the scientist was an eminent and qualified scientist who frittered away the money on a lark. There's no accountability in basic science, and a lack of accountability is anathema to good governance. Hell, that even happens in non-basic science. How do we expect basic science to be any better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbkvCMuU5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbkvCMuU5A

vkou 11y ago
There's no basic accountability in the private sector either. Money does not necessarily flow to people who provide social value - if this were the case, a number of extremely scummy, value-destroying industries would not exist.
- dnautics 11y ago
  yeah, but at least it's not "taxpayer money" (or really printed money, which screws over the poor the hardest)
  - vkou 11y ago
    The poor are already the ones more affected by the predatory industries I'm thinking of. And I'm having a hard time understanding why inflation eating at your savings is harmful... When you are a person who has no savings. Edit: You are quite right in that pensions, entitlements, and the minimal wage needs to keep pace with inflation.
    - dnautics 11y ago
      >And I'm having a hard time understanding why inflation eating at your savings is harmful... When you are a person who has no savings. Check your rich person privilege. This should be obvious. If inflation didn't hurt the poor, then why do we have to keep raising the minimum wage?
      - svachalek 11y ago
        Very broadly speaking, inflation is a spiral of wages and prices that devalues money itself while leaving the relative value of labor and goods equivalent. In this sort of inflation, the value of saving and the cost of debt are reduced. Many economists view this as encouraging investment and as an overall public good provided the rate is slow enough to inflate everything more or less evenly. Minimum wage is by definition not a market rate, therefore when wages and prices inflate, minimum wage and other fixed benefits are left behind. This is not so much inflation hurting the poor but rather the government choosing to help them less, in a nicely passive "don't blame me" sort of way.
        dnautics 11y ago
        that's not correct. Government is not a passive actor in the inflation game, it is not true that simply through inaction does less to help out the poor. Government takes an active role in creating inflation for several social engineering reasons. The fiscal reason is to pay for government spending above what it takes in in income taxes. The monetary reasons are to lower the strength of the dollar and create competitiveness in international trade and to modulate employment, and the investment reason you state (basically that's a writ large transfer of wealth to the rich). There's also a third reason in that if it doesn't, the current system of fractional reserve lending will collapse catastrophically (but that's complicated) http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher-inflation/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hig... "It’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis." Parse that really carefully and read between the lines. The policy reason for inflation is to cheat wage earners and laborers out of the real value of their earning (out the gate, not as saved in a bank) in order to bolster employment numbers.
  - kaonashi 11y ago
    There is no such thing as a distinction between 'unprinted' and 'printed' money.
lutorm 11y ago
Science has a concrete outcome: knowledge. And there are established procedures for evaluating it, things like peer reviews of research proposals. The procedure surely has its flaws, but I doubt they are more significant than the problem of evaluating whether some commercial invention actually was beneficial to society.
- dnautics 11y ago
  leave basic science to private nonprofits. It's not impossible. Peter Mitchell discovered the chemiosmotic effect (how the mitochondrion worked) using a private nonprofit... Janelia Farms is working on some groundbreaking neuro stuff. Peer review of research proposals. It's seriously one of the most broken 'established procedure' out there. There is not a single scientist out there that doesn't whine about the capriciousness of the grandfunding process, there's even a coined term "grantsmanship" which refers to one's skill in essentially scamming the government into funding what you want to work on by shoehorning it into their call for proposal.
  - lutorm 11y ago
    Proposal funding breakage notwithstanding, are you saying that there is a working procedure for figuring out what "profitable" research should be? (It's not even clear to me what you mean by that, should it be profitable to the government, to a few individuals, or to the nation as a whole?) Personally, I think you've got it completely backwards. I'm confident that we can leave the commercializable science to those wanting to make a buck. Public funding for basic science is the only workable way. Sure, nonprofits help in certain areas, but those are also usually "earmarked" for specific fields or tasks. I don't think society's avenues of exploration should be decided by a few rich people.
    - dnautics 11y ago
      You don't know your science history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell > I don't think society's avenues of exploration should be decided by a few rich people. And having it decided by popular people (politicians), spending other people's money, is any better? Moreover, just because science is privately funded doesn't mean that it's coming from rich people.
vacri 11y ago
The CSIRO is (was) a prestigious institution that had an excellent reputation for producing solid work. It was gutted for political reasons, by a Prime Minister who campaigned on the 'horror' of the opponent party kicking out their chosen PM in his first term... and then being such a bad specimen himself, was kicked out in his first term. With the exclusion of the government propaganda around the time of the gutting of the CSIRO, I've never heard anyone (domestic or foreign) speak of the CSIRO with anything but respect. Accusations of fat-cat scientists feathering their nests doesn't fit.
- blorgle 11y ago
  Unfortunately the new CEO of CSIRO is a VC, not a scientist. Fits perfectly with the "innovation" hype the Turnbull government is selling. Short termism wins again.

ken47 11y ago

If you're familiar with the notion of a greedy algorithm, that is capitalism in practice -- easy to find local optima, but in the case of humanity, very unlikely to find the global optimum.

ken47 11y ago
I'm getting a strong mix of upvotes and downvotes. I understand that achieving a true global optimum is likely intractable, so I thought I'd clarify my statement, and hopefully solicit some real responses. The most influential players in capitalism, not in theory, but as it is practiced in the real world today, are measured by their performance during financial quarters, or political terms. Such an incentive structure is not going to encourage long-term optimization.

Shiva2012 11y ago

Sigh... sorry but Einstein had nothing to do with putting satellites in space. If anything you're talking about the working of the GPS system and even in that case, the effects of gravity are below the error of the device. (clock drifts dealt with via regular ground synch) The only appreciable effect is the ephemeris calculation which uses relativistic doppler calculations. Unfortunately the difference between normal doppler and relativistic doppler is minuscule at these speeds and are also within error ranges... So ultimately even the GPS argument doesn't hold water.. So... like, go with Jonas Salk who gave away the fortune that was the Polio vaccine. That's a real hero.

dnautics 11y ago
Except Jonas Salk didn't take government money. The money to research the Polio vaccines (salk and sabin) was raised through a private nonprofit called the March of Dimes.
- Shiva2012 11y ago
  Hmm... good point, but I think it's about valuing the advancement of knowledge over monetary issues that is the heart of the matter right?
burkaman 11y ago
Do you have some source for the claim that relativity doesn't really matter for GPS? If I google "GPS relativity", I get results from several universities, Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Wired, etc. that all disagree with you. I don't know the science well enough to figure it out myself, but I can't find any trustworthy source that contradicts this idea.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  See my reply to LeoPanthera. Shiva2012 doesn't claim that GR effects can't be detected using GPS satellites, he's saying they are already corrected in a way that doesn't require understanding GR at all: by regularly re-syncing the clock with ground. In a hypothetical world without GR, this would be a mysterious drift rather than a non-mysterious one, but it wouldn't make GPS any less possible. Do you have a link from any of those prestigious places that says GR is actually necessary for making GPS work?

fiatjaf 11y ago

The same old "oh, you don't understand, we are scientists, we need your money because we do things no one want to pay for, but I'm pretty sure they are important!" talk.

jusben1369 11y ago

It's interesting you mention Canada. Canada, like Australia, had a wonderful 10 - 15 years selling huge quantities of natural resources to China. Weaker societies, like Brazil, have basically gone off the edge of a financial cliff with the significant retraction in China. Australia and Canada are better prepared but nonetheless I'm not surprised to see hard cost cutting decisions having to be made. Live by the sword....

lintiness 11y ago

you don't need a government paycheck to break ground scientifically, and government sure as hell isn't immune to "profit".

cam_l 11y ago

You don't need to appeal to Einstein.. Csiro invented WiFi.