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142 sats \ 7 replies \ @Cje95 25 Oct \ on: War, Taxes, and the National Science Foundation science
This is a very interesting and well written take but I tend to disagree with it. The idea that the net of the research projects have a negative social impact I just think is completely off the mark.
Following in the same vein of @south_korea_ln under the Biden Admin NSF funding was massively altered by the Admin requiring DEI values. That alone was an act that changed dramatically the research being done. Factor in how NSF in general has drifted to more of an applied science approach instead of a basic science approach, the same thing we have seen at DOE, and it all affects what's going on.
Pulling some quotes from the article that through working with DOE, NSF, and private industry that I find just plain wrong is
We have companies, universities, and National Labs telling us how they can't fill position X due to them not being enough of them. Places like China and India to a point have spent years now sending their students to the US and then brining them back to their country to build up both their academic system but also industry. China in particular is an issue because if you get trained and discover X and you were born in China by law you have to turn over your discovery to the CCP. There have been cases of people who left 30-40 years ago suddenly returning and it was due to threats against their families' lives if they didn't.
The article also points out humanities however that doesn't fall under basic science its an entirely different field with night and day ways of study.
Over the years DOE and NSF have drifted and not been corrected. Now that it's happening people are flipping out over the change but they have to get back to their origins and what they are supposed to do.
We have companies, universities, and National Labs telling us how they can't fill position X due to them not being enough of them
I would say this is reasonable evidence against Klein's statement, but he made his statement too strongly.
The issue is that demand for science output isn't set on the market because so much of the funding comes from government. That means we really don't know if there are enough scientists to meet market demand or not.
Edit: It's also not really the right question, because scientist wages would just adjust to the point where we did have the optimal amount.
To me the core issue is that a market would allocate research funds differently and more in alignment with public demand, which encompasses both productivity enhancing research and direct interest in knowledge expansion.
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The more common counterexample I hear is that England had basically no public science funding during the time of the Royal Society and produced far more scientific discovery than the other European powers which were spending far more on science.
You don't need one entity to concentrate research in, like a giant tech monopoly, although our giant tech companies do spend a lot on scientific research.
This would take us into another big discussion, which I'd love to hear @south_korea_ln's take on, but current public research tends to be very low value. Almost no one tries to make major advancements, so it's just a bunch of small safe tweaks around what's already well-established. I think that's because of a bunch of ways the current system disincentivizes groundbreaking research.
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Almost no one tries to make major advancements, so it's just a bunch of small safe tweaks around what's already well-established.
I work in condensed matter physics. Some of the main goals the field is trying to achieve in the next decade are:
- Achieve room temperature superconductivity
- Make quantum computers based on SC qubits
- Make quantum computers based on topological qubits
- Develop altermagnetic spintronics
- Find a theory of dense trion fluids
- Make excitonic superfluid circuits
These are far from being safe tweaks around what's already well-established. These will lead to trillion-dollar industries once successful (the use of once here is bold but intentional; people working on this do believe we will achieve it, one way or another).
Of course, we build on previous knowledge, and many of the papers are, in a sense, incremental improvements. But take 1 year of adding up such incremental improvements, and you see progress that was thought to be impossible the year before. Because the field has become so specialized, this is the only way to make progress. Long gone is the time when scientists could be experts in different fields and contribute meaningfully to both. Except for math with projects such as the Langlands conjecture to bridge seemingly disparate fields of math, most scientists specialize for years in a very small subfield to advance the field in lockstep with the rest of of people that specialize in slightly different parts of the field. In the above list, there are maybe 2 topics where I have contributed until now.
All this is public research.
Except for the current hype with quantum computers (thanks to previous progress made by public research), I don't see any industry doing its fair share yet (and I don't blame them, they either don't realize yet there is money to be made, or they can't justify to their shareholders doing such research that will only pay off in 50 years).
Of course, for the 100s of scientists working towards these greater goals, there are 100s who don't realize the bigger picture and who just care about making money. But the same is to be said by the 100s of companies that make an impact and the 100s of companies just trying to please Wall Street.
Looking at Wall Street, I think we could go into a very interesting discussion on how the free market does not incentivize useful behavior. But let's focus on the topic at hand~~
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Sounds like exciting times in your field. I'm glad to hear it.
What I've seen, and heard others complain about, is that it becomes hard to challenge orthodoxy when everyone's marching in lockstep. It's too dangerous to be in disagreement with potential reviewers. The areas I've worked and studied in have been highly politicized, which adds a very toxic element to those already flawed incentives.
If your field is making lots of tangible progress, that's not a huge problem, but it becomes one if an ideological pivot is needed.
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Yeah, condensed matter is not really political. There is no orthodoxy to challenge. A material either superconducts or doesn't. You can conclusively prove it1. That's very different from climate science, let's say.
Footnotes
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well, this is maybe the one example where we have some controversy, but what's science without a few scammers2 to make fun of. ↩
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Jan Hendrik Schon, I did enjoy going down your rabbit hole of scams ↩
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A material either superconducts or doesn't.
In econ, our version of this is "A transaction is either voluntary or it isn't." We know that voluntary transactions are welfare enhancing (in expectation and subject to some other caveats), while involuntary transactions are not welfare enhancing (again, subject to a bunch of caveats and clarifications).
That's where the absolutist and seemingly extreme views on this stuff come from. Government funded anything is involuntary and therefor unlikely to be welfare enhancing.
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