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The Billionaires Privatizing American Science
An anonymous reader writes "Government-funded science is struggling in the United States. With the unstable economy over the past decade and the growing hostility to science in popular rhetoric, basic research money is getting hard to find. Part of the gap is being filled by billionaire philanthropists. Steven Edwards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science says, 'For better or worse, the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.' Vast amounts of research are now driven by names like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, David Koch, and Eric Schmidt. While this helps in some ways, it can hurt in others. 'Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration. ... Fundamentally at stake, the critics say, is the social contract that cultivates science for the common good.'"
The free market knows best.
What could possibly go wrong? They'll "prove" that fracking doesn't pollute groundwater, nuclear plants and their waste products are safe and global warming is a myth. Oh yeah, the Earth is 6,000 years old and Intelligent Design is science. We, our children and our grandchildren will all profit from this!
Billionaires tend to be far more critical of what their money finances than government granting authorities. Consider all of the scandals involving made up data. A billionaire who funded that might get it checked out before allowing it to be published. A government agency won't. A billionaire who discovers shenanigans certainly won't fund that researcher again, a government agency probably will.
Now I know a lot of that is driven by "publish or perish" but it's pretty obvious that private donors are more likely to scrutinize than public sector donors. If that weren't the case, the various public funding agencies would be bringing the fraudulent researchers up on criminal charges for defrauding the tax payer.
But in reality, this should be welcomed. This is how science got funded during its first centuries as a discipline when many of the giants of science did their work. Billionaires have the luxury of blowing their money however they see fit. All a researcher who thinks a field might prove promising has to do is make a case to the man with the money. There's no public interest involved, just his personal interest. That means no red tape, no government oversight, etc.
There, I said it. Lets all now have a rational, civilized discussion.
I've long felt that the only value of guys is to make gals look good.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
There is a lot of trouble with science. Scientists cutting corners and cheating. Retracting papers from journals is happening more frequently than ever before. Many papers are not reproducible and important descriptions of procedures or original data sets are never published. Affording all the necessary papers is difficult. Referees do not reject papers that have serious defects. Scientists pay to have themselves added as authors but make no contribution to the projects.
I work at a major research university. Much of the government funded research is a complete waste of money.
The creator of Bitcoin has seemed to benefit from American Science. Suze Orman (cnbc.com) would contend that most Americans aren't Billionaires or Trillionaires, per-se, but some may partially disagree. See: tse.co.jp
Poe.
Son, we live in a world that has a permanent political class, and that PPC has to be guarded by votes. Who's gonna do it? You? You, AC? The PPC has a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for basic research, and you curse the skeptics. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That basic research's death, while tragic, probably saved votes. And the PPC's existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, requires votes. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want the PPC in charge, you need the PPC in charge. We use words like procedure, program, process. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending the PPC. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very "managed" freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you bundle some campaign funds, and bring in some votes. Either way, I don't give a damn what research you think the public should support.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What if the Billionaire WANTS a certain answer and lets the scientist know it, so that the "data" can be published for a huge return on investment for the billionaire? Tobacco industry did this.
Or maybe billionaire just has an answer he emotionally wants to hear and funds science to get that instead of sensible science? If Jenny McCarthy had billions what sort of research d'you think she might fund?
Or what if billionaire wants research on life extending treatments for him and him alone and screw publishing?
I don't see any compelling reason billionare science would be any better than publicly funded science. I'd rather everyone own the results, too, than a billionaire.
I mean, one thing a billionare is VERY good at is hoarding good things (money) for themselves AREN'T THEY.
--PeterM
Given the many trillions of dollars committed to Social Security / Medicare, and the amazing ability of baby boomers to get their way politically, it seems pretty obvious that everything that isn't Social Security, Medicare better be prepared to go private.
This seems to be a return to some very old models of research- think Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, where research was not government supported, but either the hobby of the very rich, or the very rich paying someone. I suppose that it could be considered as government supported, as the very rich *were* the government. The institutional government supporting research appears to be a 19th or 20th century change, and that is dominated by military motives.
The super rich have more money than they could possibly spend- why not let them spend that money in the way that they want? Be it driven by guilt or by the desire to make more money... I'd much rather them spend the money on science as opposed to spending their money on becoming part of the government (think Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg in the US and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).
Private funding is great in many areas. This is particularly true of science that addresses problems that society needs to solve (e.g. medicine) or that captures people's imaginations (e.g. astronomy).
However, there is a lot of science that needs to be done that doesn't fit into either category. That is where governments need to step in.
I don't think "if and only if" means what you think it means.
I'd say nuclear plants can only be safe (necessary, not sufficient) if economic pressure isn't allowed to force their management to cut corners (cf. Tepco/Fukushima Daiichi).
The curse of securing against extremely rare events is that you don't "see" the results in day-to-day usage.
Only a few hundred years ago the patrons of science were kings.
A billionaire who funded that might get it checked out before allowing it to be published.
Excuse me Docotr, but your results shows my business in a bad light. I am sure when you re-examine that data, the results will be much more conducive to my business.
The cigarette industry sure as hell did that.
The petroleum and gas industry sure as hell does that.
Every industry that sponsors their own research never allows negative results to be published.
AND there have been quite a bit of publication bias in the pharmaceutical industry (actually the whole of medical). That's why their studies of their drugs show them to be more effective than they really are - like many of the newer anti-depressants.
It really was not until the Manhattan project and post WWII cold war that government became the patron of scientists. Was Diract writing grant requests? Bohr? Heisenberg? Shockley (et al)?
This is a really encouraging sign and should be looked upon favorably even if it is not prefect. Philanthropists have been on the sidelines for a long time now and it will be a learning process for all involved on how to best utilize funding.
"the growing hostility to science in popular rhetoric"
Seriously?
Cue the angry response to my comment from some GRA in an environmental science department at an institution of high esteem, who has never held a job outside of the academe, who once read an article on MoJo that illustrated how the Koch brothers are funneling $10 trillion a week into a subliminal messaging system that broadcasts anti-"climate change" propaganda via episodes of 'Duck Dynasty', and who thus claims that their research is subject to 'growing hostility'.
I don't think so. Basic scientific research has been privately funded for most of those centuries. Government funding is a relatively recent change.
The problem with government funded, "public" research is that it is not "public," ever. Access to government-funded research papers by Joe Q. Public is often prohibitively expensive, if possible at all.
Human space exploration is an ideal field for private research. There is now a body of billionaires with a geeky interest in what is out there. When you consider that any new initiative, such as a lunar base or a Mars expedition, will require assuming great personal risk, there is no Western government that would run the political risk of subjecting astronauts to a high probability of death far from Earth. Remember those long periods of space shutdown after each Shuttle accident?
Another rich field is energy research. If LFTR or thorium reactors are ever going to get built, it will be by billionaires working at offshore sites not reachable by protesters.
The poster asserts, "Government-funded science is struggling in the United States."
The Federal Government spends more than $130 billion on research and development (R&D) each year, conducted primarily at universities and Federal laboratories.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog...
How much should the taxpayers spend on research? Show your work.
"...sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections."
"Part of the gap is being filled by billionaire philanthropists."
"Vast amounts of research are now driven by names like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, David Koch, and Eric Schmidt."
It's pretty great how this dude thinks that a couple of arch-politico capitalist gods paying for bogus research to protect their financial interests qualify as "philanthropists."
Yes, because "feel-good" fields like space exploration have never produced anything for the common good.
Tony Stark!
We have slowing been destroying what it means to be a civic society for a long time. Not many people meet in the park these days to discuss ideas (or gossip) on Sunday afternoons.
And remember when Reagan said that "government is the problem". And all of those names on buildings at your local university? Someone's name on a building helps insure the university does that person's bidding.
So I have an idea.... why don't we stop giving our money to rich assholes or corrupt government assholes, and since neither will serve your interests, save your money. You will need it.
What this boils down to is we as a nation have decided that the government has very little role to play in our lives and we would rather have private enterprise run the show. With corrupt politicians this has become a self fulfilling prophecy. We used to own the government. Now private enterprise does. Watch as the US Postal Service is delivered to the hands of private enterprise in the next 10 years.
I'll leave it to you as an exercise to compare the amounts of private funding that went to astronomy vs. "economics" (paid-for publications and think-tanks included). Why would that have happened?
Needs Facts, Not Agendas. You can sing about how this is capitalism at it's finest. It's the two generations down the line who will get fed biased information and suffer for it on the world stage.
I'm sure that Ludovico Sforza of Milan only funded Leonardo to work on things he thought were useful. Unless you were independently wealthy, the idea of getting funding to work on fundamental research that you think is useful has been pretty rare.
Bohr? Heisenberg?
Theorists who did thought experiments. Now, how about a particle physicist that needs a multibillion dollar collider that may discover something that has absolutely no economic value - at least in the near term? Even some cash hording corp wouldn't' fund such a thing.
Shockley
Beneficiary of a long gone monopoly that funded basic research with the hopes that one day it could be profitable.
Today, science is so expensive and specialized, there are very few fields that can be done by an individual. The mathematical "sciences" are probably the only field that can be done by the individual.
Business is way too short sighted to fund basic research and basic research is too expensive for the individual.
The Global Warming / Climate Change debate seemed almost over a few years yet slowly the truth came out -- arthropogenic activity is responsible for perhaps 1/2 of the temperature rise, with the rest being natural. Simply guiding money to groups of people who make up scary scories in order to get even more money isn't all that different from funding religion..
....the employees have control over the peoples funding of government. and That is inherent Corruption incentive.
How are the so called representatives to represent the people in this republic when they have no way of knowing what the people want?
The "No Vote" won the last election by far, worse qualified voter turnout % since before 1948 if not of all time. But Taxpayers still fund government, and this doesn't change..
What is missing is the paperwork allowing the taxpayers to say how their taxes are to be used. This in turn sets the budget and communicates via the solid bottom line of money budgeted as to what the people want represented. Think Crowd funded government.
Tax processors allocate per each taxpayers instructions. Government has to be transparent with what they want funding for or they do not get it. Taxpayers are limited in what they can chose their taxes to be used for as it must be in matters of generating teamwork benefits shared by the citizens.
Voting is a limited democratic supplement to the Republic in deciding who gets the job of optimizing the peoples funding for teamwork benefits optimization. Voting is also used for influencing the pool of funds the taxpayers decide to let the government deciding on how used (funding buffer).
When the employees no longer have control over the peoples funding of government then the corrupt will no longer find they want to be in politics, as its no longer a free lunch to do whatever they want after lying to the people to get elected, but a JOB of fulfilling the intents of the people.
This happens no less than once a year as its part of the tax return paperwork and for each at the level of taxes paid, local, state, federal.
Its not a difficult thing to implement and can be eased in as taxpayers can decide on how much of their taxes they direct and how much they allow government to decide. So its not like a taxpayer has to take full responsibility but its clear in time as people become used to and confident in the decision of the people, the more they will take responsibility for.
If you do not trust the people to make the right choices then what? You rig elections?
How I know this will work is the example of Free Open Source Software works in a similar manner and if you don't know what all is available... then you are missing out by your corporate greed feeding. Feeding that can be better directed elsewhere.
Imagine the government system getting revised by the people once a year, to express what the people want, and how well this will tell the representatives what they are to represent.
The way things are today, the employees have control over the bank account, cannot set a budget and in their guilt and effort to dismiss it have been spending money spying on the very people funding them and passing laws against the same. This is no different than a spoiled bully brat addicted to killing.
Its not what the people are intent on funding. For the people would have to be self destructive to do so.
The correction is simple and fitting of the Republic the founders of this country founded.
Where is the required taxpayer voice paper work, and government funding request information to make it possible for representatives to know what they are to represent?
Copy this comments and send to your representatives and repost.... That would be a start!
Stopped reading at "son". While it's fundamentally important to insult and deride people like you, I am too bored to do it myself. Have a lousy day and I hope everyone in your life is as dumb as a Democrat. Mmm. That felt good.
ok, this is moderated Interesting, but it's a joke. it's a play on A Few Good Men...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men
Stopped reading at "son".
*Whoosh*
This seems to be a return to some very old models of research
Not entirely. Aristotle, Da Vinci etc were given leave to "explore". They were funded to do curiosity driven research as well as the "build a better widget" kind. Today's billionaires, very like governments, are focussed on getting better widgets rather than improving mankind's knowledge. The problem is that it can take 50-100 years before our new fundamental knowledge can be applied so by the time that they all wake up to find that applied science has slowed to a crawl it will be a long time before the damage can be undone.
Private funding paid for the operations that let me have mobility through much of my life. If you watch 'Peter Pan' you will see how private individuals took the actions and made the gifts that helped out others, including science, medicine and art. Too much today for political reasons the media like to gloss over those donations by private individuals.
I'm sure that this news may make a lot of slashdotters uncomfortable. But I ask you to think of the alternative. They could spend their billions influencing elections. How many attack ads can you buy for $75 billion?
Here's a challenge. How should billionaires spend their money?
I'm not asking for how you would spend the billions if it was yours, nor am I interested in your concept of social justice or what is beneficial for mankind. I'm challenging you to try to imagine the world from, the billionaire's view.
We've got tons of "basic research" which doesn't go anywhere. How often on this site do we hear about a new breakthrough in solar energy or batteries or cellulosic biofuel that ends up going nowhere? Perhaps we really do need more in the way of applied research and development; get one of these "breakthroughs" to actually do something.
And then there's physics, which in terms of basic research has spent decades trying to break the Standard Model with more and more powerful accelerators, and gotten zip for it; the Standard Model survives and we haven't gotten any useful applications for a very long time.
Private funding in medicine sucks. If the new drug you're testings turns out to not work well or produces some really bad side effects you can't sell it and all the money seems lost (you've learned something, but you can't sell or quantify that). So there's a lot of pressure to bury the facts and get your drugs to market as long as we'll make a profit before the lawsuits come in.
We shouldn't have privately funded medical research.
No scientist should think that having the government dominate research funding for the last 70-ish years was a good thing.
I'm not going to guess what billionaires want from scientists, but I know what metrics government guys used, I've been one of them. What I'm going to say is not exactly good for my career, hence the AC post.
A government program manager was judged entirely on 1) papers published, 2) PhDs granted and 3) total amount of money they gave away. If a scientist could make a credible case that they could publish a lot of high profile papers, graduate a lot of students and justify a later need for a larger budget, that was (and still is) gold. We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking there was some "greater good" metric that went into calculating a program manager's place on the GSA scale or a program's total budget. Not once did I sit in a meeting where anyone with power pretended to give a shit about anything like that.
For a long time, government funding has been about getting good press for the political class and ensuring that the scientific labor market is so flooded in the US that industrial research stays cost competitive here.
There IS a lot of good that comes out of focusing on those things, but I became very, very frustrated that we funded a whole lot of what we KNEW was bullshit and that we couldn't fund good projects because they were "too close to commercialization." This is why you see the same "discoveries" repeated every five years, and why there's so much vaporware in working with new materials and techniques.
A little competition for the public spotlight might be good for these government programs.
In the old days did not the kinds have Imperial Mathematicians, imperial astronomers, and what not?
The only thing new here is that we now know who the kings really are.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
funny, of course the norm for humans isn't leaders elected by votes. although leadeers in many systems have and are in the pockets of what we'd today call large corporations
The president doesn't spend money. Congress spends the money. Perhaps you should check your 'facts.'
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that at least a couple of Fukushima reactors are a *long* way away from being well contained,with the expectation being that they will continue spewing contaminated material into the environment for years, possibly decades, before they can actually be decommissioned.
I agree that freezing R&D into fission is probably the wrong reaction, but a bigger issue would seem to me to be changing the economic realities that make corner-cutting so lucrative and dangerous. One possible option is sealed modular reactors where maintenance is performed periodically during refueling and refurbishing by a company whose only income stream is from power-plant operators continuing to trust the safety of their fission "batteries". It also makes oversight easier since you only have a few construction/refurbishing plants maintaining the most critical components, instead of thousands of separate reactors scattered around the world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...getting sick of billionaires? I wish they'd just go back to amassing wealth and buying stuff.
When the alternative is government funding, you're at the mercy of political winds and the loss of a patron in the next election.
Sorry, but well reviewed facts disagree with you. It is common knowledge that Reagan exploded the economy, and set into motion the movements that we see today. Please turn off Fox News and join the rest of us in fighting back. Currently you seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
Really? Patronage was the norm for a long time, but who were the patrons? Mostly the upper nobility who had money to burn - aka the government of the time. How often do you suppose the king kept separate treasuries for the nation and himself? Or the nobility, who were basically state or county governments. Sure, you had the merchant-princes as well whose empire was forged from trade routes rather than farmland, but basically those with money *were* the government.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Go to for example the mathematics stack of any decent university library and thumb through the beginning of books written around the era of the beginning of the Vietnam War. Do not be surprised to see many acknowledging support from the Office of Naval Research for topics such as algebraic topology. Post World War II the military was the best support basic science ever had in the United States. It was the left who deliberately tried to destroy this amazingly fruitful collaboration between the military and basic science with the Mansfield Amendment(s), deliberately taking away basic science's best patron and shunting off funding to a politically impotent National Science Foundation. Here for example is an actual bombing and killing of a scientist who wasn't even involved in the targeted research. If the right did such a thing today Hollywood would instantly make a major movie and the event would be seared into public consciousness by the media for decades. Instead we'll never hear a peep from the media about this senseless atrocity today. It's not growing hatred of science. It's the echo of the left's hatred of science dating back from the Vietnam War era.
Your concept essentially reduces to only taxpayers can vote, and rich people's votes count more than others'. This is exactly what this country has been against from day one.
Epic post. It took a few seconds to catch on, but awesome reuse and appropriation of the feel of that particular homily.
That you had someone moderate it without knowing what it was and have to post to remove moderation only increases the epicness.
Seems to me you're talking about SOCIALISM, or even worse, COMMUNISM.
I didn't sign no contract, and there ain't no such thing as society. That's a lie told by Karl Marx.
— All of America
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Let the private researchers back fill applied research so more money is available for government funded projects. Space is at that point now, private industry will probably develop a cheaper vehicle for low Earth orbit than a government funded project could. It's become more of an engineering problem then a research problem.
If poor people had the right to raise capital without paying lawyers millions to get them past government regulations against raising capital, they would be able to compete against the rich. That's why the rich want the government to pass laws against raising capital.
Under Reagan, tax revenue increased from $600 billion to $1 trillion. The assertion that Reagan slashed tax revenue is therefore ridiculous.
* note for the occupy crowd - trillion is more than billion.
Further, the Reagan deficits were a few billion.
The Obama deficits are a few trillion.
Sure it is, and even dictatorships acknowledge this. What is a cult of personality or state propaganda but an attempt to persuade people to vote for the current leader and system, either formally or with their feet? What is brutal oppression other than an attempt to secure votes through intimidation?
You can't rule without the consent of the ruled, and a formal voting mechanism is simply a means of establishing who has it in a public and unambiguous way.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Your concept essentially reduces to only taxpayers can vote, and rich people's votes count more than others'. This is exactly what this country has been against from day one.
You stopped learning history beyond about 5th grade?
Only white male landowners could vote.
In these enlightened times, we should change that to only those who own their primary residence in the area can vote.
Federal science funding is near an all time high (disregarding the one-time stimulus nonsense):
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
Whether billionaires also spend money on additional research makes no iota of difference to the publicly funded research.
Furthermore, large-scale government funding of research is historically a relatively recent phenomenon and closely tied to the rise of socialism and communism: socialist and communist regimes in large part tried to direct research for what their central planners considered "the public good", and the US responded in turn with nuclear weapons research, research into industrial agriculture, etc. Let's not even get into publicly funded research into social science, politics, and race. So, it isn't even clear that publicly funded research is a good thing. But whether it is or not, we have plenty of it.
A free market in education lets parents choose what their children learn, which results in a wide diversity of viewpoints being taught. That's a good approach.
The approach we are increasingly heading towards is having everybody educated according to a single, government-imposed standard. That results in exactly what you fear: generations of students who "get fed biased information and suffer for it on the world stage".
Don't believe me? Look at the US education system. It's not the private schools that are dragging it down in international comparisons, it's the public schools. And public schools drag us down despite having some of the highest per pupil spending on the planet.
It works for commercial stuff, why not use the website for this too? Get the news organizations to advertise it.
The overbearing, unrepresentative, one-size-fits-all approach that we're suffering from right now is simply due to trying to have a single federal government make more and more decisions about economics, social policy, etc.
There is a much simpler and more traditional way of achieving the same effect: reduce the size and power of the federal government. That way, people will naturally sort themselves into states and counties with similar political interests and leanings, and one state/county has little power over another. I.e., if people in your neighborhood don't spend money the way you like it, just move. That has a number of advantages over your approach, foremost that people need to live with the consequences of their choices (i.e., if they want low welfare spending, they must move in a community with low welfare spending), and that changes in allocation can't be made on a whim but exact a price from people who make those changes (i.e., moving).
Science for the common good only existed for a short time in the mid to late 20th century, prior to that, science, like the arts, was financed by various patrons. One only needs to look at the battle between Tesla and Edision to realize that one of the biggest "inventions" that change the world in the past 100 years or so, wasn't a government project.
Technology research, at least those not related to the military, have rarely been funded on the public dime, except for the past 50 years.
Sure, the Feds also put a good bit of money into medicine and basic research and even social sciences, but the largest driver of US scientific research and development over the last five or more decades has been the military, either directly or indirectly (e.g. research into computers not only drives military use of computers, aircraft builders (for the military) and NASA (for the missile programs) funded a lot of computer and mathematical research.) We've gotten some useful spinoffs from it (like the internet and GPS and Tang freezedried orange juice), but it's taken a lot of scientists away from doing medical research, energy efficiency, or other things that should have been higher social priorities. Some of that airplane development has been dual-use, since a 747 to haul passengers is a lot like a military cargo plane or an older slower bomber, but a lot of it has diverted people and money that could have been making the world a better place into the military.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Theorists who did thought experiments. Now, how about a particle physicist that needs a multibillion dollar collider that may discover something that has absolutely no economic value - at least in the near term?
You believe then, that since you are unable to conceive of its value and articulate that vision sufficient to convince people (the rich and the corporations) to fund it, that instead you should use guns to force them to pay for it?
Oh God! Harry Browne rhetoric!
Alright jackass - yeah, use guns for the same reason that guns are used to get ME to pay for WARS and money to defense contractors to protect the interests of the billionaires; while the billionaires HIDE their money overseas and via loopholes that THEY paid lobbyists to put into law.
Guns are NEVER used on the rich - only on us peons.
Therefore, you are full of shit.
QED
AND we need a 99.999% tax bracket for everyone making over $2 million. And let's bring back the 1950's era income tax brackets - adjusted for inflation, of course.
I explain our current undemocratic scientific system within the [rich-]Western world to my friends & family & they call me insane, but someone writes an article about it & they're a 'journalist'. I need new friends & family.
Funding drug development is one thing, but research with no prospect of profit necessitates public funding. Think of studies which look at how minorities receive medical care, or whether children are getting the nutrition they need.
These have social, not economic benefits. Private donors have no incentive to fund these, and eliminating public funding will eliminate the social benefits we receive from them.
you can't handle the truth.
Billionaires tend to be far more critical of what their money finances than government granting authorities. Consider all of the scandals involving made up data. A billionaire who funded that might get it checked out before allowing it to be published. A government agency won't. A billionaire who discovers shenanigans certainly won't fund that researcher again, a government agency probably will.
From the summary: "Steven Edwards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science says...", granted I don't know Steven, but you're suggestion implies that the research community is more concerned with protecting scam artists, than they are concerned with the advancedment of science. Do you really believe most researchers endorse fraud?
:)
- Because that's what you are implying.
Publish or perish isn't perfect, and it certainly produces many publications of limited novelty. On the other hand that is good, because it makes researchers share incomplete discoveries. But to suggest that the community is looking out for the interests of scam artists, is crazy talk..
- Get real!
Note, while publish or perish does make fraud tempting, I'm sure most researchers are honest... Most intelligent people who wants to scam their way to fame and fortune does to wall street and becomes a billionarie. Committing fraud as a researcher is much harder than on wall street, and a lot less rewarding...
Seriously, internet scammers are probably making more money than most researchers.
A lot more damage has come from the crazy right's ideas since Reagan than anything the left has done.
Good try though.
science is defined in at least one dictionary I have as "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment"
technology is defined in that same dictionary as "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, esp. in industry"
- - - -
PLEASE differentiate between science and technology.
MOST politicians and their myrmidions are both scientifically and technologically deliberately ignorant. AND I do mean deliberately ignorant, not stupid.
IF the justification that the funds being so dispensed are somehow "ill gotten gains" through crapitalism - fix the [expletive deleted] tax code(s)! I suggest the "fair tax"; local, state, and federal sales taxes based solely on economic consumption. Otherwise - S.T.F.U., it is NOT your money!
NIH funded researchers face the exact same perverse incentives. Publishing "negative" results is discouraged, yet you must publish to keep your job and support your family. See the problem?
There are private funding organizations that are happy to fund basic research-- I recently was solicited by a program manager at a fairly large one one (we eventually got quite a bit of money) and was told explicitly to focus on basic science value and not mention practical biomedical value at all because they had no interest in that aspect at all (despite there being quite a bit of practical application for the development).
keep reading. You might avoid the 'self-whoosh'. Then again, you might just be too young to remember the movie, or too dumb to make the connection.
Ah, yes. The magical, theoretical thorium reactor. The go-to argument for know-nothings.
First thing I could think of. If it is anything like Portal, bring on the eccentric billionaire science!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Oh. I thought it was either The Graduate or Animal House.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A lot of posts here are complaining/discussing the downfalls of private funding. I don't care- As long as (1) We don't stop _also_ publicly funding pie-in-the-sky scientific research and (2) it is still science. Verifiable and reproducible science.
That is, why can't we just have both? I'm happy that Bill Gates, in his old age, is throwing shit-fuck-tons of money at things he believes to be a problem. Fantastic!
Gates is trying to find the solution to with the problems in the world today be it the poor to the sick and needy to the hungry children, just read up on what he has done for Africa etc Good men are hard to find these days people.
What if the Billionaire WANTS a certain answer and lets the scientist know it, so that the "data" can be published for a huge return on investment for the billionaire? Tobacco industry did this.
Most don't go quite this far. They just request many studies from many different groups. If 7/8 studies have results not in their favor, they bury seven and publish the one that supports their viewpoint/stance.
technology funding in the US...
You can't help but be fascinated and confused.
I sincerely believe many problems like this would work themselves out over time if kids just had the kinds of access to chemistry sets and hands-on, practical science education they used to have, before industry and government increasingly "worked together" to "protect" everybody from themselves...
nonsense, monarchy with hereditary succession is the norm