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Is There a Creativity Deficit In Science?
nerdyalien writes with this story that explores the impact of reduced science funding on innovation in science. "There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much."...There is no more important time for science to leverage its most creative minds in attempting to solve our global challenges. Although there have been massive increases in funding over the last few decades, the ideas and researchers that have been rewarded by the current peer-review system have tended to be safer, incremental, and established. If we want science to be its most innovative, it's not about finding brilliant, passionate creative scientists; it's about supporting the ones we already have.
yes
We're well past the innovation of the late 20th century, and we're on our way to the navel-gazing imploding Roman Empire stage of our Western civilization.
More bureaucracy, more government, more universities, more requirements for simple jobs, more and more employees "required" for simple jobs, endless regulations and committees and civil servants and laws and rules and regulations...
If the Apollo program were announced today, in 9 years we'd still be arguing over the color of the rocket by PhDs in colorometry.
because the school systems are grinding the future brilliant, passionate creative scientists into drones.
Non-declarative headlines indicative of lack of factual basis to report objectively known or at least well defensible information. I would say that 352ml of creativity is enough. People haven't considered that as the creativity has moved North, it has contracted, but the methane gas release in the arctic might unleash the creativity stored in our Nation's permafrost. In other words, I'm pointing out that the argument can be made arbitrarily either way as far as science cares.
I recall a significant amount of people arguing for more verifiable studies, tighter acceptance criteria, and more peer-review. That says anything but "let's research more crazy things." While it's true that some of the most valuable information comes from data points outside the currently sampled range, we have a great capability to model proposed mechanisms these days. How about generating some data using more modelling and simulation to explore proposed mechanisms before jumping into lab research to verify those models? There are plenty of things that can always be done besides arguing that the funding environment is simply too hostile to grants that are off the beaten path; when has someone not argued that this was the case?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
The scientists who want to jump on the creative-train can change their science hats to engineering hats and apply and combine the peer-reviewed, verified and repeatable results into products that change the world. Most of the earth shatteringly creative experiments has traditionally consisted of fortunate lab accidents, or random fault-injections into the laboratory processes anyway.
It's surprising how far you can get from your starting point by doing only incremental changes.
I have been working in research (chemistry) for 10 years, half in academia and half in industry. In my time in academia, it was all about putting together enough results to scrape a paper together, nevermind whether the "promising results" were benchmarked against shitty "state-of-the-art".
In my current industry job, I have been asked to prepare a 5-year plan with high ambitions, and I am free to explore any path to the final goal without (reasonably at least) restrictions.
Unfortunately until non-tenured researchers will need to publish as much as possible without actually delivering important results, this will not change.
In my opinion the peer-review system is not perfect, but it's the best thing we have. I have found many reviewers whose comments have been genuinely beneficial to making my papers stronger. Others barely read the manuscript and rejected it because it encroached on their turf, or didn't cite them enough.
In my opinion the peer-review should be changed to a double-blind system: the reviewer should not see name and affiliation of the authors, and judge the work as it would grade an undergrad paper (i.e. harshly). Like this I believe the signal-to-noise ratio in journals would increase, and only good papers would get published. At that point, I'd be willing to accept impact factor as a measure of worthiness of a publication. Until then, it's just friends judging friends, with nobody wanting to piss off anybody else. Minor revisions, congratulations, you're published.
In most scientific fields. Sluggish conventional incremental research is heavily preferred over highly creative and risky research. Which is fine if you already know what you're looking for or if you want to make progress in an already established field. But an unwise course of action if you wish to find unpredictable and previously unknown phenomena.
Now the best way to resolve this is to increase basic research funding to college labs and lone researchers who go through a vetting process. And in addition to this a certain percentage of the funding should be earmarked for experimental research that doesn't have any immediate payoff. Because that's what basic research is all about and the fount from which many of the breakthroughs in science and technology have come.
Is 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea considered science?
Why? Why not?
It had some damn good stuff that eventually was proven possible.
According to science, there is no creator. So no, there is no creativity. Since there is no creativity, there can be no lack of creativity.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
When you believe I need to get a grant and I need to publish this or that to make a major breakthrough you are just being a lemming. :-)
Now take the teenager who had the desire to create a Pancreatic Cancer Test and didn't have all those rule drubbed into him, he just did it.
Those formally trained in research do splendid formal research, those with desire and no rules make amazing breakthrough.... Maybe
There's a current problem in biomedical research," says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. "The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky."
Risky to who, exactly?
I discovered as an adult that I had received radiation "treatments" as a kid and test subject in one of the AEC's more adventurous and ethically questionable clinical experiments.
For decades now, I have had to pay very close attention to any changes in my thyroid.
Gov'ment said so. Nuff said.
I recall a significant amount of people arguing for more verifiable studies, tighter acceptance criteria, and more peer-review. That says anything but "let's research more crazy things."
I think the point is something like, "Go ahead and research FTL travel, but if you write a paper saying FTL travel is possible, it better be reproducible."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ofcourse there is LACK OF CREATIVITY in traditional sciences.
:) Computer Science mixed with traditional science is where the creativity lies.
It seems that quite a few researches are very creative in inventing results to "prove" their hypotheses.
... is the more salient question.
Hollywood has turned against scientists again, and the anti-science hacks of antivax and climate change denial and creationism/intelligent design and alt-med are getting more and more air time.
Uneducated intuition and magical thinking seem to be the respected characteristics in pop fiction, and well respected heroes like Sagan and David Attenborough have given way to more niche respected heroes like Hawkings, Cox and Tyson.
This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust.
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.
Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.
I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
What you mention is I believe symptom of other problems, not a problem by itself. To run down why science is currently being operated this way would be rather extensive so I'll cover the biggies.
1) IP Laws have allowed certain entities to own ideas, and patent trolls to buy patents in bulk for no other purpose than to milk innovators if a product becomes successful. Remember that success can also include causing damage to a competing product, so the "success" is related to the patent owner and not society or the science. This has dissuaded sharing of science (collaboration) that up until very recent times was very normal and healthy for progress.
2) Massive government and bureaucratic control of public funding. This has allowed "pet" project funding in place of what benefits society. In fact many projects are only to benefit the bureaucrats at the detriment of society.
3) Same massive government does not understand science to uses measures which are invalid and unrealistic to maintain science programs.
Everyone else including Universities are playing the games. There are many motives for this, and in many cases playing along is the only way to get funding.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Neither you nor the GP offer any evidence to back up your claims. I'm not interested in preparing a thesis about the correlation of political orientation and intelligence. I'll just offer this,
http://www.psychologytoday.com...
and share my own personal experience, which us that there are smart and dumb people across the political spectrum.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In some areas, e.g. for SIGGRAPH, the review is double-blind; only the paper committee knows the identity of the authors so that they can assign reviews who do not have a conflict of interest. However, this only really works for areas that are being hotly pursued by many different research groups; diction (often researchers will have different terms for the same thing based on what research group they are in), writing style and illustrations will often give away at least one of the authors, if not the first author.
Lee Smolin's brilliant book The Trouble with Physics discussed this issue eight years ago. The book also includes the best introduction to string theory for a scientifically oriented non-physicist I have ever seen.
Smolin concluded the "trouble with physics" is the problem discussed in the article: the current system rewards small incremental steps over creative leaps. He discusses the risk to payoff ratios. He says the current system drums out most truly creative people.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I work in biomedical research and yes - a lot of money is diverted into research with incremental benefits - me-too drugs.
remember that big pharma spend more on marketing than on research.
The interesting stuff has effectively been outsourced to start-ups that find compounds, do some basic work and then sell to a pharma to commercialise. That way at least the people doing the creating get some benefit.
What hasn't happened in its stead is any good research at delivering and applying a lot of the knowledge/ practice we do have, and this is where we could get a lot of bang for our buck and we could be a lot more creative - just by doing what we know works correctly.
This is particularly true in fields where there is not currently much research (because there is no big drugs market)
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
You cannot predict what you do not know, and to measure how long something takes, it turns out you need to know it pretty darn well. So if anyone claiming to be a scientist claims they need x dollars to get you something amazing in y days, they are talking straight out of their ass. All they have is their curiosity and a hunch. The journey is unknown, and so are the results. To know you will succeed, you have had to have succeeded already. This isn't to be confused with engineering. Engineering is different because you already know the technology and have the tools. You can simulate what you're building before you build it. But the science that gives way to technology no one can predict. If anyone should admit to this, it should be the scientists. The only reason they can't is for political and financial reasons.
it better be reproducible."
Did you mean the experiment or the paper? :p
My prophetic tendencies tell me there may come a day when reproducing an FTL experiment for real might be less risky than making a copy of the original paper ^^
I recall a significant amount of people arguing for more verifiable studies, tighter acceptance criteria, and more peer-review. That says anything but "let's research more crazy things."
No, actually that's one of the key points of tighter acceptance criteria and peer review. Currently it is very common for scientists to take something that is, at best a small incremental improvement, and package it up in a paper to look like a major discovery. When you take some of the smartest people in the world and what's at stake is being able to feed their families - well, they can make a turd look really really shiny.
Part of the problem is that the publication quotas don't allow enough time to make genuine major discoveries. But the other part of the problem is that research that would lead to major discoveries is almost impossible to get funded.
Now, personally, I tend to take the view that tightening acceptance criteria is like continuing the beatings until morale improves. It's not like scientists are all sitting around with clear paths to major discoveries but they just prefer to churn out polished turds because it's slightly less work. Maybe it was better back in the good old days and maybe it wasn't - but the current system of bureaucratic micro-managing scientific research is a major obstacle to genuine progress.
Yes in the reduction in creativeness of the scientific community or yes in the reduction of funding which causes the lack of the daring / adventurous spirit in pursuing the research subjects ?
Which one ?
All I am saying is this emphasis on leadership and creativity is a little too much. Leads to "All Chiefs and no Indians" problem. Good, strong, independent thinking followers are as important to science as leaders. And we need an order of magnitude more followers. If anything we should reduce the incentives for creativity so that only truly creative people shine through.
[*1] Power Law: aka 80-20 law. 80% income by top 20% of earners, 80% of crime by 20% of criminals etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's not that hard to see what you have to do. Provide a funding system that reflects how science actually works. Provide longer-term grants that are accepting of minor failures or changes in research direction. Cut down on the bureaucracy and the committees. Realize that not all research falls into the domain of 'big name' journals and instead focus on more realistic metrics of progress. Some funding agencies are already starting to move in this direction.
Non-risky science is a big problem, but there's an even bigger problem. You know how news outlets have a focus on churning out news that is sensationalist and overhyped to whore for views and attention? Well, sadly, it's starting to look like that in science. Nowadays the most 'successful' labs are the ones that hype their output the most and shout loudest over the din of everyone else. This is aided and encouraged by both grant agencies and 'big name' journals like Nature.
As a result, we now have an entire self-sustaining system for producing bullshit, where bullshit goes through the cycle of hype and publication, leading to grant money, leading to even more bullshit. Some of these big labs become black holes for funding, consuming millions upon millions and then ten years later everyone wonders why their miraculous cancer cure turned out to be a dud.
I don't know when it got this way, or if it's always been this way. Hell, I'm just a newcomer. But I have a hard time imagining that this system would produce people like Einstein or Crick. People like Fleischmann and Pons, more likely.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Fusion research seems to get all the Gov't $$$ it needs, & uses all the energy it needs, even when it comes from fossil fuel powered energy plants...
While USA's Energy from Thorium, Molten Salt Reactors & Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors - which could produce 100% green energy - for Fusion & lots more users across the planet.
Much basic & applied work supporting MSR & LFTR work was done in the 1950's, so perhaps it's not to be "sexy" enough to draw funding today.
It may be unethical to run (Gov't-funded) "mega-energy-consuming-projects" like Fusion, eg, as CO2 levels & storm-activity continue to rise, hand-in-hhand.
We need Ethical Committees (like those whose approval is needed when humans are involved in medical trials) to decide whether such mega' projects as Fusion should be put on HOLD, pending implementation of 100% green energy sources, like Energy from Thorium, that is long overdue.
While it's nice that a Canadian company found funding from some mining companyl who'd have to burn a lot of natural gas, if they don't get heat from the company's (coming) small, transportable Molten Salt Reactors, in the coming 6+ years.
But USA has wasted too much $$$ on war-making & Fusion R&D, that could have brought MSRs & LFTRs into implementation decades ago... This is not to say it can't / shouldn't do so NOW. It should!
Lots of people feel strongly about this. More media focus & more people pushing their politicians, at all levels, to re-focus Science R&D on "finishing the work" begun by Alvin Weinberg, so long ago.
True. Some people are quite intelligent but pretend to be stupid in order to fit in with a bunch of luddite extremists, especially if there is a chance of money or power on the table.
I'll bite since you are using this to push your petty little political barrow of dismantling the secular state for a theocracy of lay preachers and the catamites they lay with. You've got it backwards and are railing against people that do not feel constrained by a dumbed down version of Genesis and an even more ridiculous extrapolation from it and instead take a look at the world for themselves.
NASA, for example, does not allow grant funding to be used to write grants. So, this preliminary data thing sounds like a different model. Where did the money come from to obtain the preliminary data? With regard to NASA, grants can cover administrative overhead. And, most institutions have support for new grant writing efforts. Doubtless, some NASA grant money that goes to overhead ends up providing support for that kind of effort so new grants do get written. It is just murky.
In any case, all that work to find out if an idea is technically feasible enough to make a good grant proposal gets paid for somehow to persuade peers that a proposal is viable. So, really, the originality of new grant proposals has something to do with how well faculty are supported in exploring new ideas. That would seem to be the place to ensure that peer reviews get to see exciting and not just competent proposals. Are the institutions hiring the most creative postdocs, for example? Are junior faculty getting good seed money? Is there time set aside for use of laboratories for pursuit of hunches? So, if granting institutions want to see more creative proposals, they'll have to look at the institutional culture grant overhead supports.
It happens whenever "getting the grant" is more important than "doing the research".
Everyone follows a program like little computers making it impossible for people to make leaps of intuition and follow them to their conclusion.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Creativity tends to go a different direction with mainstream. When peer-review is important do you really want to contradict or say something different from your peers?
When the system makes the process for getting a new drug hugely expensive, you have to be careful.
If Asprin was discovered today, it could take years to get approved.
When the system takes excess profits away, you no longer have them to fund risky ventures.
The high tax rates are part of the problem. The patent on your drug starts when you invent it.
You have to go through years of tests before you can market it, so you only get a few years to get payback.
Too much of the system goes through the government.
A phone app maker has a better chance of getting venture funding than a Bio researcher.
Cut the red tape, make the board of directors responsible for bad drugs, not some bureaucrat.
I worked for 10 years as a researcher in quantum computation. Looking back, i would say that i see a mixed bag. On the negative side i have to say that many groups try to jump on whichever direction the most recent five papers in the field had been in, very often with little or no result at all. (if the Nature paper is out, the other group already followed the new path for five years).
On the positive side, we come to the other groups/leaders, which follow a direction which adresses aa problem until it's solved. In the superconducting QC field that would be for example (There are many other good and creative groups in the field) the group of John Martinis. They adressed the problems they saw over years in hard work (and that started in 2002 or earlier), at least such effort is usually rewarded in science on the long term.
But again on the negative side: the papers they managed to put in Nature or Science were focused on the final results of the engineering - the papers which really adressed the problem puzzeling the community for years, where they really found out how to reach the goal were published in Physical Review B, Physical Review Letters and some other Journals. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 077003, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 210503, Phys. Rev. B 68, 224518, Phys. Rev. B 67, 094510, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 117901, Phys. Rev. B 77, 180508). The fact that enhancing the building blocks for a final result gives you much less impact factor than obtaining the final result make the stategy not be creative and hope for others to fix problems a reasonable one. Even catching a Nature paper every few years is enough for a conservative, non-abitious group leader, so you can burn a few postdocs in average, which you put up to the current topic, and if you a lucky, your results look accidentally good every few years, even if you did not contribute much to science.
Kickstarter for scientists. Just put your project there, and see if it gets funded.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Seems like you need to be a workaholic to make it through the selection processes these days. It's also mostly a game of social manipulation and networking.
How many top creative people are completely stable, hard working, and good with others?
To get proposals funded you need to point to something already existing for the most part and say how yours is very similar to that/likely to succeed. So yeah the funding and financial steering is towards things that are not very innovative. However there are a few a compensating factors. 1) Doing something similar both verifies theories/that we actually understand what we thing we do and has the chance of something different happening which either invalidates the theory or adds nuance. 2) Most people aren't really that capable of innovation: science has their equivalent of timecard punchers too: lots of people are smart enough to do science, few are able to do it well, and even fewer will come up with the new ideas. 3) Even those that are innovative aren't going to come up with that many new ideas. Take Einstein, he was a theorist so didn't have as much of a time requirement in terms of designing ordering and using equipment etc. Still (I might miss something) he only had a 3 really big ideas: energy matter equivalence, Brownian motion, and arguably relativity (GR and SR are really just consequences of energy-matter equivalence + the invariability of the speed of light). 3 ideas in a 50 year career.
Once the idea is out there the timepunchers (relatively, still very smart people and they might be innovating techniques that make things more accurate, quicker etc but they aren't the one with the big foundational ideas) quickly become able to run the experiments that build up the data and there are much more of them. So naturally the job of allocating resources focuses on sending the money to the timepunchers not to the innovators: they'll likely hack something together with equipment they already have on the weekend for free anyways, be theorists so not need a lot of resources, or for biomed go the private financing/corporate route.
Yes, you've explained why string theory has been a boon to mathematics. But not why it has been a reasonable road for physics to walk down. String theory is born of the desperation of physicists to try to explain cornerstones like gravity. String theory, despite some rather attractive mathematical undergarments, is wearing no physics clothes.
It may look like scientists nowadays are less creative. I don't think it's the case, they just communicate more.
Research is always made in small steps. The thing is that now, with sites like arXiv and search engines, we see all these small steps instead of just the end result. It is probably why it looks more incremental.
Another factor is that we have pretty much nailed down most of the human scale phenomena. Science now needs to address high level of accuracy or work at the nano or cosmic scales. Our brains are not made to deal with this, as a result, a lot of rigor is required and most wonderfully creative ideas end up flat out wrong when compared to the actual data. Because of this, when someone comes up with a creative idea, we need to make sure that he is ready to deal with high precision observations.
In elementary school, my kids did an independent science fair project every year. They learned to do graphical programming in Scratch. The school had several teams that competed in robotic competitions.
FYI that's not a normal public school.
It is if you are middle class. And it is not just a public school issue. It is also an income issue. My girl will have a greater chance of success given that
compared to another kid of the same age and talent potential whose parents
Neither situation implies guarantee success for my girl nor failure for the hypothetical kid in the comparison. But the conditions and disparities are real, and amount and accrue to tilt the odds one way. No amount of public education the way it is funded nowadays can change that.
We know how to teach. We simply allow a system that permits the existence of school districts better funded than others.
The problem people are discussing here is not about the school system per say, but the system that funds public education which is a) highly local, and b) relies heavily on real state taxes. If there were true state and federal level public education funding systems and/or if we were to diversify local public education funding away from real state taxes, you would see a change.
You can have a great brain surgeon or a world class oncologist, but he will not do his magic if you pay him crap, you only give him a Neolithic stone dagger and a bag of aspirins to do his work, and you measure his performance under such conditions. It is not a problem with his professional potential, but the system that funds him and deploys him.
This is very obvious. So why do we examine public education on a different light? It is not our public education system that is doing this or that. It is the system that funds it, and our culture's ethos regarding the role of state and federal government that are a) vital to our society and b) whose support systems are fundamentally broken.
Either we get Fed/big government involved, or we get local governments to find more equitative (cue morons screaming "socialism!"), more diversified sources of funding away from things that are purely a function of economic brackets/classes (real state taxes.)
We do not want big government involved, but at the same time, we do not do shit to properly fund public education across all income brackets and neighborhoods? How the hell does that make sense? How the hell does this become a fault of our public education system?
It's always been easier, safer, and more reliably productive for scientists, young and old, to contribute incrementally to established lines of inquiry rather than to attempt to trailblaze. The present age is no different.
See Kuhn, Thomas..
I'll see your bible thumping idiot and raise you a crystal rubbing, fixey riding, vegan idiot!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Most? No.
But recognizing an anomaly and pulling that thread has long been among experimentalists best tools.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nary a word about Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in particular the distinction between the puzzle solving of normal science and the different conditions of revolutions in thinking? Oh, the revolutionary thinkers face an uphill battle (like they always have)? I am shocked, shocked, at this sorry state of not learning from the history of science.
I know some people in academic research; retired and current.
The system is fucked up; to use the expression of the youngest one.
In pursuit of "perfection" we have so much worrying about oversight to prevent waste and corruption that was already lower than everywhere else that we continually clamp down and harm the system more every "reform." This extends into the publishing system which also has a "gold stars" approach where it's all about quantity and not quality. A big earth shattering research paper is foolish; you milk it for dozens of lesser papers almost nobody reads (and creates more research work.) So now we need IBM to device an AI to handle the volume when it probably could go down by a factor of 100 (that said, active topics are still too much for a human to keep up with.)
Creative science isn't even required-- we just need to fund wasteful stuff that politicians ignorantly rail against as being pointless. Some marine biologist wasting time studying some creature we don't eat... like sharks... finding out why bacteria don't cling to their skin like other creatures might be a total waste; however, that led to super anti bacterial coverings (which you don't see because somebody was allowed a trivial patent on publicly funded research... the real invention was the "pointless" research.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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Science in general, and mathematics, has gotten to the point where there aren't any big breakthroughs left. Research seems to be on the margins with maximum effort for minimal progress. The days when a Von Neuman could revolutionize physics, computing, and many branches of mathematics at once seem to be over, because the territory is so well mapped by now. So the chances of any one piece of research being a big breakthrough are almost zero.
That made my day. Somebody else sees it permeating society too!
I often wonder if our authoritarian society fosters these kinds of mental coasting, a mental laziness which is habitual because of the nature of the society to allow one to run on autopilot for so many aspects of like. Technology being a big factor as well; however, more chaotic natural settings makes one routinely have to think about little things all the time which also do not fit a clear repetitive pattern. (The nature of modern jobs has to also has to be a factor. )
The attitudes regarding responsibility is another factor; you don't have to be concerned if you just delegate thinking to something else.
Little Eichmann are also something to ponder.
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"Science" here in this article is about the allocation of public money to people with credentials, and social connections. Emphasis on the last ".". The word "Science" is conflated with scientific method and research so often, that their meanings are too vague to discuss succinctly.
Inside that sphere called "Science", let's call it granting, the scientific method is utilized by some people more than others. The method is rarely exercised however. Repeatability is ignored.
Most "studies" don't start with a hypothesis and test it. Gaussian is worshiped, statistics abused, and media reports of studies consistently misrepresent the meaning of studies: hint, most are just observational and "links" mean next to nothing.
So let's ignore the scientific method here.
So that leaves us with something called "Granting". Does granting need more creativity? Anecdotes and Expert opinion are not to be relied upon for answering this question. The scientific method is. Use it, it works.
Disgusting.
Keep cutting back on all that basic science, most of which is done by universities and the government. "Oh,", the Libertarians reply, "But companies will do the basic research, because it will lead to new things to monetize!"
Let's ignore that most companies are forward-looking... to *maybe* the next quarter. Let's ignore the fact that basic research may not pay off for years, or decades, or may not directly ever pay off in something that you can sell, the Sacred Free Market will take care of it all, and if it doesn't, it wasn't needed anyway.
mark, watching folks leave due to US fed gov't budget cuts....
If we don't know what we don't know, then we don't know if there's value in knowing whatever it is that we don't yet know. That's when we should fund research, to find out if the funding was worth the price of knowing whatever it is we don't know... and if there is something to know, whether it is worth knowing.
But if we research what we already know, then because we already know most of what we want to know about, we will know only a little more about what we know much about rather than know much more about what we know little about.
Isn't that pretty clear?
There's also smart people who get fixated on something or other and can't understand arguments against it, and therefore come out looking either dumb or fanatical. Many of these post on Slashdot.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Definition of a useful idiot: See above two posts.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What I've heard from fusion researchers is that the budgets have been drastically cut over the years. When they were predicting it within twenty years when I was a kid, they assumed a certain level of funding. Some have said that research is on schedule, if you measure by research money rather than years. In any case, the researchers certainly aren't getting all the money they need.
The reference to "too much $$$ on war-making & Fusion R&D" makes little sense, considering the relative magnitudes. One might as well refer to "too much water used in Lake Superior and my backyard pool". According to this, defense and such spending is 19% of the budget, while scientific and medical research as a whole is 2%. From this, current federal fusion research money is about $400M, which is more than three orders of magnitude smaller than the military budget. To put it another way, transferring 1% of the defense budget to fusion research would increase the latter by about a factor of 15. The second reference said that money spent on fusion for 57 years was about the same as what we spent on 72 days of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Also, if we're certain that such thorium reactors could be made to work effectively, producing all necessary energy cleanly, spending on it is not research. We're talking engineering. If there's any research involved, your second paragraph is at best uncertain. If it were this easy, somebody (not necessarily in the US) would probably have done it, probably India. I'm not arguing against putting serious resources into alternative reactor designs, but focusing only on one project seems way counterproductive. Some people don't want to spend Federal money on research while we've still got needy [white] kids. We've got lots of money if we want to spend it, and I'd like to keep pressing forward on many fronts.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Ian Malcolm *was* Michael Crichton. This is a common thread in the "adventure fiction / technothriller" category - the author writes a character in who is a thinly disguised version of themselves. This character is the only one who really understands what's going on, and the only reason everything isn't wrapped up into a happy ending by the end of chapter one is because no-one listens to this one person. Apart from a few courageous allies, pretty much all the other characters are stereotypes from the author's vision of "what's wrong with today's world" (idiot rednecks, brainless hippies, scientists playing god, mindless wage-slaves, chicken-hawks, pacifist weenies and so on). Tom Clancy's books are a great example of this, but you find the meme popping up everywhere once you start to think about it. Unsurprisingly, that's the one character that pretty reliably either "gets the girl" (or equivalent) by the end of the story or dies heroically, sacrificing themselves for everyone else.
So I'm suggesting something other than written?
Easy answer for that one. I'm sure you can work that out for yourself instead of pretending to be a fucking idiot that can't.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
From the last:
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.