Posted by chmaynard 10/13/2025
> The Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected failure to convert science into sustained innovation, during the same time that U.S. universities, startups and venture capital created Silicon Valley. Long-term military and economic advantage (nuclear weapons, GPS, AI) trace back to scientific research ecosystems.
The US has an extremely entrepreneurial culture, which is why Americans are so good at building innovative businesses. In the UK, money is seen as grubby and the class system has consistently placed barriers between those with ideas and those with money. Similarly, the Soviet Union struggled to make use of its innovators due to the strictures of central planning. Australia punches well above its weight in scientific research but is unwilling to engage in any economic activity other than digging rocks out of the ground and selling them to China.
So the idea that scientific research is a limiting factor in economic growth is not general; it's specific to the US and countries with that same entrepreneurial culture.
The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat.
Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.
There is an ideal of SF but SV isn't SF, definitely not non-tech SF.
So... you might think of a version of SV that existed, maybe, at some point. It might even still exist as some rebellious employees of those large corporations but in practice people with the money and power in SV I believe now are pretty much with such a stance, yes, sadly IMHO.
Wind has turned, in SV too.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: the other commenter was also breaking the rules, of course. I've responded to that user elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45595217.
is that i’m sure even the CEOs would rather live in a world with anesthesia, MRIs, wifi, gps, etc
yet they greedily prefer to personally gain money because they cannot see that they would be richer in a world with { what would be discovered if we had science }
it’s just that you cannot miss what you already don’t have, if they could only see what would be possible, what we could achieve, the would go nuts about how slow we are moving
There is no Ozempic without federal funds for basic research to identify GLP-1. (Nordisk started their research downstream of the US taxpayer's contributions.)
GPT-4, as its builders would certainly admit, is a descendant of early work in the field. This work involves a significant amount of work funded by DoD.
None of this is to detract from these products. But there is no point in pretending that e.g. rocket research is not generally funded by militaries (governments), on which SpaceX built.
In general, if you a citing something with a brand name and a trademark, you are talking about something that is not basic research. Basic research in the US is overwhelmingly government-funded for the simple reason that companies do not invest on the time horizons required and in general cannot take on the amount of risk entailed.
What you’re describing is at least partly engineering and product design, not pure science
Outpaced? What does that even mean? The whole point is they have different roles and goals. And you need them all, if you cut basic research all the downstream stuff will suffer.
1.The government should periodically review how many funded research projects are successfully completed and lead to tangible outcomes.
2. The government should ensure that research funding is properly utilized for the intended purposes, so that resources are used effectively and efficiently.
3. It is necessary to study how artificial intelligence can be leveraged to reduce the cost and duration of research while accelerating scientific experimentation.
- the current system works for the benefit of US industry, military, and the economy
- the current system has delivered real results over many decades
- nobody has proposed how an alternate solution would work ("use AI" is not an answer)
- much less an alternate that has been tested at all
- even much less an alternate that has shown any results
A sensible approach would be to do trials of other approaches before making changes that will ensure Americans are poorer for decades than they otherwise would be.
As basic research transitions to engineering, things built from the current knowledge base, if suitably updated, should be useful. And work within the training set should go well.
If they had evaluated 1993 the discovery would be called useless and a waste of money.
However, I still believe that a light-touch monitoring system is important. It's not about evaluating the usefulness of the discovery in the short term, but rather ensuring that:
Funds are being used for the stated research goals (fiscal responsibility).
The project is making scientific progress as defined by its own milestones (accountability).
How do you differentiate between pursuing a hypothesis that turns out to be incorrect (an essential part of science if we want to actually learn anything new) and failing to make scientific progress?
Not a researcher, but my perception is that this is already part of the process. Is it not?
Bringing it to market requires money and management and luck. Many/most of the promising candidates fall out along the way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decre...
edit: to clarify I am arguing against putting in the effort on my own expense which benefits the company because I need to foot the bill which the company should have, so I am not arguing against such self-improvement which obviously benefits me
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield
If you know; you know. #ARPA
Yes, there was a Mansfield amendment and a would-be 'nother Mansfield amendment. It had some (waves hands) ever-unarticulated effect on defense funding of research. Motivations of Mansfield are never articulated. Seems so self-defeating to not describe.
1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decline in technology and science innovation that has occurred since the beginning of the neoliberal assault. In 1961 we get SketchPad at the University of Utah. In 1968 we get the Mother Of All Demos. What's been developed since with the same kind of impact? I'd argue, "not a whole lot."
2) This has inevitably led to a decline in the public's enthusiasm for technical innovation. I remember the early 1990's World Wide Web. I remember the feeling that a non-marginally better future was, "months away." Now the government and Google collude to spy on me and my family. Now I have a short-form video feed that is paid to deliver content meant to extremize me as a young adult.
The Mansfield Amendment is the technical glitch that may have cancelled a better future for technologists and especially technology literate young adults. It's difficult to say and we may never know. My feeling is that some day some country might achieve a level of social democracy where-in, "we get back to that." Time will tell. The irony is that it's the Adam Smith Societies pushing the hyper, "privatize everything agenda" that reifies the problem. Adam Smith actually advocated for strong public institutions- especially educational institutions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decl...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-...
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151a...
Still unanswered questions:
• Which Mansfield amendment is wing referred to? Namong the year would be suffiicnetly identifying
• What were Mr. Mansfield’s goals in pushing his eponymous amendment.
And I would like to ask a follow-on, once again in appreciation of your response: • Among the people (usually academicians in my experience) who express unhappiness with (one of) the Mansfield amendments, why don’t they express at least equal level of unhappiness with the NSF not being allocated a larger budget with mandate to fund the future Engelbarts & Kays? Or why don’t they advocate the standing-up of a National Engineering Foundation, or a peacetime non-weapons version of the OSRD to fund the next Engelbart, as vociferously as they express discontent with Mr. Mansfield’s amendment?
1) The relevant portions come in 1973. By 1969 we see developments in this direction. I have links but thanks to the Peter Thiel shithead take over of search I'm finding it hard to find the relevant literature on the NSF website. I found this article informative:
https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/a-note-on-the-changi...
2) From what I've been able to gather most of the rationale of restricting research came in response to the Vietnam War. It was misguided but the idea was that the role of ARPA (to become DARPA) should be concentrated strictly on military projects to prevent waste and overspending. As, "lefty that likes psychedelic rock" I get how at the time this might have made sense. Mansfield was Senate majority leader and given the popular anti-war/military sentiment I can see how the, "hippies and beats" might have seen ARPA as a menace. It's worth noting that they didn't have the incredible hindsight at the time that would include seeing the ARPANET evolve into the Internet or Engelbart's project eventually becoming the Macintosh.
As for your last paragraph-- I agree. NSF should have a larger budget. Honestly I don't think that in today's political climate that, "restarting IPTO-ARPA like it was in the 1960s" is actually a good idea. Even the idea of creating a new Xerox PARC was tried by our namesake Y Combinator and from, "what I can gather" the project was a massive failure. Like I said-- we get to a point where discussing what motivates society to fund the education of the Paperts, Kays, Engelbarts, and Brenda Laurels of the world becomes a discussion about ideology. I'm with you for creating a, "NEF" or a peacetime OSRD. Honestly in some sense if critics are right about the United States being in a state of, "cold/pre civil war" this might become necessary. I'm with you in this regard. The issue is motivating the powers that be and those with the capital to realistically fund projects like this to do so. Historically this requires either a period of unprecedented peace or a war. Given the current situation I'm think that the later is more likely. This really pains me as a millennial but as a wise man once said, "we must deal with the world as it is not as we would like it to be."
Thanks for the worthwhile exchange. Wishing you and yours the best this evening ricksunny.