Posted by chmaynard 1 day ago
If that’s true (maybe it’s not? all I have is vibes!), if it is indeed true, and science is becoming less able to convert into invention- it stands to reason that at some point it becomes rational for a country to direct resources elsewhere. Political will becomes strained, and politicians decide it’ll be popular to defund and discourage science.
And maybe that is how the US got here.
There are some major advancements in biotech for instance that are nothing to sneeze at, and even more in the pipeline (which admittedly may not pan out). Organs may not qualify as an invention technically, but being able to manufacture them certainly does. Not to mention how environmental tech is needed now more than ever.
Science being less convertible to inventions could have counterintuitive effects if it were true. Like smaller nations being in a 'don't even bother' situation while superpowers gain a literal monopoly on invention due to the rareness raising the barrier to entry to get anything meaningful out of it.
Politicians defunding and discouraging science is based more around memes and suppressing dissent than anything concrete. The reason not to create such 'stability' is generally that when the rest of the world passes by it will not be kind to you. But even if science somehow became literally useless tomorrow (an impossibility, of course), I highly doubt that politicians would not be such rigorous cost-oriented stewards that they would consider it worth the political capital to uproot the entrenched bureaucracies which no longer serve a purpose. Even if they knew it for certain was useless they might consider the spending a worthy price to pay for false hope. Crowds get real ugly when you tell them that things will never get better.
If the US is increasingly relying on universities for foundational research, and corporate R&D is only focused on short-term, applied projects, we're definitely running the innovation engine on fumes.
It’s hard to build the next trillion-dollar company if the core science wasn't funded 20 years ago.
It is not compelling at all. The difference between dividends and share buybacks are not big enough to explain this at all. The argument is totally absurd, companies could always reward their shareholders with their profits.
Bell Labs did not end because of share buybacks, it ended because Bell was broken up and their free money printer did no longer exist.
>If the US is increasingly relying on universities for foundational research, and corporate R&D is only focused on short-term, applied projects, we're definitely running the innovation engine on fumes.
Why? This is just total nonsense. The only difference is the physical location of basic researchers. And that the government decides what to fund. That is literally it.
Basic university research is still funded by corporations. Only they are paying the money to the government, which then decides what to fund.
In the last 80 or so years, this has been the case, but I don't think it's historically the norm. It just so happens that through whatever accident of scientific history, we were set up perfectly for a series of discoveries in basic theory that lent themselves well to immediate implementation and productization. We had a "science cycle" to match the business cycle that looked like this: Come up with a theory -> works? (yes: proceed, no: start again) -> publicize result -> collect huge sums of money -> plow that into new experiments -> find a problem with current theory -> start again. I don't think there is much disagreement that this cycle has slowed down considerably over the last 30-40 years.
Science by its nature is descriptive. As a discipline, it isn't actually geared towards discovering maxima in a space of design possibilities. No scientist invented the automobile or the airplane or the steam engine. A more typical mode is that engineers demonstrate that something is possible, and scientists recapitulate/integrate it into theory.
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?
The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works.
* Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.
* The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true.
* Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false.
* A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics.
This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing.
In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data.
The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation.
That is science.