How Should the U.S. Fund Research and Development?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/us-research-and-development/477435/?single_page=true

by tokenadult • 10 years ago

18 21 10 years ago

theatlantic.com

hartator• 10 years ago

I think the question is bit biased. I think we should ask first if the idea of the fund itself is a good idea.

rhizome• 10 years ago

You might refer to the long-standing grant systems at DOE, NEA, SBA, and so on.

brownbat2• 10 years ago

I think the question is bit biased. I think we should ask first if the idea of the fund itself is a good idea.

That's literally the first issue the article discusses in detail. It's in bright red lettering in bold font.

drjesusphd2• 10 years ago

Since the times of Newton, science has always been funded by governments. Funding agencies are as much part of the real-world scientific process as The Hypothesis.

WalterBright3• 10 years ago

Not exclusively. Einstein wasn't.

brownbat2• 10 years ago

A lot of scientific studies (some funded by grants) are never tested through replication, even though that's a core part of the process.

Replication is the unsexy grunt work that makes science reliable, but it usually doesn't make anyone famous (or necessarily even get them tenure), because it's not bleeding edge work creating or advancing new theories.

Maybe the government should treat this like a market failure and generously fund replication studies.

Planet Money on the replication issue: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episo...

Replication crisis (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

vph3• 10 years ago

To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or circumstances with human subjects, it's very expensive or even infeasible to have well controlled repeated experiments.

Godel_unicode4• 10 years ago

If you don't have well controlled, repeatable experiments (a.k.a. the scientific method) are you actually doing science? I think we should come up with another word for these types of one-off studies.

vph3• 10 years ago

I believe that whoever is in charge of federal funding in R&D will have to be extremely smart and balanced in his views because R&D plays a great role in the economy and future of this country. The right approach is a balanced between fundamental and applied research. And it's not just balanced but which areas to invest money into.

Godel_unicode4• 10 years ago

I think that the government would be better served to spend money researching fundamental science, that seems to me to be the great shortfall of industry.

Intel, Westinghouse, biotech in general, and Dow do a pretty good job on the applied piece IMHO.

vph3• 10 years ago

Intel, Westinghouse, biotech in general, and Dow do a pretty good job on the applied piece IMHO.

Private companies are in a great position to do applied research, but they are often slow or unwilling to distribute the research results for the benefit of everyone.

joeblow9999• 10 years ago

by letting free individuals decide what they want to fund?

WalterBright3• 10 years ago

computer networking

I've been in computing long enough to know that the first thing anyone does with 2 computers is to connect them together. The notion that nobody would have thought of it without Arpanet is absurd. People invented networking protocols ALL THE TIME before the internet. FidoNET, BIX, Prodigy, MCImail, AOL, RBBS, CompuServe, Kermit, The $25 Network, etc. Even I designed a scheme (I never got around to implementing it), even calling it "web" (!).

How Should the U.S. Fund Research and Development?

Related Stories