America Needs a New Scientific Revolution

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/grants-american-scientific-revolution/620609/

by khelwegen • 5 years ago

22 15 5 years ago

I'm not going to pretend the current bureaucratic approach is ideal. I'd say though that there is a difference between supporting long term national research capability, and flexibly deploying money to urgent or new areas (and everything between).

It's not like there has been a shortage of covid related research in the last ~2 years. Machine learning, quantum computing, all have piles of money pouring in from industry. And somewhere, some long-suffering career researcher is toiling in some area the rest of us ignore, that will be super important somehow in 10 years.

There's definitely room for streamlining processes, and making them apolitical, even if bureaucratic. But institutional inertia has an upside too. Fundamental research is a very long game.

Chesterton's fence and all that

908B64B1972• 5 years ago

There's also the option of simply trimming bureaucracy. For instance, you could cut DEI and still get the same research output [0].

[0] https://quillette.com/2021/11/02/tales-from-the-gulag/

mrtranscendence• 5 years ago

I'm sure Lawrence "Groper" Krauss has a bug up his ass about DEI, but I don't see how that should mean a whole heck of a lot to me.

version_five2• 5 years ago

I'd group that under politics - that's about using the programs for aims outside their core mandate (in this case funding science). That's a separate issue that's endemic in government spending that I agree should be tackled.

inglor_cz• 5 years ago

"And somewhere, some long-suffering career researcher is toiling in some area the rest of us ignore, that will be super important somehow in 10 years."

That is basically the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian scientist behind mRNA technology. She started tinkering with mRNA in 1978 and she was actually snubbed by Pennsylvania U. for doing "unpromising" research at some later point. All around, it took her almost 40 years of toil to arrive at a human-usable mRNA form.

One of the weaknesses of the current approach is the "publish or perish" curse. It incentivizes people to work on problems that yield (even mediocre) papers within a short timeframe. Most scientific breakthroughs didn't happen that way.

rapjr92• 5 years ago

It's not like there has been a shortage of covid related research in the last ~2 years.

And yet there has been. Where is the definitive research on aerosols? What is long covid? Why do vaccinated people get long covid? Why does COVID-19 arrive in fairly regular waves? Is Zinc helpful if you catch COVID-19? How does superspreading happen? It seems like a lot of research was abandoned when the pandemic seemed to be ending after the vaccine distribution started which turned out to be the exactly wrong thing to do when Delta showed up.

pwr-electronics2• 5 years ago

Where is the definitive research on aerosols?

https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/air/publications

This example was pretty easy to find.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

I heard rumors that the NSF might double in size.

I’d rather see funding go towards an international science foundation, personally There are so many amazing scientists in other countries that can’t get even living expenses covered.

malandrew• 5 years ago

I'd rather see us keep the money here and instead bring those scientists here to make America better as it improves the US economy. Taxpayer dollars should work for the citizens that are taxed.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

Cheaper than sending troops, is all. We spend 5 billion a year on NSF in the US. Not much! Improving the scientific base of an ally could, in the end, be more effective than other aid.

JoeyBananas• 5 years ago

I used to think this way, but I have realized that the NSF is practically a welfare program for academics. I've seen a lot of junk science come out of NSF grants. It's very obvious that they do not manage tax payer dollars correctly.

petermcneeley• 5 years ago

Obligatory: http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

America Needs a New Scientific Revolution

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