Capitalist Science

by YAFZ • 13 years ago

24 43 13 years ago

nmc• 13 years ago

I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity forever.

Science does. Each discovery is the heritage of humanity, the beneficiary of being in the world that we are in. This suggestion is nothing more than an attempt to steal that heritage and dole it back out in limited amounts, expecting us to be grateful for it.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it.

That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.

CWuestefeld3• 13 years ago

How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products...

Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general?

Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.

dylandrop3• 13 years ago

The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest. (Imagine if the only crop research was done by Monsanto.) Capitalism hasn't caused basic research to go away, but if we only rely on science from capitalism, there will undoubtedly be a ton of problems to face there.

ignostic2• 13 years ago

*"Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science."

Be careful with those broad strokes - they're likely to be a result of selective perception unless supported by external fact.

I actually read the paper (not just the abstract), and I'll be the first to agree that ant that the paper is a little basic, and it makes too many "economics in a vacuum" assumptions.

If you're going to take the time to disagree, though, you really should be prepared to back it up with something. Anyone can spout their opinion ("Capitalism is bad at science") as fact, but that alone is meaningless and adds nothing to the conversation.

parrotdoxical2• 13 years ago

I'd argue that a such a sweeping hypothesis as one made by the "paper" is so broad so as to be meaningless, and that you couldn't actually come up with enough facts to prove it one way or another. Just seems like troll bait, honestly.

zdw• 13 years ago

If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.

darkmighty• 13 years ago

Have you read the article? It's interesting and follows the individual reward premise of capitalism, although absolutely impracticable not to mention it only makes sense in a very limited number of fields.

zzzeek• 13 years ago

Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???

dylandrop3• 13 years ago

If they didn't in fact fund it themselves

jerf2• 13 years ago

Don't we already have both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated.

(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)

jk4930• 13 years ago

Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...

im_a_bug• 13 years ago

This is daft.

twic• 13 years ago

From reading the abstract, i assumed it was satire. Is it serious?

Jtsummers• 13 years ago

Based on his previous two papers which detail a way of determining the value of various research projects, I'm inclined to say yes, he's serious. Either that or I'm unable to hear the whoosh.

praptak• 13 years ago

"The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large."

Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.

mcv• 13 years ago

But this "capitalist science" has already existed for ages, hasn't it? Plenty of companies do science, monopolize the results through patents, and exploit them for private profit. That's capitalist science.

The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large.

Yes, but increasingly less so. The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.

Capitalist science will better align the incentives of scientists with taxpayer interests,

No it won't. It will align the incentives of scientists with the interests of corporations.

channel more money into basic science, lower your taxes, and generally improve the quality of your life.

Nice talk. I think you're trying to sell me something, but I'm not buying it.

ArbitraryLimits• 13 years ago

> The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist,
Yes, but increasingly less so.

IMO opinion the real problem isn't that basic science is becoming less publicly available as much as it's becoming less basic, and really less science also.

If "capitalist science" meaning holding scientists to the same production quotas that Frederick Taylor gave steel workers, then above and beyond the problems seen with steel workers, there's the additional problem that bad science drives out good since it's easier to produce.

wes-exp2• 13 years ago

The public may fund it, but too much of the results get copyrighted by Elsevier and patented by other parties.

Though it is lamentable that publicly funded research papers are often encumbered by a fee for access, the general knowledge contained within is still free for the public benefit.

Furthermore, the content within most papers is not patented or even patentable.

His fundamental assessment is still true: publicly funded science is currently a socialist enterprise.

ronaldx• 13 years ago

Wow, I couldn't disagree with this premise more. I believe the exact opposite.

Capitalist science already happens - that's how capitalism works. If something has the potential to be directly turned into profit, people create businesses around that. Governments professing to be capitalist shouldn't interfere with that process.

Academic science ought not to be capitalist. Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system. We should expect that to be indirectly-profitable (not profitable for the inventor) and loss-making work with long-term benefit. That's what we pay taxes for.

Academic science is already far too capitalist for my liking - the existing funding system requires scientists to chase money, acting as poor mimics of capitalists, while corporate-sponsored grants mean lobbyists are getting their favoured R&D done on the cheap.

(Edited to add: that said, the paper is still worth reading and makes good points about how we identify the value of science)

CWuestefeld3• 13 years ago

Governments should fund science that benefits society and that wouldn't otherwise be happening in a capitalist system.

But that's not what ends up happening. The funding doesn't get allocated such that the total utility would be maximized. Instead, it is directed toward those areas having a constituency that's better organized.

The result is that AIDS research -- its victims being fairly focused in a particular demographic -- gets about 350x more research funding per victim than does COPD. It gets 112x more than Hepatitis C, and 33x more than Alzheimer's disease. [1]

Government funding equals political funding. And this is what leads to scandals like Solaris, too. The government is not able to make rational decisions, as much as we might tell ourselves that it does. In a democracy, the funding will go to those causes that can muster the most votes.

[1] Source: http://www.fairfoundation.org/factslinks.htm

grimtrigger• 13 years ago

Article starts off with brushes that are too wide, but gets interesting around Appendix B where he talks about a sort of "Market for Hypotheses". Interesting concept, but doesn't talk much about the incentive structure needed for companies to play the game fairly. Also the market would have to be government created and run, a responsibility the ACA should make anyone skeptic of.

veganarchocap3• 13 years ago

I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model.

Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic. I think if innovation in these fields were brought into the responsibility of private investment, investors would see it as their job and not the state. In other words the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete.

This is probably due to the states mechanism of 'bigging up' its own achievements in order to justify its own existence.

I think there's a bright future for technology and science in the private sphere. Facebook working on AI is another recent example. Google have been funding scientific studies mostly in tech for years. We need to embrace this.

Big businesses understand that scientific breakthrough could well be the next biggest product on the market, even on a simple basis of materials. Producing newer, stronger, more durable materials is not just benefit to the producers, but to the consumers. State science rarely deals with practical innovation that we as consumers can benefit directly from either.

Almost every business, big and small has some form of R&D department or group, and more are following suite. It's becoming a standard and I think in this model, we will see our species's biggest gains in advancement.

I think another important point is that consumers have a choice when it comes to private enterprise, whereas they don't when these funds are forcibly extorted through taxation. Those on minimum wage can barely afford essentials, let alone the money to fund space programs.

Long live private enterprise, long live Capitalism!

noelwelsh• 13 years ago

I don't recognise the world you are talking about. Particularly "the state monopolises on grandiose scientific projects, making it too difficult for the average enterprise to compete". On the contrary, the state funds the basic research that is then "monopolised" by enterprise once it has been sufficiently developed. The rocket tech. that Virgin Galactic is using didn't come from nowhere. Neither did the deep learning methods that Facebook is investing in.

veganarchocap3• 13 years ago

NASA is a government agency, in the UK we're bound to a part of the EU known as the European Space Agency, they aren't subject to the same laws and regulations, let alone taxes as well as all the normal rules of competitive business that privately owned enterprises are.

They've utilised their monopoly of force in order to contract themselves to these responsibilities. Most likely in order to use the glory to justify their existence.

acqq• 13 years ago

Most of the big and basic scientific projects currently funded would never be funded by private investors.

veganarchocap3• 13 years ago

Only because the state monopolises such projects through taxation, regulation, licensing laws etc.

There are already examples of private investment achieving in these areas despite all of the above. I think private enterprise will eventually take over, but it will be a long battle.

dagw• 13 years ago

Private enterprise is already financing ambitious projects once sought only by state provisions on their own merit. Such as Virgin Galactic

I'd like to open by saying that I have nothing but respect for Virgin Galactic. I still get chills thinking back on watching the SpaceShipOne flight. I also largely agree with your stance.

That being said the argument could be made that all Virgin Galactic is doing is taking all the hard work and science done by the old state funded model and trying to repackage it in a simple cheaper form for "mass marker" consumption. That's not Science, that's business and engineering. And no one would disagree with that fact that Capitalism is great at business and engineering.

Capitalism rocks at taking concepts out of obscure theoretical journals and putting them in a form that affect our daily lives (often for the better), no argument there. I'm somewhat less convinced that capitalism rocks at getting those concepts into those obscure theoretical journals in the first place.

brazzy• 13 years ago

I'd argue that our scientific process and development would improve exponentially as result of replacing the old Socialist, state funded model with a voluntary consumer model.

I'd argue the exact oppsite: that the current private research work done especially in the field of medicine would yield vastly more benefit for lower costs if it were completely replaced by state funded research.

daughart• 13 years ago

Would private research have ever discovered the structure of DNA? And why? How do you defend this R&D project to your board of directors in the early 1950's? What does the ROI calculation look like?

Companies are good at research when there is a payoff in sight. What about the fields with no quick return? Or the fields that don't yet exist?

LogicalBorg• 13 years ago

Maybe we should crowd-fund science projects like we do Kickstarter projects. In the Internet Age, that's about as capitalistic as you can get.

jlcx2• 13 years ago

It's already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889305

denom• 13 years ago

Is this supposed to be a scientific research paper?

"The companies selling this product are required by the Capitalist Science Act of 2012 to identify the hypotheses in the database (or their negatives) that are necessary for the product to work as intended. By 2020, the database contains millions of hypotheses. Of the hypotheses in the database in 2020, many have a posterior (current belief) sufficiently close to the prior (set by the initial auction for that hypothesis) that the money made by the authors who provided evidence for the hypothesis is negligible"

What's up with the citation to the above paragraph:

"[11] Both the prior (circa 2012) and posterior on Newton’s Law of Gravity (with appropriate caveats) will be very close to unity, for example, and the money made by the authors of database entries adjusting the belief in Newton’s Law of Gravity can be neglected in this example."

I can't parse this, Don't adjust your beliefs based on the fictional database? caveats to Newton's Law of Gravity? I don't understand.

This doesn't seem rational or scientific. It seems more like a narrative or personal exposition. Can anyone point out a hypothesis or any science here?

jlcx2• 13 years ago

"Basic science is currently a socialist enterprise, funded by the taxpayer, with the results available to society at large."

One current problem is that this is that the results are not always available to society at large; I've seen a lot of stories on HN about attempts to change that.

"Since the benefits of scientific advances are consumed by everyone, no individual has a strong financial incentive to invest in basic research."

Related to this point, patent law causes companies to focus more on efforts that lead to patentable inventions, and therefore away from basic science, which is unpatentable.

wes-exp2• 13 years ago

I don't think this it is the fault of patent law that companies do not fund basic research. I think is it just the fact that it is very hard to profit from basic research, fundamentally. If anything, patent law (for all its faults) at least tries to create some incentives.

mordae• 13 years ago

channel more money into basic science

This has been already experimentally proven to be false. I have several friends in the basic Biology research and they have mentioned several times that companies explicitly fund only the applied research where they can reap the fruits early and not in 10 or so years.

Capitalist Science

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