All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
When younger I've had job in grocery stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
Have you worked in a corporation? How sane was that corporation? Did it seem to even value its own survival? (Not corporations in general. In general they seem great. Just curious about the ones you actually did time in.)
"Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics."
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
All of the low hanging fruit that could be discovered by self-funded gentlemen scientists has been picked. That doesn't scale to a supercollider or a large RCT. Funding at the whims of rich benefactors is very susceptible to petty politics.
Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors. That could be a better set, but when it is it's because it's a more local and hands on group of people, not because those people happen not to work for the government. Governments are awkward because they are deep bureaucracies, and deep bureaucracies divorce the decision makers from the impact of their decisions. Weaker feedback leads to worse decision making. Not because there is a magic property of government that makes it uniquely bad. Large corporations, universities, and other deep non-governmental bureaucracies have similar pathologies.
That's something of an exaggeration, they are empowered to do violence and collect taxes and other things that are more problematic when abused, but still, privatization isn't a silver bullet.
>Politics is irreducible from human affairs, privatization doesn't eliminate politics. It relocates it to a different set of actors.
We ideologically privatised the water sector into regional private monopolies in the UK, and anyone who's had experience with the water monopolies knows this is the truth.
I don't know, maybe it's the way I was raised, but to me it just seems like common sense that a privatised monopoly is going to be worse in literally every metric imaginable, than maintaining public ownership - not just with regards to water and/or similar critial-to-life infrastructure, but everything in general. Highway 407, the most expensive toll road on the planet, is a prime reminder to Ontarians why privatisation is objectively bad.
We in the US did the same with PG&E (gas and electric utility) out in California. It goes as well as expected, which is to say poorly.
In the UK, gas & electric is also privatised and in a poor state too :)
Almost like private investment generates return for investors, not customers. Sometimes those align.
Can't really compare a natural monopoly (water utility) that should be the government with something that isn't a natural monopoly (research).
I think you can in the limited sense it supports the idea privatisation doesn't remove politics, just relocates it and often into a less democratically accountable place to boot.
Whenever a person or group has power over another person or group, politics necessarily exists. I don't think this fact can be avoided, as much as advocates of privatisation often argue that it can be.
I am suspicious of this fruit-altitude analogy due to its long history of use, and 100% failure rate.
That sounds like excellent grounds for suspicious but I don't know what you mean. We were talking about Peter Higgs for example. I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have. Nation state level resources are the table stakes for fundamental research into particle physics, because everything beneath that barrier has already been explored - I don't think that's really controversial.
It's definitely an exaggeration to say that all science on a shoestring budget has already been accomplished, there are new frontiers out there. But once they start gaining momentum, the low hanging fruit will be consumed in due course. Methodically searching a domain works and works from the most tractable end up until it is at the frontier of what is tractable given our current technology/constraints.
I don't really understand the alternative hypothesis. That there's an infinite amount of low hanging fruit? What's this 100% failure rate?
The points your making make sense. I am thinking of it like this: Say there is an elegant argument. It checks out at first. Then you do the unit analysis, and find out the units don't match! But you still don't find the flaw in the original argument; maybe because it's suble in some way. That's where I am: Very smart people have been writing things in the vein of your post here for millenia, and it always seems convincing in the light of contemporary knowledge! Then is proven to be incorrect by major advancements.
Perhaps this will help: Indeed high energy physics is a very high budget project! But there are many areas of the natural sciences which are not high energy physics. This area has been a big deal over the past few decades, and I wonder if it's an over-commitment at the expense of other areas.
You can do many molecular bio lab techniques with a budget of $10k in equipment and reagents, for example. (If used/entry level) I believe there are also many areas in science, chem, and bio which can be done on a theoretical level, or with computers, etc.
Another angle: We are in the earliest steps of neuroscience. Many biology tools and techniques are borrowing something serendipitous we found in nature (CRISPR, TAQ polymerase etc, leveraging living cells' equipment to produce proteins etc). We have no concept of a general chemistry simulator. Molecular dynamics simulations can only work on very small systems for very small timescales, and are based on many approximations, and assumptions which provincialize them. We are very likely missing a big picture of the lower levels of GR/QM. It is very hard for me to agree with "Yep we're good; nothing left to discover here without really expensive equipment!".
Yeah, I agree. It works as an argument for why science can't rely on wealthy benefactors, not for understanding what is possible with a given budget at a given point in time. And biology and chemistry are good counterexamples where capabilities are getting smaller and cheaper.
I would point out that that's on the back of a huge amount of research funded by grants and performed in national labs, but it doesn't impact your argument.
> I don't think Peter Higgs could have self funded CERN. I don't think a thousand Peter Higgs could have
Higgs didn't use the LHC to write the paper which won him the Nobel prize.
Additionally, I think it's worth considering that the availability of the money that built the LHC alleviates the drive to find different solutions.
As they say, "necessity is the mother of invention." I frequently think of the great pyramids and people being baffled on how they would build something of that scale without modern equipment. It's hard to get your mind to come up with novel ideas when it already knows that you'd use cranes, trucks, etc. to do it today.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
When younger I've had job in grocery stores and saw petty politics.
There's nothing particular to being subsidized or not: politics is something humans do, and the pettiness is simply a reflection of the people involved.
Have you worked in a corporation? How sane was that corporation? Did it seem to even value its own survival? (Not corporations in general. In general they seem great. Just curious about the ones you actually did time in.)
"Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics."
I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one.
The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery.
We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
It has crossed my mind that being a scientist is for people who are already financial independent. Same as being an artist. For the rest of us, we need focus on careers where we can make a living. Of course, we can still do science and art as hobbies, but it is rather risky pretending to make a living from it.
The stakes are never higher when the stakes are so low.
> Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics.
Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
the only ingredient needed is humans