Can someone please change `wity' to `with' in the title?
This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns.
the difficulty with 'basic research with seemingly no value' (a good example is the fourier transform, which at the time was seen as a mathematical curiosity) - is that it lacks accountability. How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies?
This problem is even worse when you take taxpayer funds, because transparency and accountability are fundamental attributes of good governance, and the claim that 'it will be useful someday' potentially pushes the accountability aspect out to t=infinity.
It's very difficult to predict ahead of time what will be useful and what won't. Given this limitation, there is already a reasonable amount of accountability: many different people in the field are involved in both deciding whom to fund and whom to publish. Moreover, people track how well past research does (based on citations as well as impact more generally) to evaluate any individual researcher.
This is already more accountability than in some government departments or parts of large corporations!
Since nobody can predict everything ahead of time, we have to take risks and explore possible dead ends. Moreover, we really want to avoid getting everyone stuck in the same mindset, so we need people to challenge the status quo occasionally. Think of research as a large search problem--you sometimes have to take seemingly bad moves in order to avoid local maxima. Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted.
>Moreover, people track how well past research does (based on citations as well as impact more generally) to evaluate any individual researcher.
Do you not see how this could be bad? You're implicitly subsidizing a select few - then who gets to be the gatekeeper that decides what is or isn't bad? Surely not, people who are selected because of their high training, where "high training" winds up also being indirectly judged as "people who were trained by the closed society of individuals who just happen to be the selectees"?
I mean, really, that's what we're doing. As the system becomes more closed and self-interested, and dependent on extracting funds from the government, the more the danger of becoming detached from reasonableness - and then you DO have to worry about people tickling their intellectual jollies.
Now, if we had the very same system, except it were funded as, say a private non-profit entity, it will for sure have the same problems. But - it's less morally suspect, because, at least the people donating their money into it should have known that risk beforehand - and can choose to directly defund their part in the rotten enterprise when they figure out what's going on.
> Punishing risk-taking just because you're worried about somebody tickling their "intellectual jollies" is rather short-sighted.
You're absolutely right. But that choice is not one that government should be making, because of its conflict of interest (accountability). Incidentally, there are problems with transparency in government funding reviews (NSF and NIH panels are conducted in secret with 'anonymous reviewers'), too, but those are implementation details, not fundamental problems.
I'm not suggesting that the risk-taking involved in judging basic science should not be done. I am suggesting that it should not be done by government.
> How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies?
The term "basic research" refers to the study of fundamental principles. It is undertaken precisely to "tickle intellectual jollies". This is not a bad thing. Basic research is important because it is critical for the advancement of Science to understand why something works the way it does. This approach is distinct from applied research, which is very often concerned with making a buck from the derivation of Scientific results.
> How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies?
what's the difference? would you want to fund a Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies?
yes. But I would not want someone to force me to fund Feynman to tickle his intellectual jollies. Moreover, your example has survivorship bias. There are plenty of completely rediculous people you probably would'nt want to fund. For me, one such person is Thomas Cavalier-Smith.
no, just that I have a problem with him. But if you are curious: so much wasted effort. I am not a fan of siloing sciences, but TCS puts into stark perspective Rutherford's epithet "All science is either physics or stamp collecting" - and what TCS has done is stamp collecting at its worst. Over, and over again.
A good friend of me said: anything that is science is just a special case of either mathematics or physics (and anything that does not satisfy this criterion is bullshit or rambling on and on; but surely not science).
I don't agree with the taxpayer funds aspect. Why can we not agree that employing people to perform research is a good thing? There are lots of things that are taken as good investments by governments based on the fact that it will be useful in future years. Take for example teaching people to read and write, preventative healthcare, disaster planning, Sex education (it's a long list when you think about it). My point is that research for research's sake isn't actually a bad thing. It's generally cheap (when compared to employment ,social welfare or institutions like Prison or Hospitals) and provides useful outputs(I think everyone can agree that at least some positives come out of research).
Anyway, I think in future years people will consider the fact that people aren't freely educated to 3rd & 4th level in much the same way as we view not getting educated to secondary level(18) in days gone by.
I'm not sure "it being a good thing" is sufficient rationale for government to pay for any given thing. For starters, you'll have arguments about what's good and what's not. Why do you decide to fund telescopes pointing at distant galaxies, versus anthropological expeditions to the Andaman islands? Or do we fund it all?
If it's so obviously good, then why aren't people paying out of their own pockets to help out?
I'm going to anticipate your answer: because they're too selfish. But is there any reason to believe that our elected officials are any less selfish? Look at the narcissistic idiots we elect - and ask, are these the people whom you really want holding the purse strings? I often see complaints, "petition congress not to defund science". Well you know what, scientists shouldn't be so darned entitled, it wasn't their money to begin with. Putting their faith in the continued patronage of a capricious bunch of authoritarians beholden to questionable special interests may not have been the smartest way to secure a sustainable (or a moral) stream of funds.
In the end, taxes are backed by "if you don't pay them, you're gonna be taken away by agents who will throw you in jail". That's blood money you're taking. Deficit spending, which is governments do these days, is even worse - at least with taxes there is the pretense of the voter having a say; when you borrow money on the credit of the nation - you are mortgaging the assets of future generations, who cannot go back in time and cast a vote against spending their money on a stupid idea.
In most democracies we elect politicians to decide if things are good and worth funding.
Please don't anticipate my answers :) at present people are paying out of their own pockets for 3rd and 4th level education. So this is happening.
Taxes are not yours. They belong to the state. There is a fallacy that exists that you own your taxes and "pay them" to the state. This is not the reality. The reality is that the state has always owned the taxes and by virtue of the system they have created (which the taxes are used to fund) enable you to earn a living. You owe taxes because you have used the resources of the state. Be it the land, the security forces or the markets or transport networks.
In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous in that individuals cannot be effectively excluded from use and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others.[1] Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defense, flood control systems and street lighting. Public goods that are available everywhere are sometimes referred to as global public goods.
your statement is an existence statement. Yes, public goods exist. In some cases government regulation of public goods against abuse is reasonable e.g. "clean air". But your statement doesn't give moral justification for government subsidy of public goods.
Let's put it in really stark terms. I want to build a lighthouse. Because it's a public good; it will keep ships in the ocean safe. Is it morally justified for me to hold a gun to your head and threaten to blow it off if you don't give ten dollars for the construction of the lighthouse? What about one dollar? Ten cents? Half a cent? Let's ratchet back a little bit. Maybe I don't threaten to blow your head off. I'll just build a cell and throw you in there. For ten years. Is it any better if it's six months? Six weeks? Does that make it any better? Does it make it any morally better if instead of taking the personal responsibility for detaining you, I delegate that responsibility to agents of a byzantine bureaucracy?
I don't think the provision of public goods are a moral choice, if anything it is an economic choice, where its subsidy is justified by two things: the benefit of the public good outweigh its costs, the general public will not sufficiently fund public goods out of their free will. The degree of benefit for the future is sometimes not measurable, however if the past is any indication than it has definitely provided major contributions to innovation.
>the general public will not sufficiently fund public goods out of their free will.
May I remind you:
>I'm going to anticipate your answer: because they're too selfish. But is there any reason to believe that our elected officials are any less selfish? Look at the narcissistic idiots we elect - and ask, are these the people whom you really want holding the purse strings?
>The degree of benefit for the future is sometimes not measurable, however if the past is any indication than it has definitely provided major contributions to innovation.
It's not like privately funded applied and basic science is chopped liver here. Applied: Salk and Sabin developed the polio vaccines without a public dime (pun intended) and didn't patent it either. Basic: Peter Mitchell proposed and validated the chemiosmotic effect (1970s) and even won a nobel prize on the discovery, without public help. Obviously, if you go far back enough to where the state was essentially uninvolved in science, most of the discoveries were made with private funding. Yes, of course, publically funded science has made discoveries, but what you are arguing is the broken window fallacy.
I agree with you that governments can be very suboptimal, but that doesn't diminish the existence or usefulness research as a public good. Some research can not be readily commercialised, but nevertheless form basic building blocks for other innovation, in such cases government funding is crucial.
>Some research can not be readily commercialised, but nevertheless form basic building blocks for other innovation, in such cases government funding is crucial.
Quit being such an ultra-capitalist arse. The funding of public goods is not and should not be an opt-in system. You contribute whether you like it or not because that's in the best collective interest.
And if an individual decides to opt out, what then? The current solution is "throw them in jail for a decade", which seems way too excessive for me. I keep hearing people complaining about how others get sent to jail for drug-related crimes, but not many similar complaints about tax evasion. Is this crime so bad that we have to throw a person away for years?
That's all fine and good until "we" decide that the "best collective interest" is to defund gradstudent's research in favor of something else more politically expedient. Then gradstudent throws a hissyfit because the collective interest is not his interest. Who's the selfish one then?
The purpose of government is to marshal these selfish urges such that we benefit as a whole.
Whether or not that happens is a political problem. That the political system can be captured by politically expedient interests is a political problem.
Of course gradstudent should throw a hissyfit, if it is in their interest - would you expect anything less?
"The purpose of government is to marshal these selfish urges such that we benefit as a whole."
I think a lot of people think that's what government should do, but you should really think hard about why that's a bad idea. Who is "we"? Who gets to really decide what is "benefit"? Who gets to decide what is "selfish"? And how can I be that person so that I can screw over gradstudent, and bring about benefits, which, oh by the way, also REALLY benefit my friends and family? Some animals are just.... More equal than others.
This is a very good point and I think I would like to refine my comment in response to it.
I think it is important to distinguish between individual vs collective accountability, as well as accountability within a field and the accountability of the field to larger society. My argument for supporting basic research in a field assumes that there is internal accountability within that field and that the research makes sense to those within it even if there is no direct application. In this view accountability of the individual to society is mediated by the accountability of the field at large to society. This is what allows for various sorts of bet hedging (if we think of a field as a firm) to improve the chances of hitting the rare event where a basic result has a big impact. If there is a deterioration of transparency accountability within a field, perhaps due to the mechanisms the OP describes in points (1-7) then (8) does become a problem. So I have perhaps a different understanding of (8) then the OP. I do not argue that some particular flavor of esoteric mathematics be supported because 'it will be useful someday'. Rather I argue that, so long as there is intellectual integrity within mathematics (or whatever other field) that one should expect some small fraction of the esoteric theoretical research will yield big returns, and that these returns will subsidize the failed efforts. This kind of mechanism allows for the possibility to support t=infinity timescale research with accountability checks of the collective at finite timescales.
Now, if we start to deviate from my assumption of integrity within a field and my scenario of field as idealized firms, there are all sort of interesting game theoretical questions that pop up. For example, what sort of internal rewards and punishments within a field are needed to keep things honest? I don't know, but I think it is interesting to think about.
>assumes that there is internal accountability within that field
Yeah, that is a huge, and completely wrong assumption about the sciences.
I could rattle off a list of names just in my field (you should google them to find out exactly what they did): Dalibor Sames/Bengu Sezen. Leo Paquette. Homme Hellinga. Peter Schultz/Jonathan Zhang. Geoffrey Chang. Armando Cordova. To varying degrees of fraud, or negligence (e.g. Chang wasn't fraudulent, just almost criminally[0] negligent) And those are the people who got caught, and the ones I know about. Guess how many of them still have faculty positions?
[0]I feel safe saying this (with the "almost" qualification) because misappropriation of federal funds is a crime.
Irrespective of your assumption, you still need some sort of justfication for giving taxpayer money to science. Presumably, because it's good for society. Well fine. If it's so good for society, why can't you find people to give money to science as a free-will donation?
>How do you make sure that the academe that is selling their project as 'basic research' isn't just pulling a fast one on you and sucking your funds to tickle their intellectual jollies?
I'm actually in the sciences. I've seen the stupid ideas that PIs have proposed in the name of "basic sciece" and the grad students and postdocs they have burned in the process.
I had a different but related reaction to point 8 specifically. He seems to imply (although it's not totally clear since he treats the academy as a single unit) that people who have come up with theory should turn their individual attention to practical applications after it's well-developed. But it may be that people who are good at theory simply aren't good at applications. It could be better if once something was ready for practical applications, those theory-people went and worked on developing theory in a different area, rather than trying to become applied. If we aren't seeing enough practical application, perhaps it's because we aren't rewarding application sufficiently (seems unlikely), or people aren't being rewarded sufficiently for practical applications of other people's theories (seems possible?), so we have less appliers than is optimal.
This critique is well written and was interesting for me to read, having just finished my PhD a few months ago. I can relate to a number of the issues he raised. However, I must take issue with his point (8). While I think it certainly is important to make sure that academics contribute back to larger society in some capacity, I think it is a bit premature to conclude that this means turning the focus towards more applied work. There are simply too many examples of basic research with seemingly no value to anything of practical interest that turn out to be very value in industry and medicine some years down the road to dismiss incubation of purely theoretical work offhand. I think this fact is more or less appreciated by society at large, and they are very happy to support Edward Witten and Terry Tao and so forth, with the understanding that it is a long term investment with some large expected return. Of course these return have long tails, so most results will be useless, but that is beside the point if you are interested in total returns.
EDIT: typos