[HN Gopher] Please Fund More Science
___________________________________________________________________
Please Fund More Science
Author : davnicwil
Score : 274 points
Date : 2020-03-30 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| teen wrote:
| Wouldn't these investors want a return on their investment? Is it
| possible to invest without profiting off of the pandemic?
| m0zg wrote:
| I don't think anyone would mind some company "profiting from
| the pandemic" if it actually had something that works. Heck,
| the US government would probably sign you a hundred billion
| dollar check in 15 minutes at this point if you had a cure or a
| working therapeutic which can be deployed immediately.
| [deleted]
| mhb wrote:
| They should offer that as a prize.
| m0zg wrote:
| That's one way to do it. That's what it is, essentially.
| earthtourist wrote:
| Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for
| their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required
| before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people
| back to work with relatively low risk.
|
| Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy
| for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15
| minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or
| supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that
| I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is
| uninfected.
|
| I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing
| machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate
| the tests and test machines correctly.
|
| The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while
| supplies are limited.
| koeng wrote:
| I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for
| Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea.
|
| The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive
| investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests),
| which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for.
|
| Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show
| results if your body is already producing antibodies. The
| really good test is an RT-PCR or RT-LAMP test, which uses a
| pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant.
|
| Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup
| (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources
| and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't
| approved by the FDA AFAIK.
| lr wrote:
| You would have to do this every day, too. Getting tested
| doesn't mean you are not exposed on the way home that day, or
| the way back to work. Also, what if you wanted to go to
| multiple places in the same day? You would have to be tested
| n-times, as you could have been infected going from one
| business to the other.
|
| What I do not hear people talking about is this: Getting tested
| once is not enough. If you do not have COVID-19 today, it
| doesn't mean you are not going to have it tomorrow. The only
| test that can tell you that is an antibody test. Also, we don't
| even know yet (for sure, anyway) if people can be re-infected.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| We're planning to do this here in Germany, and I think many
| other countries are planning it too. It just depends on the
| availability of a reliable antigen test, which I heard will be
| available soon. Testing people once will be enough for now, if
| we can't get rid off the virus entirely (which is unlikely) it
| will probably become like the flu, so we will have to test
| people regularly or provide vaccines, which in any case is a
| good idea for influenza as well. I hope that after this
| epidemic we take mass vaccination a bit more seriously, as we
| can save many lives through this simple and (for influenza)
| cheap measure.
| [deleted]
| gdubs wrote:
| This might be an unpopular opinion around here, but this is an
| obvious area for bold public investment. Countless startups
| sprung out of public investment into basic research during the
| 20th century. And places like Bell Labs spent more on R&D due to
| the tax situation of the time. Beginning in the 70s and 80s,
| investors began to push for lower and lower capital gains taxes.
| So, I guess I'm saying that if you're an investor and you want
| more research into basic science, we could release the vice grip
| on capital gains rates and let the public pour a ton of money
| into it.
|
| I'm hoping for this to provoke a rational conversation and not a
| political flame-war - so, please respond fair-mindedly.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| >Scientists can get us out of this. What they need are money and
| connections.
|
| No.
|
| It's too late to get us out of this. We can prevent the next
| case. But no, it's too late now.
|
| What was needed with coronavirus was prevention. That's a matter
| of politics and economics. No science.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| Hence why the title has "funding" in it.
| jolmg wrote:
| By "economics", I don't think LatteLazy is referring to the
| need of funding of anything in particular.
| zippoxer wrote:
| On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would
| have a mass-producible vaccine ready, then you could say
| science has saved us from a second pandemic.
| dangom wrote:
| Indeed. Scientists and policy makers know that decisions are
| taken by policy makers.
| reasonattlm wrote:
| My company, Repair Biotechnologies, is working on regrowth of the
| atrophied thymus via FOXN1 upregulation. We're at the preclinical
| stage of getting the vector and formulation into shape, and the
| start of tests in influenza exposure models in mice.
|
| The atrophy of the thymus is a major reason why the adaptive
| immune system declines. The evidence from sex steroid ablation in
| prostate cancer patients strongly suggests it is possible to
| provoke the naive T cell component of the adaptive immune system
| into regenerating itself in a matter of months, provided that the
| thymus is restored to more youthful activity. Also evidence from
| the Intervene Immune trial with growth hormone (not advisable as
| a strategy, but congratulations to that team on getting
| interesting data) for the same proposition.
|
| To be clear this is a years long process for Repair
| Biotechnologies that would see us into trials around 2022, but at
| some point fixing the aged immune system will and must become a
| practical concern. At that point, we'll all be a lot less
| concerned about pandemics of this nature, as the mortality and
| hospitalization rates will be much reduced.
|
| There are other things that need to handled to restore all of the
| aged immune system: getting hematopoietic stem cells back into
| line and functioning properly, regenerative medicine for lymph
| nodes, some form of targeted destruction for malfunctioning
| immune cells. But each of these items will give incremental
| benefits on its own.
| saintx wrote:
| According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an
| epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of
| biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.
|
| To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and
| resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."
|
| > He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats:
| 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published
| findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design
| flaws. And those that aren't flawed and manage to publish are
| often needlessly redundant.
|
| What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to
| improve the research and funding processes to make them more
| relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.
|
| 1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data
| that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and
| experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.
|
| 2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials
| over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often
| only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound
| conclusions.
|
| 3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better
| and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current
| knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research
| before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current
| proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already
| very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision
| making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good
| for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.
|
| Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:
|
| https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...
| meow1032 wrote:
| Here's a link to the actual source, rather than that garbage
| news article: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2016/07/01/much-
| biomedical-researc...
| dantheman wrote:
| It could be that there is too much money in science - there are
| too many under-qualified people jamming up the system.
| Requiring more administration and overhead to make them
| effective. Jamming the information channels with bad studies,
| reducing the signal to noise ratio.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not
| publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper
| that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem,
| and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way".
|
| Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is
| dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| The thing about science is that it's quite unpredictable. While
| I'm sure we can increase the efficiency of the system I'm not
| sure where the efficiency ceiling lies, as even with great
| processes it's simply not possible to know beforehand which
| approaches will be successful (if you did it would not require
| research).
|
| I mean, look at the proportion of software projects that fail,
| which I'd estimate to be 50 % at least. And software
| engineering operates with much fewer unknowns compared to
| research.
|
| Physics research is similar: Much of the research does not
| yield world-changing technology, or anything useful at all. I
| wouldn't say it's useless though, as unsuccessful projects
| still can provide inspiration for new research avenues and even
| if the research fails, the researcher (hopefully) gets better
| at doing research in the process, so the chances of producing
| something good the next time he/she tries increase.
|
| I think the most promising avenue of increasing research
| productivity is to make it possible for more people to do
| quality research. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not,
| so let's create more opportunity.
| AxiomaticSpace wrote:
| Pedantic correction: R0 actually refers to the contagiousness of
| a virus before any public health measures are taken (including
| vaccines). R is the contagiousness of a virus in the world as it
| currently is. So if an effective vaccine is produced, R will go
| below one, but R0 will be unaffected.
| koeng wrote:
| In the future, I'm hoping some of the dreams of synthetic biology
| come true (basically, decentralization of biotech).
|
| I work on that problem in close collaboration with a lot of
| community lab spaces, and it is surprising how many have the
| capacity and knowledge to implement rapid testing in their local
| communities and the inability to do so because of regulation.
| Biotech, if you run proper controls, isn't actually _that_ hard.
| A lot of those spaces are now seriously struggling because of the
| shut down.
|
| The main thing that is stupid about how the FDA is approving
| tests is that they approve protocols, even though they have lots
| of controls for input->output. Coming from a computer science
| side, I'd imagine they'd so something along the lines of unit
| tests, but they aren't - they're still regulating how the
| protocol is done itself.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Please pay more tax.
|
| Then we can fund the science with it.
|
| Honestly, I heard a comment on Slate Money to the effect of "Why
| aren't the billionaire class doing more to fund COVID research"
|
| All the epidemiology, all the WHO plans for last decade, all the
| incredible co-ordinated response globally (#) has been publicly
| funded. Give over on the idea private companies are good for
| anything but taking existing research in the hands of hundreds
| and putting it into hands of millions and billions.
|
| Pay tax. Vote for competence.
|
| (#) yes I happen to think that shutting down most of the planet,
| in an attempt to save millions of lives, in a matter of weeks, is
| an amazing feat of global co-ordination. Yes there are lots of
| local differences and many many ways things could be better but
| humanity could have done so much worse.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on
| science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5
| years.
|
| Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a
| primitive virus.
|
| We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need
| to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first
| place.
|
| Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on
| smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for
| free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we
| are.
| lazyjones wrote:
| Wishful thinking in a world where human resources(!) are
| expendable and replaceable whereas wealth and power are not.
|
| Also, throwing money at a problem doesn't automatically solve
| it. Progress often depends on few individuals with crucial
| ideas, but you'll have to get those interested in your problem
| first.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Good point. But also currently research requires expensive
| equipment, interdisciplinary cooperation. It all takes money.
| So its true. Throwing money at a problem does not solve it.
| But its not possible even for a brightest people do the
| research if they dont have money for research tools and
| financial safety.
| lazyjones wrote:
| I'd argue that exceptionally smart people and capable
| people usually have financial safety early in their lives -
| and this kind of research has plenty of funding available.
| It's probably just that other problems or goals seem more
| interesting until you are personally affected.
| bluGill wrote:
| Money does get smart people interested. Of course they have
| their own ideas, but money directs things.
|
| I'm a great C++ programmer (or so I like to think) because I
| have been paid to write C++. I could write any other language
| if I had been paid (and I have but the rest were unique to
| the client)
| gen3 wrote:
| Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D
| and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look
| into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in
| creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research
| already.
|
| Smartphones have given millions of people access to information
| they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of
| computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then
| 80% of there population online [1]
|
| The issues you listed would take significantly more time then
| "five years" to cure.
|
| I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed
| and used.
|
| [0] First link when searching for DARPA inventions:
| https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...
|
| [1]
| https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/...
| tomaszs wrote:
| Yes - Army had impact on development. War - didnt. Even if we
| discuss research caused by wars i am 100% sure these would be
| made a lots faster without an actual war.
|
| And also - its natural army attracts some bright minds
| because sometimes only army has resources and money to fund
| research. So as long as it is used for good cause it makes
| sense as a symbiosis
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but
| you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on
| what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get
| smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we
| don't know.
|
| If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic
| engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have
| fire breathing dragons!
| coredog64 wrote:
| We have vaccines for flu. Every year, a probabilistic
| determination is made of which strains will be a problem and
| those are put into the vaccine. That people still get it is
| down to incorrect guesses and inadequate herd immunity. The
| vaccine is super cheap (as low as $20 out-of-pocket and free
| via most US health insurance).
|
| Cancer isn't "one thing" that can have one cure, and it's silly
| to think otherwise.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Of course cancer is not one thing. But the truth is research
| with the little money we spend on it, is very advanced if you
| take almost any cancer into account. What is missing is money
| to push these efforts into final results.
| appleshore wrote:
| Cancer's not one thing but there's some things you can do to
| generally improve your odds.
|
| A doctor and an oncologist won't tell you these things
| because they're not even thinking about them. They likely
| don't even know how to answer the question "can vitamins help
| some cancers?" Instead, mine repeated word for word responses
| about how we get most of our vitamins from a healthy diet.
| Then said he'd have to look it up.
|
| Ask them about IGF1 levels, fasting, ketogenic diets they
| mostly won't know. They simply say there is NOTHING you can
| do to prevent getting cancer.
|
| It's the system's fault, the doctors and surgeons are just
| human beings who have no incentive to be practical.
| fyp wrote:
| Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be
| failing us in the US.
|
| Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever
| detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile
| apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have
| visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.
| samstave wrote:
| Un-popular opinion incoming:
|
| FUCK YOUR SURVEILLANCE STATE apologist propaganda.
|
| I don't WANT Predator following me about and retinal scanning
| me into the Starbucks.
| creddit wrote:
| I think it will only be unpopular because of your inability
| to say it in a stable, civil way.
| samstave wrote:
| Don't spy on me.
|
| Period.
|
| ---
|
| Actually let me expand upon that. First with an
| annecdote....
|
| I Was at RSA conf in SF a few years ago - ran into an old
| friend who was contracting to the NSA - and then met the
| head of cybercrimes for the state dept (I cant recall his
| title sadly - I kept a pic of his business card for years,
| but have since lost it)
|
| They invite me to dinner that night. There is about ~12 of
| us - and they are trading war stories of shit they have
| done in cybercrime blah blah (I was working at Lockheed at
| the time)
|
| There was this super you, SUPER brilliant eng that was with
| them and he was talking about hacking this, that and the
| other - being on redteam and they had to physically
| infiltrate, pick locks and steal this and that from
| blueteam...
|
| but there was a subtext which was fucking disturbing.
|
| They were all bragging about these OPs...
|
| And while I understand the national necessity of having
| such skills in your bet - the problem was that I realized I
| was sitting at a table with 100% psychopaths that didnt
| have a single moral fiber in their soul.... and it was
| about the thrill and ego of being "look at how fucking
| smart and technical and cool I am"
|
| I literally excused myself from the table and acted as
| though I was going to use the restroom.
|
| I simply walked out of the restaurant.
|
| The point is, that these orgs use very young smart people
| and enable and empower them with autonomy, authority, and
| praise and you wind up with digital psychos.
|
| I am looking at you [lots of surveillance companies all
| over HN]
|
| So, FUCK authoritarian supporting, bullshit businesses.
| earthtourist wrote:
| The word "spy" isn't specific enough. It's enough to say
| that you don't want your Fourth Amendment rights
| violated.
|
| It should be possible to do mass surveillance of Covid-19
| without violating people's rights. It's just an
| additional constraint that other countries don't have. It
| will require some alternative approaches.
| fyp wrote:
| It's definitely not an unpopular opinion, especially on HN.
| Pre-corona I was probably a crazier privacy nut than most so
| I completely understand where you're coming from.
|
| But right now our privacy is not worth more than our parents'
| and grandparents' lives. You ought to re-run your moral
| calculations with the current state of the world in mind.
| There are literally millions of lives at stake.
|
| Also I am hoping for tech solutions that do preserve privacy
| to some degree. Singapore seems to have a decent solution
| where the user has to opt-in:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/singapore-coronavirus-app-
| tr...
| mrfusion wrote:
| Some of our grandparents went to war to protect these
| freedoms you're willing to throw away.
| rstupek wrote:
| attempting to do face tracking for contact tracing in the US
| would likely lead to an uproar from privacy advocates. there
| are likely many companies (amazon, facebook, google) that have
| the tech to accomplish it (several years ago).
| nostromo wrote:
| > face tracking for contact tracing
|
| These calls remind me of 9/11 when we permanently reduced our
| civil liberties for a momentary problem.
| davidw wrote:
| I am not opposed to some of these measures. A lot of lives
| are at stake, and also the ability to restart the economy.
|
| But they _definitely_ need as part and parcel of the
| implementation, a 'self destruct' that goes into effect once
| the crisis is over.
| nostromo wrote:
| That's definitely a step in the right direction.
|
| But take a look at the Patriot Act. Much of it expired, but
| has been reauthorized time and time again -- with support
| from both parties, both Obama and Trump.
| davidw wrote:
| Yeah, that's tricky; people tend to adjust to things and
| they become the 'status quo'. I guess it's partially a
| matter of electing better politicians down the line.
| williesleg wrote:
| Please find more humanity.
| [deleted]
| marcell wrote:
| In terms of COVID-19, I'm skeptical there's any real need for VC
| style funding:
|
| 1. Existing biotech companies are probably perfectly capable of
| addressing this with usual means. Vaccines are a known quantity,
| not novel disruption.
|
| 2. By the time any startup gets off the ground (6 months at
| least), the crisis will likely have passed
| comicjk wrote:
| Existing vaccine efforts will probably succeed, but the
| possibility that they fail is real and quite scary (to me,
| anyway). So I'm glad we have a bunch of longer-term speculative
| projects as backup.
| upofadown wrote:
| It seems to me that it is way easier to get funding for medical
| research vs straight up biology. That might be wrong.
|
| Biology is what all of medical research eventually hinges on and
| any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths
| of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money.
|
| It is super easy to contribute to the search for treatments for
| particular diseases but how do you contribute to the fundamental
| research that ultimately fixes problems?
| dnautics wrote:
| It might be wrong, but it also might be right.
|
| >any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast
| swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of
| money
|
| But most research in pure biology is irrelevant. So you're
| effectively mistaking a type II error for a type I error in
| your argument.
| anthony_r wrote:
| Not sure if necessary. You can get so much funding for anything
| covid related, it's almost like ".com" in 90s or adding
| blockchain to your name more recently. But this time it's so much
| more urgent, so I think people will forgive easily the incredible
| amount of misses in the area that we'll probably have.
|
| I'd much rather see the governments fund coronavirus-related
| research _after_ this is over. The primary reason why SARS (v1)
| still doesn 't have a vaccine and research was abandoned was due
| to the incentive structure (SARS is gone, and so is funding). I
| wish we knew more about coronaviruses now, it's been over 10
| years since SARS ...
| barkingcat wrote:
| The US has been politically antiscience for this entire
| administration. It's not a matter of funding more science. It's
| about voting out politicians that seek to benefit themselves
| instead of thinking about what science can do, and what science
| has already done for humanity.
|
| I also would like to counter - science doesn't need any more
| money. Money distorts the progress of science (for example, look
| at the grants system - what a dumpster fire). What science needs
| is proper primary and secondary education and a healthy
| population. Start with fixing schools and healthcare, and you'll
| have so much science you wouldn't be able to stop it.
| bertil wrote:
| Some would see a contradiction between that impulse and how
| companies from Y-Combinator might use a tax-reduction scheme.
| Some could even see a connection between tax lawyers introduced
| by Y-Combinator to founders and that practice.
|
| I'm not saying that _has_ to be the case but "tax-avoidance /
| tax-optimisation / complex international structure / negotiation
| with government keen to offer low tax deal" is a common point
| made against large tech companies. I'm surprised why Sam doesn't
| connect that point to his point, or confront that issue directly.
| aazaa wrote:
| > Investors and donors--this is where we can help. Please
| consider shifting some of your focus and capital to scientific
| efforts addressing the pandemic. (And future pandemics too--I
| think this will be a before-and-after moment in the world, and
| until we can defend against new viruses quickly, things are going
| to be different.)
|
| Although the sentiment resonates, the business logic does not.
|
| Consider antibiotic drugs. Big Pharma and biotechs alike have
| been jettisoning programs. Why? It has nothing to do with
| science. These drugs simply aren't as profitable as others:
|
| > Several major pharmaceutical companies recently shut down their
| antibiotic and antiviral research projects, backing away from the
| growing threat of superbugs, which may kill more than 10 million
| people a year by 2050.
|
| https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-ba...
|
| How much do you think a cure for COVID-19 will make its creator?
| Be careful when you answer, because you'll need to include all of
| the R&D effort in the calculation, and also consider the
| opportunity cost of not pursuing something more profitable.
|
| The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by
| science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the
| highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very
| short period of time and only once gets funded.
| twomoretime wrote:
| I think R&D is going to be a lot cheaper when you have the FDA
| authorizing emergency compassionate use for promising drugs.
|
| >The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by
| science moonshots
|
| Why not? We are basically in wartime conditions. Even if the
| government doesn't relax it's rules, there's a high likelihood
| that enough hospitals/doctors will to conduct high risk trials
| on critically ill patients. Now is the best time for moon
| shots.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| While you're at it, fix everything else too.
|
| I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we
| could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was
| in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot).
|
| He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and
| delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole
| neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that
| captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog"
| showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it
| would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of
| business. )
|
| Or see his Old Man River's City project (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project
| https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ ) A city in a single
| building with ten million square feet of enclosed open space. Add
| some applied ecology ("Permaculture") and you've got an arcology
| ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ).
|
| We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our
| power with our values.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| The problem is not in science but in human nature.
| hanniabu wrote:
| I would love to see new neighborhoods being built have their
| plumbing not right under the road. It just seems so stupid to
| do that since it basically increases the costs. Instead it'd
| probably be better to put it under the sidewalk and have loops
| embedded in the sidewalks so that when work needs to be done
| you can tie it up to a fork truck and lift the sidewalk tiles
| up to perform your work. It's easily accessible, no digging, no
| excessive repair costs afterwards, and should make the actual
| work cheaper since repairs can be made faster.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| What do you do with the BMs in the little bags?
| michaelyoshika wrote:
| The real problem is who are "we".
| m4rtink wrote:
| >He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and
| delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole
| neighborhood in a week or two.
|
| Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-
| fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled
| on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k
|
| You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the
| crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the
| factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics.
|
| The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at
| record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was
| often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often
| lacked basic public amenities, at least initially.
|
| In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of
| parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack
| of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by
| modern ones & isolating the sides).
|
| >hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the
| project was spiked because it would put too many electricians
| and carpenters and so on out of business. )
|
| Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese
| toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you
| can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets
| and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered
| extraodrinary around here.
| jacquesm wrote:
| As bad as the 'Blocks' are they are to this date housing many
| millions of people and despite 30 years of capitalism there
| has been no equivalent to date. The money is there but it is
| far more concentrated now. The communist system was terrible
| in many ways, and economically a complete disaster. But: you
| had a (very small and cramped) place to live, petty crime was
| next to non existent (corruption though, was rampant) and
| your pension was guaranteed.
|
| When the wall fell it became a free-for-all overnight, all
| that security went out the window and not much was done to
| replace it. A couple of people got obscenely rich and plenty
| of people dropped well below the poverty line. It is that
| which powers the rise of assholes like Orban: the people that
| yearn for the bad situation they were in before because at
| least they knew just how bad it was.
| rvp-x wrote:
| I lived in a similar place and I somewhat miss it.
|
| It isn't just parking spaces, the neighborhood was designed
| with walking in mind. Many streets had shops at the bottom
| floor, and I could do all my errands on foot.
|
| My elderly grandparents still live there. In a small radius
| around their building is a grocery store, medical clinic and
| a bus stop. They could live independently for a long time
| after they lost the ability to drive.
| thedance wrote:
| Building houses in factories doesn't really solve a big
| problem. We're actually really, really good at building on-
| site. Just look at the experience of Factory_OS and their
| building that was "built in 10 days"[1]. While it may be the
| case under a narrow interpretation, it's also the case that the
| project spent a year in site prep, 5 years in planning and
| permitting, and six months after "building" it they are still
| detailing and finishing and are another 6 months away from
| occupancy.
|
| https://factoryos.com/press/housing-development-erected-in-w...
| californical wrote:
| The second sentence of your linked article says that it was
| pre-assembled and just needed to have the pieces fitted
| together on-site. It also says constructing it normally
| would've taken a year
| thedance wrote:
| Yeah but it's a press release. What I'm telling you is if
| you walk to this site today, they're still working on it
| and far from being done.
| californical wrote:
| My apologies, I thought you were making a point that
| building is fast even without pre-assembly in a factory.
| I see that you actually mean that the _everything else_
| takes several years, no matter how quickly the building
| goes up. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
| decasteve wrote:
| Bucky was so far ahead of his time. I've been reading Critical
| Path again and it's as enlightening now as it was 20 years ago
| when I first discovered it as I'm sure it was 40-some years ago
| when he wrote it.
|
| Add his Ultra-High Voltage World Electric grid to your list.
| odiroot wrote:
| So something like real socialism but this time actually
| working?
| simonsarris wrote:
| > houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the
| site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in
| a week or two.
|
| I'm currently writing a series on designing my own home and
| contrasting it with some soul-crushing new construction around
| here. It's very obvious that the places cherished and loved in
| New Hampshire were the villages built slowly, and the places
| least loved are the ones flash formed overnight by contractors
| trying to max out $$. Building on site is not very expensive
| but I'm not sure that making it cheaper is fixing any of the
| major problems with housing. It would just give more life to
| planning for lifeless sprawl.
|
| If anything, we need ways to build more beautiful houses better
| or cheaper, in smaller, odd and non-level lots. Not assembly
| line houses.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Houses can be custom built in a factory.
|
| They don't have to be identical copies at all, in the
| computer age.
| simonsarris wrote:
| You'd think that! You'd think that about something very
| simple, too, like door hardware. Eastlake (mid 1800's)
| style hardware has all these beautiful engravings on knobs,
| plates, hinges, even little places like the mortise plates
| that are rarely seen. Surely today in the computer age the
| doorknobs on half-million dollar homes must be more
| beautiful than these. But they're not.
| GordonS wrote:
| Agree with this.
|
| I live in a newish housing estate in a relatively affluent
| area of the UK, where every single house has the same
| cladding, the same colour of roof, the same colour of
| doors, the same colour and style of windows, the same small
| patch of grass out the front, and each house is separated
| by less than 2m.
|
| Walking around the place feels... wrong, hollow, eerie
| somehow. And yet, many people seem to love this homogeneous
| kind of place.
|
| Thing is, as you point out, it doesn't have to be this way
| - it's local planning regulations and NIMBY neighbours that
| are the problem. Why does every house need to look almost
| _identical_? Why do I need permission to paint my front
| door a different colour?
|
| It's not prefabrication that prevents diversity - it's
| policy.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Building on site is not very expensive
|
| Compared to building the same stuff in a factory, it is.
| mstj wrote:
| Would you be willing to share the series that you're working
| on?
|
| I'm looking to design my own home and very much agree with
| what you have to say. I'd be interested in hearing more of
| your thoughts.
| ozim wrote:
| Second that, and also parent poster thinks you can fix people
| problems with "build moreee hoouses".
|
| There is no technology that fixes people problems. I would
| say Skynet from Terminator was onto something but still
| failed :)
| madhadron wrote:
| There's a happy medium. A lot of things like roof trusses are
| much more precisely and cheaply built in a shop and then
| transported to the site.
|
| But, yes, most houses around me have so many flaws that it
| seems problematic to count them as assets. Christopher
| Alexander has a lengthy calculation on this in 'The Nature of
| Order.'
| krebs_liebhaber wrote:
| I'm always skeptical of arguments that go along the lines of
| "It would be so easy, if only we did the _right thing_ ".
|
| The truth tends to be that:
|
| * It wouldn't be so easy, even if we did the _right thing_.
|
| * Doing the _right thing_ is actually the hard part.
|
| * What you think is the _right thing_ isn 't actually the right
| thing.
|
| Most systems in place today are there for a reason.
| Organizations that do the wrong thing tend not to survive for a
| very long time.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| I do agree that it is tough to figure out what the right
| thing is but I disagree with the survival argument. A lot of
| organizations (e.g. companies, non-profits, and unions) end
| up spending a good chunk of their resources to try keep
| things as they are and keep the organization alive - despite
| the right thing being in another direction. This ends up
| keeping these organizations alive for far longer than they
| should. The systems of incentives can also become perverted
| by these organizations.
|
| Personally, I want to see more organizations devoted to
| solving problems and boldly becoming obsolete. The
| predominant reward models do not really seem to reward that.
|
| (Recent semi-related anecdote: see recent nytimes article
| about what happened to the project devoted towards designing
| and stockpiling inexpensive ventilators that came into
| existence after doing a risk analysis around SARS.)
| justin66 wrote:
| Yes, but the severity of a lot of problems would be
| ameliorated by simply not doing the very obviously _wrong
| thing._
| ozim wrote:
| Funny thing it would be right thing, right now. In 5 or 10
| years that "right thing" could as easily become yet another
| problem.
|
| Also most of the time right thing is not "right thing" for
| everyone because there will be always group of people who
| think totally opposite is the right thing to do.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Doing the right thing is a very very high bar these days. I'd
| settle to not being bullshitted to, as a good step in that
| direction.
| shoo wrote:
| Technical fixes or market-driven fixes cannot help when the
| underlying philosophy used to set objectives for research and
| economic activity is wrong.
|
| Some of the world's most severe and urgent problems are caused
| by (western?) society's emphasis on individualism -- or maybe
| that's a bit unfair, arguably it is fairly human for humans to
| be short-sighted and selfish much of the time. E.g. global
| warming is a huge problem, but global warming is just a symptom
| of the underlying problems of overpopulation and
| overconsumption. I don't really believe we can fix those two
| underlying problems by continuing to operate within the same
| individualist market-driven philosophy.
|
| E.g. most people want a comfortable place to live, children,
| opportunities for their children, a way to make a living, cheap
| food, cheap luxuries, cheap travel, medical care when they are
| sick. Governments, researchers and business strive to provide
| these -- but arguably most of these activities are harmful
| where they encourage consumption or discourage population
| reduction.
|
| With a market-driven individualist approach we (as the
| collective human endeavour) just keep doing what we are already
| doing a bit more efficiently or a bit faster, which doesn't
| address the problem of what we individually demand -- which the
| market & research moves to supply -- is bad for the collective
| in the long run.
|
| I think there's a clearer version of an argument along these
| lines in one of Yuval Noah Harari's books (although he may not
| have the same outlook or conclusion that I do).
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I'm all for inventiveness and solving problems. It's great. We
| also need to look at the limits of our own knowledge and
| ability to design things, elegantly summarized as
|
| > The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how
| little they really know about what they imagine they can
| design.
|
| (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit#Ch._5:_The_F..
| .)
|
| We can invent those things, sure, but we can't necessarily
| anticipate all problems with them. For example, a city with 10
| million sq. ft. (according to Google, about 0.36 sq. mile) of
| open space would be very cramped compared to New York, which
| has Central Park (1.3 sq miles). A virus like COVID-19 in a
| more dense location than NY could be far worse. Or to take
| another example, plastic bags are certainly one way to capture
| waste, but there was a movement to produce fewer plastic bags.
|
| We really don't have all the answers - we have people who think
| they have all the answers, and we have some other people that
| understand that the questions are hard.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align
| our power with our values.
|
| And the alignment has to be deeper in our society. A good
| example would be all the money spent trying to find a cure for
| baldness. Imagine if the funds were directed elsewhere if there
| weren't so many people willing to spend money curing baldness.
|
| But does changing our values mean the people who are caring
| about not going bald turn their resources elsewhere. Or should
| we look into why these people care so much. Is it that hair,
| and especially natural hair, plays such a large role in
| attractiveness that we need to change? Maybe what we need to
| change is not the desire of people to be more attractive, but
| what society deems as attractive.
|
| This gets even harder and more outlandish when you consider
| people with what even more deviant values. How much would it
| cost to end slavery?
| scythe wrote:
| >A good example would be all the money spent trying to find a
| cure for baldness. Imagine if the funds were directed
| elsewhere if there weren't so many people willing to spend
| money curing baldness.
|
| Both of the currently approved drugs for baldness --
| finasteride and minoxidil -- were originally designed for
| other purposes: BPH and ulcers respectively. The actual
| research effort spent to find a "cure for baldness" is not
| that large. Plus, androgenetic alopecia is a likely symptom
| of prediabetes[1,2]; to that end, "high consumption of fresh
| vegetables" has been found to reduce the risk by more than
| half[3] and so research on baldness is not necessarily about
| hair loss per se.
|
| 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5073072/
|
| 2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6340244/
|
| 3:
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00403-017-1799-z
| flattone wrote:
| I currently have hair and am not too concerned woth baldness.
| I just wanted to share and hear back on the idea that
| sometimes amazing discoveries come from previously long
| thought meaningless pursuts.
|
| Does this seem valid? I paused for a moment but only recall
| the concept, lacking any example off hand.
| nickff wrote:
| Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive
| structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution
| (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other
| government-funded researchers are simply responding to their
| incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case.
|
| The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they
| gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted
| to gaming a government-funded and bureaucratically-run grant
| system. Major government funded research projects (especially
| international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because
| of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive
| structure. Pouring more money in will not help us.
|
| A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work
| better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.
| djaque wrote:
| I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular
| idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving
| their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm
| doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I
| haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with
| any of my collaborators.
|
| Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and
| promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when
| it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects
| to support, we only care about what would be important to our
| field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a
| project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he
| couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece
| of work and wanted to see the results.
|
| On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is
| very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated
| since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment
| from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is
| the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in
| academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get
| isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground.
| My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced
| to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some
| menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some
| ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a
| professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad.
| student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I
| study, not because of citations.
| Reelin wrote:
| This matches what I saw in academia.
|
| Many non-academics seem to have this view that science is
| full of senior researchers with political motivations
| stifling good ideas and gaming the grant system for personal
| gain. I can't say that people don't game the system, but in
| my experience it was very much a symptom of an already broken
| system.
|
| As I see it, there certainly isn't enough funding (in the US)
| but that's not actually the primary problem. The issue is the
| processes used to allocate the funding (IMO). The funding
| cutoffs are _extremely_ competitive (because there isn't
| enough to go around) and renewals are typically every 4 to 5
| years, but the system doesn't seem to be designed with
| funding stability in mind. It creates an incredibly stressful
| and uncertain climate, so _of course_ people group up and
| game the system to varying degrees.
|
| (I almost want to describe the climate as feast and famine,
| but that's not right because there doesn't seem to be much in
| the way of feasts - just slightly less famine.)
| btrettel wrote:
| Your view of the incentives argument is too narrow. In my
| experience, the people who actively try to game the system
| are rare. The majority of the problem is people and ideas
| being _filtered out_ by the system. This comment by Daniel
| Lakeland on Andrew Gelman 's blog says it better than I
| could:
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-
| rese...
|
| > The way the incentives play out is that they create a
| survivorship bias. You can't do science today without at
| least basically paying your own salary, either through grants
| (many biomed researchers have to pay a large component of
| their salary directly through their grants) or through making
| "having you in the university" make sense for the university
| so that it pays your salary. That again basically means
| either grants, or adding substantially to the university
| prestige and the ability to charge money for tuition and get
| high quality students etc.
|
| > So, anyone with tenure in academia today has spent say 5 to
| 10 years minimum creating a "brand" that somehow enables them
| to pay their salaries, and/or funds for lab work etc. If the
| primary kind of "brand" that universities respond to is a
| "fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand" then the
| primary content of academia today is people who survived that
| cutoff...
|
| > It's not so much that individuals see the incentives and
| change their own behaviors to fit it (though this happens to
| some extent) it's more just that lots of people go into the
| filter, and the ones that come out are enriched for that
| particular behavior.
|
| > Also note that this mechanism doesn't require the
| individual scientists to be primarily money-driven. It's
| sufficient for the MBAs running the dean/provost/president
| offices to be primarily money driven, which they definitively
| are.
|
| I would recommend reading chapter 4 of the book "Disciplined
| Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (a physics PhD). While I disagree with
| a large fraction of the book (in particular, I don't think
| the problem is inherently political), I think chapter 4 is
| mostly right and shows how a researcher can feel self-
| motivated while actually being under strong external
| influences.
|
| http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
|
| I can give examples from my own experience in academia if
| anyone is interested.
| djaque wrote:
| Yes, yes, I understand your point. What I'm trying to say
| is that the PIs in my department (the ones who made it
| through the filter, that is) don't seem to have the "fake
| sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand" that you're
| talking about.
|
| I might just be really lucky to be in a clean department,
| but Machiavellian researchers accumulating in academia by
| filtering or otherwise just isn't my experience, sorry.
|
| I'm interested in hearing your experience though because it
| sounds like it's very different. I'm studying accelerator
| physics by the way, an extremely applied sub-field of
| physics. It may be that it's easier to weed out the people
| that don't pull their weight here.
| btrettel wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not thinking specifically about _hyped-
| up_ research that doesn 't pan out. Low quality research
| in general is what I'm thinking about. And I see the vast
| majority of academics as well-intentioned and not
| manipulative. (That is not to say that bad actors don't
| exist. They _definitely_ do.)
|
| Academics are incentivized to publish papers in
| recognized journals and bring in external funding. I'll
| focus specifically on publishing here for simplicity. I
| could write about funding if desired.
|
| The source of many problems I have with the current
| system is that I want to do high quality research, but
| the current system doesn't make that easy. The most
| important research I've done so far has been to make a
| large data compilation and use this to test different
| models and hypotheses in my subfield:
|
| https://github.com/btrettel/pipe-jet-breakup-data
|
| But my advisor never liked this, and mostly discouraged
| me from doing this research. He would have preferred
| instead that I stick to the more established path of
| skimming the literature for a problem some review article
| called open, doing a naive experiment about that, and
| then publishing the experiment. (Yes, I am being
| facetious, but unfortunately this characterization is
| accurate in my experience.) My experience is that review
| articles are far from comprehensive and frequently
| contain misinformation. It's important to actually
| assemble a large amount of data to see where the _real_
| gaps are, not just what a review article _called_ a gap.
| This sort of data compilation is very rare in my
| experience.
|
| It really was clearly about getting publications as
| quickly as possible. My advisor repeatedly pointed out to
| me what others recently published in my field and
| _exclusively_ what he pointed out to me I 'd call naive.
| His point was "This is good enough to get a publication"
| and my point is "So what? Just because other people do a
| bad job doesn't mean that I should." To him, other people
| are getting publications when he's getting nothing! He
| didn't seem concerned that I thought most of these papers
| weren't making a contribution. That's not to say that he
| doesn't care _at all_ about quality, but in practice he
| 's _more_ concerned about getting publications than
| quality.
|
| In the end, I think I am making several large
| contributions, even if the "gestation" time was longer
| than people would like. To get tenure, you need to
| publish regularly, but a lot of valuable research doesn't
| come on a regular schedule. The data compilation took a
| long time. I started roughly in Jan. 2017. I published a
| conference paper based in part on it over a year later,
| and it wasn't until December 2019 that I submitted
| journal papers using the data. (I prefer to take my time
| to perfect an article rather than rush it.) This sort of
| delay isn't acceptable in the current system, regardless
| of the value of the work at the end. In terms of total
| publications, I think I'm actually coming out ahead of
| most PhD students in my department, but by now I'm seen
| as unproductive by my advisor so that doesn't matter.
|
| At this point, I'm waiting for one of my papers to be
| accepted because my advisor won't allow me to graduate
| until I have a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed journal.
| My original plan was to publish a few years after my PhD.
| I'm not okay with this as I don't like most scholarly
| publishers and wanted to wait for more open access
| options. I've chosen a smaller but established publisher
| with reasonable open access policies instead. My advisor
| wasn't exactly happy about this and seems to think that I
| might have made this choice because I believe my research
| to be low quality. After all, why wouldn't I submit to
| the "top" journal? He has no problem with Elsevier.
|
| I've been told multiple times by professors that the
| basic purpose of a PhD is to learn how to publish in peer
| reviewed journals, and they'll let you graduate once
| you've demonstrated that you can do that. And this _does_
| actually seem to be the crux in my case. I 've tried
| pointing out that nowhere in my department's rules does
| it say that peer-reviewed publication is required, and
| that people have received PhDs recently without peer-
| reviewed publications, but my advisor is insisting. (To
| be clear, my advisor has no specific technical arguments
| against my research.)
|
| It would have been much easier to just pump out a naive
| paper every year. I would have been done my PhD years ago
| if that were the case, and science wouldn't have advanced
| much if at all.
|
| By the way, you might find this other recent series of
| Hacker News comments I wrote to be interesting:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659622
| koeng wrote:
| Biotech companies are responding well because they have all the
| production lines built out to rapidly respond.
|
| Academics and other government funded researchers are
| responding (personal communication) but they can't do so at the
| speed of companies who already have their ducks in line.
|
| In addition, consider how hard it is for an academic to get
| regulatory approval. The biotech companies already have
| relationships with the regulators, while this is completely new
| ground for those academics, all while the regulators are
| completely swamped with requests from their preexisting
| network.
|
| Most scientists aren't funded well, but I think a big problem
| is pouring money into the right holes. Some things will help a
| lot, some won't. I think getting more investors looking at the
| system can help with figuring out the right holes to put money
| into, and that will help just as much as the actual money.
| mathfailure wrote:
| No >:[
| julesqs wrote:
| it's really rich to read a blog post from someone at YC wishing
| "the federal government was doing much more". YC and the extended
| universe of VCs have spent years providing an intellectual facade
| to undermine confidence in a centralized government, public
| funding of critical services, and promoting the profit motive in
| places like healthcare.
|
| The past decade in America has seen the dominance of the
| capitalist tech utopians like Paul Graham, and we are seeing the
| results. For god's sake Peter Thiel was working with YC barely
| two years ago and now Sam wants to complain that the federal
| government isn't prepared to respond to crises?? what a joke.
| dekhn wrote:
| During the clinton administration, NIH funding doubled over ~5
| years. This led to a glut of PhDs (far, far more than there are
| faculty slots or biotech jobs) who had limited job options and it
| didn't really translate to higher scientific productivity (in
| some sense, it just ended up selecting for professors who were
| more cutthroat and willing to publish lower quality stuff in
| higher h-index journals).
|
| I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab
| and computational) will just waste more money rather than using
| it to scale up productivity.
|
| The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific
| productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the
| short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems
| like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to
| fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send
| them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while
| demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.
| grawprog wrote:
| >I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab
| and computational) will just waste more money rather than using
| it to scale up productivity.
|
| While I agree to an extent, it's not necessarily possible to
| 'scale up'. I helped run a project off around $40,000 of grant
| money. Our goals were research and education. About half went
| to pay my coworker and I about $15/h, another large chunk went
| to gas. The rest went to equipment and stuff. We couldn't
| charge for anything, we had no product to sell. We made
| brochures and buttons we gave out by donation, our work was in
| no way marketable. We had to justify everything we did by
| proving the value of the animals we were studying to
| agriculture.
|
| There's a ton of scientific research that isn't directly
| valuable in the short term. Especially when it comes to
| biology. As it is, much of the work is just gathering data
| because we have painfully limited knowledge of our ecosystems.
| But the more we learn, the more we understand how important
| they are for the long term functioning of the planet.
|
| It's exceedingly difficult convince a logging company or an oil
| company, the government they bribe, or the public in general
| that caring about the long term gains of researching these
| things should come before the short term gains of exploiting
| them. At least in my experience.
| anonlinear wrote:
| Why not create more research labs and professorships? There are
| many state universities without great programs right? Also glut
| of PhDs doesnt seem to be a problem for a lot of engineering
| fields.
| dnautics wrote:
| How do you know small labs are more productive? Are we trying
| to do science for society or trying to be a jobs program?
| These two objectives are not necessarily synergistic.
| dekhn wrote:
| The challenge with those is hiring. State unis without great
| programs have a hard time hiring the top folks needed to make
| great programs. Also, top universities will just hire away
| the best professors from state universities after the profs
| become successful.
|
| I think the rich folks are more interested in making
| Institutes- the Allen Institute and CZI being two examples.
| Institutes which are not affiliated with a university have a
| lot of advantages to the folks they hire- tend to be in
| popular locations, with higher salaries, more resources for
| crazy ideas, less overhead on grants (just a guess, I don't
| really know for sure), and NO TEACHING REQUIREMENTS (many top
| research profs hate teaching because it eats so much time).
| pen2l wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average institution or entity
| that Bill Gates chooses to fund is much more productive than
| the average NIH funded lab.
|
| I think the answer lies in taking a good look at where the
| money is going. Particularly, I think I think we need to give
| more to the very productive people and institutions. I know
| it's the million dollar question, by what is Salk doing that
| others are not? Or CSHL which has something like 8 nobel
| laureates there.
|
| One last observation is that a career in science just doesn't
| make sense anymore. Why slave away making $40 or $50k as a
| postdoc or an instructor after years of studious study when you
| can pull 6 figures in tech right out of school? This right here
| is one of the things that tells the bright ones to stay away
| from academia.
| dnautics wrote:
| Ex-Scientist here: While I agree the gates foundation is
| likely doing a better job than the nih... The danger is this,
| how do you decide upon a metric for productivity? How do you
| then prevent 1) corruption, absent that, 2) inadvertent
| corruption via biases (I'm going to judge proposals in my
| field more favorably because they are less confusing or more
| comfortable, or the inverse, more harshly since I want to
| keep competition out or know the pitfalls better), and absent
| that, 3) goodhart's law?
| phkahler wrote:
| Is there a psychological measure of internal bias? Hire
| decision makers that score low on that?
| curo wrote:
| Does anyone have a list of all the COVID-19 research and response
| orgs that would be funded?
|
| I've worked in international dev where normally government grants
| go to a handful of familiars who subcontract out. It's often a
| question of visibility for everyone else (smaller groups either
| win subcontracts or have a shot at getting their work accelerated
| directly).
|
| I know science funding is different, but I wanted to map all the
| orgs & relationships for visibility. The best list I can find are
| previous grantees of https://wellcome.ac.uk/
| jankotek wrote:
| Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual
| researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets
| redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...
| umvi wrote:
| > but is it not efficiently used
|
| This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and
| government contractors.
|
| When you have so many layers between the money source and sink,
| each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer
| fights for its survival like a parasite.
|
| It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people
| in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required
| billions of dollars and thousands of people.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| I agree that a lot of money is being wasted but your estimate
| of 4 people is very naive.
| umvi wrote:
| What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people
| can't handle it?
|
| Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever
| written was written by one person (or a very small team).
| The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the
| code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can
| see the big picture.
| radus wrote:
| You're speaking from experience? In my bio-ish field most of
| the money gets used to purchase reagents and to maintain mouse
| colonies.
| jankotek wrote:
| Yes, my friends work as lab rats in marine chemistry.
| jrumbut wrote:
| All that now looks very cheap with a large percentage of the
| economy shut down, no good solution in sight, and a bunch of
| PhDs in relevant fields working as data scientists for
| advertising companies or pricing derivatives on Wall Street
| after they couldn't find a sustainable job in research.
| fataliss wrote:
| Like it's often the case this is not just a problem of money. You
| can research virtually anything and not everything will yield
| anything of value to the human race. We need to have some
| direction. Epidemiology for example, sounds like a good high
| level scope that is definitely more directed towards human gains.
| Biology is a huge field. Also private funding and humanity's
| benefit are often at odds. Private funding tends to aim at making
| investors a return. What we really need (and Sam alludes to it)
| is a government/public fund for research so that labs have the
| ressources to research things that may never yield commercial
| profitability. If you leave it to big pharma and other private
| biotech companies to advance humanity, it's like leaving the food
| industry in charge of making humans healthier.... not happening
| :(
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