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Cemetry Gator posted:Look dude, I hear what you're saying, and I don't think you even understand what your point is supposed to be. If you go back and read my posts again, you'll see that I'm not "railing against theoretical physics", and neither am I saying we should only go after "sexy" goals. It's just the increasing calls for state funding and welding the scientific community onto the government. The LHC being a particularly egregious example of a huge capital project. Please note here that I am not at all questioning the importance or validity of basic research, and I fully understand the potential for unknown applications for the discoveries. I would also like to clarify that I don't think these projects are Enemy #1 when it comes to state largess. Realistically they're fairly minor, and the only reason it came up was because of the Molyneux video. But the fact that basic research sometimes yields great discoveries doesn't automatically justify state support, it's an is=!ought thing. quote:The basic point you're missing about research is often you don't know. Take penicillin. It was just a complete loving accident. Maybe we need the stuff that we can gain from the LHC to solve those spaceflight mysteries. We just don't know. But you know what history has shown me. That every time we break ground somewhere, some one has said "Yeah, but is it really that useful?" I would have hoped by now we would have learned that the people who said that have been pretty consistently wrong. Of course it's useful...in the long run. We're talking about opportunity costs here, invest now or later. If we delay the LHC by another 40-60 years by taking the funds and investing them in more immediate concerns, we may end up with a better society that can inherit the fruits of that research. quote:Except that's what the markets do - follow profit. There was a survey done where they asked business leaders would they rather take a hit the next quarter if it meant increased profitability for 20 years, and an overwhelming majority said "no." The market is short sighted. The market is all about the money you're making today. We've seen it time and time again that the people put short term profitability above long-term gains until some force makes them. Sure, individuals maybe won't. But people in general want to make gains on their money, and are going to follow the short gains. It's what we've seen time and time again. There's a lot to discuss in this quote, but it's not entirely useful to look at the way business is operated today and extrapolate that into how things would operate in freed markets. Monetary policy, tax policy, and corporate law have been pushing business to grow grow grow and focus on the next quarter. Part of the reason we have such a debt laden consumerist society in the US is because that's what policy has been pushing us towards for nearly the past century. The market today may be short sighted, but that doesn't mean that that is the only way the market, and society at large, will arrange themselves. I mean, even today you have industries that invest in long term projects. For example, mining, oil and gas have huge amounts of capital invested in long term prospects that play out over 50 years or more. CharlestheHammer posted:Well I mean its theoretically possible a business owner could just fund the research as a vanity project. Vanity projects aren't the only possibility. Universities, research trusts, and other not-for-profit institutions can exist without a strong state.
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Aug 30, 2014 15:24
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asdf32 posted:Research spending ($ billions). The GDP percentage is my own quick calculation. You do realize that, by your own calculation, research spending in the US totals at 0.76% of GDP, right? While we're talking the US spending ~20%. You're proving my point that research expenditure is negligible and doesn't explain the disparity in healthcare expenditures between the US and other, better countries.
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Aug 30, 2014 17:34
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LogisticEarth posted:If you go back and read my posts again, you'll see that I'm not "railing against theoretical physics", and neither am I saying we should only go after "sexy" goals. It's just the increasing calls for state funding and welding the scientific community onto the government. The LHC being a particularly egregious example of a huge capital project. Please note here that I am not at all questioning the importance or validity of basic research, and I fully understand the potential for unknown applications for the discoveries. Of course, funding for basic research in universities, huge or otherwise, would decline without the fairly strong government funding we have now. To be clear, you're not presently complaining about taxpayer-funded research, but huge project research. You wouldn't be the only one to oppose a methane ice-drilling expedition to find life on Titan, when a thousand new species could be discovered in an ocean trench for the cost of a sturdy metal sphere.
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Aug 30, 2014 17:47
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LogisticEarth posted:Universities, research trusts, and other not-for-profit institutions can exist without a strong state. And the reason none of these things are happening right now in sufficient quantity is somehow related to all the filthy statism in the air.
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Aug 30, 2014 17:59
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LogisticEarth posted:If we delay the LHC by another 40-60 years by taking the funds and investing them in more immediate concerns, we may end up with a better society that can inherit the fruits of that research. I would bet one billion Ron Paul Gold Cubes that there would always be more "immediate concerns" and funding of the LHC would never happen were we to follow this suggestion.
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Aug 30, 2014 18:50
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LogisticEarth posted:... There's a hell of a lot of money tied up in private business ventures and profits as it is. Maybe if we gutted them and put all that money towards science we'd end up with a better society because discoveries could be made and the tangible results disseminated at a faster pace. The point being that, yes, things might be better if we took a different course. Things always might be better if we took a different course. There's a lot of data out there to suggest that reducing regulation and introducing free-er markets and/or private interests, especially when it comes to things that are to some degree essential for society to run, gives worse results. If you have data which shows that gutting science funding and opening it up to markets would give beneficial results, show it. Government policy isn't the proximate cause of growth-focused business, it's the result of the Chicago school of economics gaining and holding a large amount of political sway and is currently central to the way economics is understood.
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Aug 30, 2014 19:19
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Absurd Alhazred posted:You do realize that, by your own calculation, research spending in the US totals at 0.76% of GDP, right? While we're talking the US spending ~20%. You're proving my point that research expenditure is negligible and doesn't explain the disparity in healthcare expenditures between the US and other, better countries. What you said in response to me was that other countries don't do less research. I don't disagree that US healthcare spending is ineffectual. My original statement was that research/manufacture/deployment of cutting edge care was a major component of our expense (which relates to logisticearth's broader point). And that's absolutely true. A whole lot of cutting edge care comes in the form of complex procedures, advanced machines and legitimately expensive to manufacture drugs. It's not just research. Though research is a pretty large chunk of change too.
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Aug 30, 2014 19:32
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LogisticEarth posted:If you go back and read my posts again, you'll see that I'm not "railing against theoretical physics", and neither am I saying we should only go after "sexy" goals. It's just the increasing calls for state funding and welding the scientific community onto the government. The LHC being a particularly egregious example of a huge capital project. Please note here that I am not at all questioning the importance or validity of basic research, and I fully understand the potential for unknown applications for the discoveries. I would also like to clarify that I don't think these projects are Enemy #1 when it comes to state largess. Realistically they're fairly minor, and the only reason it came up was because of the Molyneux video. But the fact that basic research sometimes yields great discoveries doesn't automatically justify state support, it's an is=!ought thing. The opposite of this is true quote:Of course it's useful...in the long run. We're talking about opportunity costs here, invest now or later. If we delay the LHC by another 40-60 years by taking the funds and investing them in more immediate concerns, we may end up with a better society that can inherit the fruits of that research. No one can predict whether that's the case, least of all you quote:There's a lot to discuss in this quote, but it's not entirely useful to look at the way business is operated today and extrapolate that into how things would operate in freed markets. Monetary policy, tax policy, and corporate law have been pushing business to grow grow grow and focus on the next quarter. Part of the reason we have such a debt laden consumerist society in the US is because that's what policy has been pushing us towards for nearly the past century. The market today may be short sighted, but that doesn't mean that that is the only way the market, and society at large, will arrange themselves. I mean, even today you have industries that invest in long term projects. For example, mining, oil and gas have huge amounts of capital invested in long term prospects that play out over 50 years or more. Yes, but it's very rare that industries use their own funds for basic research. Even when a private enterprise conducts basic research, it is usually done with government funds because of the unpredictability of basic research (IE it is difficult to find someone to fund something that has an unknowable ROI). Furthermore, your example has nothing to do with basic research and is a counterexample of your point. Mining, Oil, and gas companies perform some directed research with their own funds, but none of it is basic research. quote:Vanity projects aren't the only possibility. Universities, research trusts, and other not-for-profit institutions can exist without a strong state. Universities, research trusts, and not-for-profit institutions in the US all rely on government funding for research projects. Private research universities don't pump money into research, rather they extract money from research grants received from the government. These things can all exist, but basic research basically wouldn't exist without some sort of public funding. As you are aware, it is extremely difficult to find an investor who will give a lot of money to projects with unknowable ROI. e: Note that my focus on basic research is due to the fact that the LHC is a set of basic research projects. We have no idea what discoveries may be made, nor their applications QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 21:45
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I'll just leave this here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cFlaqEsyRg
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Aug 30, 2014 23:16
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asdf32 posted:What you said in response to me was that other countries don't do less research. I don't disagree that US healthcare spending is ineffectual. My original statement was that research/manufacture/deployment of cutting edge care was a major component of our expense (which relates to logisticearth's broader point). And that's absolutely true. A whole lot of cutting edge care comes in the form of complex procedures, advanced machines and legitimately expensive to manufacture drugs. It's not just research. Though research is a pretty large chunk of change too. The bigger point is that LogisticEarth is using healthcare costs as evidence that there is too much investment in medical research vs. the practical in this country. You piped in with a message that agrees with that, while including procedures and manufacturing. Then your evidence itself showed that research was a drop in the bucket of healthcare spending, despite being twice what other countries invest in it, even if we assumed the rest were as you said. LogisticEarth is mistaken, so that's the end of that.
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Aug 30, 2014 23:25
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LogisticEarth posted:On the other hand, if we're spending too much on basic research I stopped reading anything you had to say at this point because 
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Aug 31, 2014 00:18
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Guys maybe the country we're building is too good. Think about it! The United States, Somalia; neither of these is the perfect solution. As usual, the real solution is to be found somewhere in the middle.
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Aug 31, 2014 00:29
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isildur posted:I stopped reading anything you had to say at this point because Still waiting for evidence for that one. Hell, one country where too much was spent on basic research. Yes, I'll hold. 
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Aug 31, 2014 01:48
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A couple of reading comprehension points here:QuarkJets posted:Furthermore, your example has nothing to do with basic research and is a counterexample of your point. Mining, Oil, and gas companies perform some directed research with their own funds, but none of it is basic research. Indeed the oil/gas/mining example did not have anything to do with basic research. I was using it to respond to the (false) claim that businesses can't take action long term and only worry about the profits over the next quarter or two. Absurd Alhazred posted:The bigger point is that LogisticEarth is using healthcare costs as evidence that there is too much investment in medical research vs. the practical in this country. You piped in with a message that agrees with that, while including procedures and manufacturing. Then your evidence itself showed that research was a drop in the bucket of healthcare spending, despite being twice what other countries invest in it, even if we assumed the rest were as you said. LogisticEarth is mistaken, so that's the end of that. I never said that research costs were a huge part of the cost of medical care. The discussion I had with my friend was about the questionable practicality of spending huge amounts of money on bringing new, marginally better products to market, when general service is becoming increasingly unaffordable. New goods and methods don't do humanity much good if only an elite can afford them. So setting up a set of incentives (patents) that promote new and constantly more costly products is probably a bad idea. My real broader point is that you will face diminishing returns when trying to push the edge of human knowledge ever beyond the ability of society's capital structure to implement that knowledge in affordable, practical applications. Also, non-reading comprehension related: QuarkJets posted:Yes, but it's very rare that industries use their own funds for basic research. Even when a private enterprise conducts basic research, it is usually done with government funds because of the unpredictability of basic research (IE it is difficult to find someone to fund something that has an unknowable ROI). If you're talking about the present, then yes, of course public money is dominant and necessary to maintaining the status-quo. If you go back and read my posts, I'm not claiming that we should make it a priority to gut public spending on research. In the "ideal world" it wouldn't be necessary, and given the number of people who are passionate about basic theory and experimentation in various fields, there's no reason to believe that there wouldn't be institutions created to support and fund these endeavors. The reason the LHC and similar projects are contentious is because they represent a huge chunk of money that, although a drop in the sea of total state expenditures, is still a tremendous amount of money for no real predicted practical benefit in the medium or potentially even the long term. If you split up the $10 billion cost of the LHC over 300 million people over 10 years, the cost comes out to $3/person/year. This is an extremely small amount of money. But at the same time, if you asked each individual if they would rather donate $3/year to a program for basic physics research, or a program to provide tools and capital to impoverished families in developing nations to lift them out of poverty, not everyone is going to give that cash to the physics program. When funding is allocated through the political process, it's easy for privileged groups to gain significant concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. EDIT: Absurd Alhazred posted:Still waiting for evidence for that one. Hell, one country where too much was spent on basic research. Yes, I'll hold. Are you denying it's possible for a society to over-invest in certain areas? LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 02:00
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Libertarians, from jrodefeld on down, sure spend a lot of time accusing others of having poor reading comprehension. However, as a counterpoint to their own accusations, they themselves have become libertarians. So how good can their reading comprehension be?
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Aug 31, 2014 02:17
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I'm just trying to understand the thrust of this argument. For the LHC, let's consider all the jobs is creating. It's creating manufacturing jobs that require quality machines. Somebody has to run the experiments, somebody has to maintain the machine. Somebody has to take lunch orders and clean the bathrooms. And then you need people to train the next generation of researchers. Long term, it will lead to an industry that will lead to further economic growth. The LHC isn't just a financial black hole that you're trying to make it out to be. The other thing is that we don't compartmentalize taxes like that. Otherwise, why not just throw all our tax dollars at the poor?
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Aug 31, 2014 02:24
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Cemetry Gator posted:I'm just trying to understand the thrust of this argument. Politicians may have fooled you but measuring things based on "job creation" is generally not smart. The important thing is whether people are employed at productive activities and just noting that something creates jobs isn't an argument for it being productive. Building yachts for the rich creates jobs but it's not a productive activity for society as a whole.
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Aug 31, 2014 02:31
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LogisticEarth posted:Are you denying it's possible for a society to over-invest in certain areas? If "is =! ought," then this is "could be =! ought."
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Aug 31, 2014 02:36
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asdf32 posted:Politicians may have fooled you but measuring things based on "job creation" is generally not smart. The important thing is whether people are employed at productive activities and just noting that something creates jobs isn't an argument for it being productive. Building yachts for the rich creates jobs but it's not a productive activity for society as a whole. The point I'm trying to make was that the LHC was not just some money sink that may or may not have an impact sixty years from now. I'm saying that there are tangible benefits to promoting research that can be felt in a community. Anyway, I think it's safe to say research can provide quality jobs to a community. A well run program can last years, and bring in skilled workers into an area, and increase the demand for an educated work force, which hopefully ends up in more funding for education. But that's a larger argument than what I was trying to discuss. Cemetry Gator fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 02:38
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LogisticEarth posted:Are you denying it's possible for a society to over-invest in certain areas? Many things are theoretically possible, but it's pointless to have an abstract discussion when we are talking about changing policies in existing countries, and there are and have been so many to choose from. I am asking you either for evidence that basic research is now over-invested, or of a country where there is over-investment in basic research. I personally think that there are always such high disincentives to invest in basic over applied research that you would be hard pressed to find a place where the balance is too much in the opposite direction, but I am open to adjusting my thinking. Cemetry Gator posted:The point I'm trying to make was that the LHC was not just some money sink that may or may not have an impact sixty years from now. I'm saying that there are tangible benefits to promoting research that can be felt in a community. A lot of data processing analysis experience was gained while working on the LHC, that can be implemented elsewhere. Really, all of these "big stupid programs" create so many side benefits. People tend to underestimate the value of morale that people have when doing things that excite them. But yeah, probably most of the benefits are not predictable in advance, which is what the market always wants.
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Aug 31, 2014 02:47
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Cemetry Gator posted:I'm just trying to understand the thrust of this argument. The thrust would be, psychiatric drug research has cost many billions of dollars since the 1950's. Would that have been better spent on basic cog sci research on the nature of consciousness? How about just half? Would half of our psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Cemetry Gator posted:For the LHC, let's consider all the jobs is creating. It's creating manufacturing jobs that require quality machines. Somebody has to run the experiments, somebody has to maintain the machine. Somebody has to take lunch orders and clean the bathrooms. And then you need people to train the next generation of researchers. Yeah, that's true of everything, though.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:23
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Phyzzle posted:The thrust would be, psychiatric drug research has cost many billions of dollars since the 1950's. Would that have been better spent on basic cog sci research on the nature of consciousness? How about just half? Would half of our psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Would half of our potential psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Not all drugs make it to the market, lots of drugs contributed to the understanding of underlying physiology and all drugs would be impossible if it weren't for the basic research that lead up to them.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:31
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Phyzzle posted:The thrust would be, psychiatric drug research has cost many billions of dollars since the 1950's. Would that have been better spent on basic cog sci research on the nature of consciousness? How about just half? Would half of our psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Yes, maybe? Those drugs were just a potential good too, once. Maybe the resources devoted that way could have developed a deep-brain stimulation revolution that resulted in implants that would tweak every facet of the brain that the drugs do. Or it could have been a bust - but nobody knew the drugs wouldn't be, and most drugs flame out spectacularly for one or another reason during research. Plus, many of those drugs could have never been conceived of without the basic research into neurotransmitters, brain structure, etc. that allowed pharma researchers to intelligently pursue drugs which target specific systems in specific ways. Neuroscience is one of the worst example fields you could pick to argue against basic research because almost every discovery can enter the "applied" side quite quickly. Not every field is physics - is there a gap between theory and application in physics? Yes. In most subfields of biology or chemistry? Not really! It makes no sense to talk about this issue like the LHC's relatively abstract purpose is the case for all basic research.
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Aug 31, 2014 03:53
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GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:Would half of our potential psychiatric drugs be a reasonable cost for the potential of a big breakthrough in understanding brain structure? Well ... would it? Either version of the question is fine. Developing a new psychiatric drug surely isn't considered 'basic' research any more. And yet, as you point out, lots of drugs contributed to the understanding of underlying physiology. Leaning too heavily in the direction of basic research might have missed those improvements.
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Aug 31, 2014 04:03
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Phyzzle posted:Well ... would it? Either version of the question is fine. Well, uh, yes, part of psychiatric drug research is heavily dependent on "basic" research. SSRIs couldn't have been developed without a detailed understanding of serotonin reuptake, could they? And yet before SSRIs someone studying serotonin reuptake was just some nerd in a lab fiddling with pointless cellular minutia. But psychiatric drug development existed before SSRIs, of course - so at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left. Somebody's working on discovering something right now, as I post, that a drug 15 years from now will depend upon but which we have no idea even exists at the moment. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 04:11
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LogisticEarth posted:If you're talking about the present, then yes, of course public money is dominant and necessary to maintaining the status-quo. If you go back and read my posts, I'm not claiming that we should make it a priority to gut public spending on research. In the "ideal world" it wouldn't be necessary, and given the number of people who are passionate about basic theory and experimentation in various fields, there's no reason to believe that there wouldn't be institutions created to support and fund these endeavors. It's hard to remain passionate about basic research when you don't have any funding, and the fact that there is almost no such thing as privately funded basic research indicates that there wouldn't be institutions to support and fund these endeavors in a society that didn't provide public funding specifically for these endeavors. quote:The reason the LHC and similar projects are contentious is because they represent a huge chunk of money that, although a drop in the sea of total state expenditures, is still a tremendous amount of money for no real predicted practical benefit in the medium or potentially even the long term. If you split up the $10 billion cost of the LHC over 300 million people over 10 years, the cost comes out to $3/person/year. This is an extremely small amount of money. But at the same time, if you asked each individual if they would rather donate $3/year to a program for basic physics research, or a program to provide tools and capital to impoverished families in developing nations to lift them out of poverty, not everyone is going to give that cash to the physics program. When funding is allocated through the political process, it's easy for privileged groups to gain significant concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. I already understand why the LHC and other basic research projects are seen as contentious by people who have no understanding of the importance of basic research. I'd like to also mention that the LHC is contentious among people who believe that the funds used to build and operate the LHC would have been better spent across a larger number of small research projects. These are possibly the only people who have a leg to stand on in this argument, as they are not arguing for the cutting of basic research funding, but rather they are arguing that the basic research funding should be spread across a larger number of groups. The people who believe that we should have cut the LHC so that we could reduce taxes or whatever don't have a solid grasp on the consequences of their own ideas. asdf32 posted:Politicians may have fooled you but measuring things based on "job creation" is generally not smart. The important thing is whether people are employed at productive activities and just noting that something creates jobs isn't an argument for it being productive. Building yachts for the rich creates jobs but it's not a productive activity for society as a whole. Would you agree that employing bunch of grad students and postdocs at the LHC is going to have a greater long-term economic impact than temporarily hiring some people to build a few yachts? As an example, did you know that many of the data analysis tricks used by Google, Facebook, and others were developed by physicists who had worked at the LHC? It turns out that analyzing LHC data is actually pretty similar to analyzing social media data: there's a fuckload of it, and you have to come up with clever ideas for separating the wheat from the chaff. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 04:39
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LogisticEarth posted:A couple of reading comprehension points here: So 3/4 of your post was about basic research with an emphasis on long term basic research projects, but right in the middle of it you decided to talk only about free market long term projects that are completely unrelated to basic research? Rather than assuming that everyone else has poor reading comprehension, have you stopped to consider that maybe your posts are poorly written?
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Aug 31, 2014 04:44
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Many things are theoretically possible, but it's pointless to have an abstract discussion when we are talking about changing policies in existing countries, and there are and have been so many to choose from. I am asking you either for evidence that basic research is now over-invested, or of a country where there is over-investment in basic research. I personally think that there are always such high disincentives to invest in basic over applied research that you would be hard pressed to find a place where the balance is too much in the opposite direction, but I am open to adjusting my thinking. Realistically I don't see how either position (overinvestment/underinvestment) can be definitively proven, and in practice it's not just "basic research in aggregate", but specific projects and areas. Furthermore I'm not sure it's possible for a specific country or nation to be easily picked out here, since knowledge gleaned from basic research is generally dispersed across borders. That said, I feel that the cost and nebulous practical application of the findings LHC should be a red flag and cause for us to consider the issue. Projects like the one in question are fundamentally tied to other technologies, discoveries, capital, and economic and political conditions. Hypothetically, ancient Greeks could have built a radio if they had the theory in place, but it would have required massive economic commitment on their part, and in the end have no practical application for them in their time if they couldn't afford to build and power one. And forget mass producing them and seeing the communication revolution the radio actually brought about. The rest of the economic puzzle pieces just weren't there. Now, obviously this is a more severe case than the LHC, but the theme of the problem is the same. If we're spending billions of dollars to search for particles that we already theorize to exist, but have no practical application for the knowledge, we might have gotten ahead of ourselves. I recently watched Particle Fever on Netflix, and I remember one of the physicists saying that the construction of the LHC was a greater effort than the moon landing, and was more akin to the construction of the Pyramids. At the time that struck me as a potentially apt comparison, but not for the reasons he probably intended.
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Aug 31, 2014 04:51
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QuarkJets posted:It's hard to remain passionate about basic research when you don't have any funding, and the fact that there is almost no such thing as privately funded basic research indicates that there wouldn't be institutions to support and fund these endeavors in a society that didn't provide public funding specifically for these endeavors. This is a simple non-sequitur. You can't use the absence of non-state research in today's world of abundant state-sponsored work to conclude that it wouldn't exist without state intervention. quote:I already understand why the LHC and other basic research projects are seen as contentious by people who have no understanding of the importance of basic research. Again, if you go back and read my posts, I'm not arguing for the immediate cuts to basic research funding, and have repeatedly said that it's a minor overall issue in the economy. The concern is overinvestment in large capital projects and the like that absorb a significant amount of resources. The only time I've talked about a world without state funding for basic research is a hypothetical non-state society. As I have a positive view of a society with freed markets, I expect basic research to be a healthy part of that world. If you don't have the same view of said society, obviously a world without state-funded basic research will be a terrible dark age where everyone gorges themselves on free market Doritos while the monuments of man deteriorate. The disagreement here is in the effectiveness of markets to meet society's needs, not the value of basic research. You repeatedly frame my position as if I think it's all wasteful and unimportant, when I have repeatedly said otherwise. QuarkJets posted:So 3/4 of your post was about basic research with an emphasis on long term basic research projects, but right in the middle of it you decided to talk only about free market long term projects that are completely unrelated to basic research? It was used in a direct response to a quote about the shortsightedness of the market, I don't see how that could have been confusing at all. LogisticEarth fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 05:10
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LogisticEarth posted:If we're spending billions of dollars to search for particles that we already theorize to exist, but have no practical application for the knowledge, we might have gotten ahead of ourselves. Yeah, you have no idea what physicists actually do. Or how the scientific method works.
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Aug 31, 2014 05:14
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Slanderer posted:Yeah, you have no idea what physicists actually do. Or how the scientific method works. Given how Praxeology works, isn't this self apparent?
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Aug 31, 2014 05:15
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ThirdPartyView posted:Praxeology works, it is self apparent! FTFY
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Aug 31, 2014 05:17
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LogisticEarth posted:Realistically I don't see how either position (overinvestment/underinvestment) can be definitively proven, and in practice it's not just "basic research in aggregate", but specific projects and areas. Furthermore I'm not sure it's possible for a specific country or nation to be easily picked out here, since knowledge gleaned from basic research is generally dispersed across borders. That said, I feel that the cost and nebulous practical application of the findings LHC should be a red flag and cause for us to consider the issue. Projects like the one in question are fundamentally tied to other technologies, discoveries, capital, and economic and political conditions. Hypothetically, ancient Greeks could have built a radio if they had the theory in place, but it would have required massive economic commitment on their part, and in the end have no practical application for them in their time if they couldn't afford to build and power one. And forget mass producing them and seeing the communication revolution the radio actually brought about. The rest of the economic puzzle pieces just weren't there. Now, obviously this is a more severe case than the LHC, but the theme of the problem is the same. If we're spending billions of dollars to search for particles that we already theorize to exist, but have no practical application for the knowledge, we might have gotten ahead of ourselves. Is the LHC really the hill you're going to die on? This is what you yourself had to say about it: LogisticEarth posted:If you split up the $10 billion cost of the LHC over 300 million people over 10 years, the cost comes out to $3/person/year. This is an extremely small amount of money. But at the same time, if you asked each individual if they would rather donate $3/year to a program for basic physics research, or a program to provide tools and capital to impoverished families in developing nations to lift them out of poverty, not everyone is going to give that cash to the physics program. When funding is allocated through the political process, it's easy for privileged groups to gain significant concentrated benefits while dispersing the costs. I am going to ignore the fact that you are rounding up the cost (Wikipedia cites $4.4bn for accelerator and $1.1bn for experiments as of 2010, so over 12 years the cost was $5.5bn, half your figure over a larger timespan), and pretending that the LHC was solely funded by Americans, when it was in fact funded internationally (with the previous caveat, the cost per person per year easily drops below than 1$), we are still talking 3$ for a whole year for each person. Is that seriously you worst case scenario, for a project whose previous incarnations brought about the very WWW on which we are communicating, and which is at the very least a training program for thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians, who can then use this expertise in other fields? If this is the best "privileged groups" can do, it's a really sorry service for special interests, and isn't a good argument for your contention that Big Government is causing too much basic research spending.
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Aug 31, 2014 05:19
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LogisticEarth posted:Realistically I don't see how either position (overinvestment/underinvestment) can be definitively proven, and in practice it's not just "basic research in aggregate", but specific projects and areas. Furthermore I'm not sure it's possible for a specific country or nation to be easily picked out here, since knowledge gleaned from basic research is generally dispersed across borders. That said, I feel that the cost and nebulous practical application of the findings LHC should be a red flag and cause for us to consider the issue. Projects like the one in question are fundamentally tied to other technologies, discoveries, capital, and economic and political conditions. Hypothetically, ancient Greeks could have built a radio if they had the theory in place, but it would have required massive economic commitment on their part, and in the end have no practical application for them in their time if they couldn't afford to build and power one. And forget mass producing them and seeing the communication revolution the radio actually brought about. The rest of the economic puzzle pieces just weren't there. Now, obviously this is a more severe case than the LHC, but the theme of the problem is the same. If we're spending billions of dollars to search for particles that we already theorize to exist, but have no practical application for the knowledge, we might have gotten ahead of ourselves. Would you also have told Faraday to stop playing with magnets because his research had no known practical applications? And what about the many accidental discoveries that have been made during basic research, such as penicillin, or the effect that microwaves have on food? Goodbye antibiotics. Goodbye microwave ovens. Goodbye nearly every modern convenience that you take for granted every day, as everything that you use today required some amount of undirected basic research at some point. Basic research is the source of all applied research. But no, I'm sure that proving the existence of a particle that gives objects mass will have no potential future applications no matter how far into the future we look. And potentially discovering something like a magnetic monopole or a new type of boson that could provide insights into unique types of radiation that we've never seen before would definitely have no ramifications for us at all quote:I recently watched Particle Fever on Netflix, and I remember one of the physicists saying that the construction of the LHC was a greater effort than the moon landing, and was more akin to the construction of the Pyramids. At the time that struck me as a potentially apt comparison, but not for the reasons he probably intended. That line actually makes no sense at all, but scientists and journalists alike love to come up with stupid catchphrases like that one. "God Particle", for example, is another stupid thing said by a physicist. It's important to take the statements in these documentaries with a grain of salt. Another example, Particle Fever tries to play up SUSY vs The Multiverse by suggesting that the mass of the Higgs would prove one or the other wrong, but that isn't based on any multiverse paper that I've ever read. The two theories really aren't mutually exclusive at all. Some multiverse theories even include SUSY as part of the model. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 05:21
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Jazerus posted:Well, uh, yes, part of psychiatric drug research is heavily dependent on "basic" research. SSRIs couldn't have been developed without a detailed understanding of serotonin reuptake, could they? And yet before SSRIs someone studying serotonin reuptake was just some nerd in a lab fiddling with pointless cellular minutia. But psychiatric drug development existed before SSRIs, of course - so at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left. Somebody's working on discovering something right now, as I post, that a drug 15 years from now will depend upon but which we have no idea even exists at the moment. Yeah, SSRIs were the first products of "rational drug design," ie, finding and testing drugs that should be effective based on our knowledge of how the brain works. There's still a lot of research into how some of the older drugs actually work, some of which reveals whole new receptors. For example, amphetamines target the Trace Amine-associated Receptors (TAAR). This was only discovered in 2001. Until then, we literally did not know that amphetamines were targeting endogenous receptors in order to release better-known neurotransmitters such as dopamine. There's a shitload of basic research to be done just around stimulants (one of the more popular research topics, since they have applications for depression, ADD, military uses, and general productivity). For example, there seems to be an overlap between the effects of large sustained doses of amphetamines and schizophrenia, which seems to be due to damage caused by excess dopamine and/or glutamine. e: I was curious, so I googled "applications LHC research." It turns out there are a lot of them! http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/august-2010/new-imaging-tools-from-the-lhc posted:About four years ago, radiologist Anthony Butler was visiting CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, when he saw something that left him, as he put it, "flabbergasted." Of course, I just selected one article from the results. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 05:24
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LogisticEarth posted:This is a simple non-sequitur. You can't use the absence of non-state research in today's world of abundant state-sponsored work to conclude that it wouldn't exist without state intervention. Then let's consider places where state-sponsored research does not occur: are there a lot of basic research startups in, say, warzones in Somalia? Or would you rather look to the past? Did you know that a lot of basic scientific research in antiquity was actually funded by the Vatican, of all places? Was there lots of basic research taking place in the time before widespread state funding of basic research? But even in the presence of public research funding, why does that prevent private groups from also engaging in basic research? It's not as though government funding prevents privately funded research from taking place. Last of all, shouldn't the burden be on you to prove that private basic research funding would grow significantly in the absence of public funding? What free market mechanism would encourage funding in projects that have an unknowable ROI, projects that are unlikely to provide your business with any competitive edge in the free market? Your suggestion that we may be overinvested in some areas of basic research, like giant accelerator projects for particle physics, is just indicative that most people really have no idea how basic research works or benefits the world at all, so how would this change in the absence of public funding? quote:Again, if you go back and read my posts, I'm not arguing for the immediate cuts to basic research funding, and have repeatedly said that it's a minor overall issue in the economy. The concern is overinvestment in large capital projects and the like that absorb a significant amount of resources. The only time I've talked about a world without state funding for basic research is a hypothetical non-state society. As I have a positive view of a society with freed markets, I expect basic research to be a healthy part of that world. If you don't have the same view of said society, obviously a world without state-funded basic research will be a terrible dark age where everyone gorges themselves on free market Doritos while the monuments of man deteriorate. The disagreement here is in the effectiveness of markets to meet society's needs, not the value of basic research. You repeatedly frame my position as if I think it's all wasteful and unimportant, when I have repeatedly said otherwise. I understand that you have not actually stated that you want basic research to be cut, and that your position is one of "basic research is just overinvested in certain areas", despite never providing a coherent explanation for why that is your position while also choosing to focus on how the LHC has no known applications (as opposed to other basic research projects, hurr hurr hurrrrrr). Great, so you don't want to cut basic research funding, that's great. But why do you believe that basic research would continue at its current rate in a stateless society? And if you want to leave research funding to the free market, then how do you reconcile the possibility that basic research funding may fall drastically due to the whims of the market with your claim that you don't want basic research funding to fall at all? quote:It was used in a direct response to a quote about the shortsightedness of the market, I don't see how that could have been confusing at all. It's something called context. In the middle of a post about basic research, it should not be surprising to expect that your comments about oil, gas, and mineral companies, entities known to engage in basic research, were related to the rest of your post about basic research. Simple misunderstanding, not a big deal, in the future I won't make the assumption that any particular post of yours has a thesis or coheres to a theme e: Before you try to use my post as an example of private entities that fund private research, I want to make it clear that these companies don't actually fund much of their private research: they primarily use public research grants. In the absence of these grants, it is unlikely that these businesses would make up the shortfall QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 05:48
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LogisticEarth posted:This is a simple non-sequitur. You can't use the absence of non-state research in today's world of abundant state-sponsored work to conclude that it wouldn't exist without state intervention. Sure we can. State-sponsored research didn't appear from the ether. If private ventures would have funded Basic Research I'm sure the State would have been happy not footing that bill. But seeing as no one stepped forward, and indeed, still doesn't, the State funds it because it understands the necessity for it. As far as I know, there is nothing stopping Private Ventures from funding Basic Research. So why aren't they? Are they waiting for a Truly Free Market? Why?
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Aug 31, 2014 05:59
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Jazerus posted:Well, uh, yes, part of psychiatric drug research is heavily dependent on "basic" research. SSRIs couldn't have been developed without a detailed understanding of serotonin reuptake, could they? And yet before SSRIs someone studying serotonin reuptake was just some nerd in a lab fiddling with pointless cellular minutia. But psychiatric drug development existed before SSRIs, of course - so at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left. If developing a new product is "in the realm" of basic research, then literally everything is in the realm of basic research, and it's not a very meaningful distinction. Phyzzle fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 31, 2014 14:19
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Phyzzle posted:If developing a new product is "in the realm" of basic research, then literally everything is in the realm of basic research, and it's not a very meaningful distinction. That is not even close to what was said.
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Aug 31, 2014 14:38
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GROVER CURES HOUSE posted:That is not even close to what was said. "at what point did the preliminary stages of drug development leave the realm of basic research? After SSRIs but before now? No, of course not. They never left." So it was in the realm of basic research and it never left. Which is not even close to suggesting it's in there now. Okay.
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Aug 31, 2014 15:55
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