Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Sure. However, the problem with this idea is that it is easy to pick a few things here and there that can be done without petroleum. However, once you take in the entirety of industry, the range and scale of products we derive from petroleum or products that very much directly depend on petroleum and derivatives it truly massive. The world would come to a grinding halt if we stopped using petroleum.

This stands to reason. In an effort to extract more and more value out of the stuff we have become very creative and efficient at using as much of that black goo as possible for all kinds of things. We are talking about hundreds of years of research and technological evolution. It is only reasonable that, given that, humanity is as dependent as can be on the oil ecosystem.

This is what I talk about when I say that we need to stop this business of reducing reality to single variables. The consequences of reacting to a single variable while ignoring the dependency tree could result in far worse outcomes than anyone could possibly imagine.

Then please, pretty please, with sugar on top: You have the scientific and mathematical training to actually understand that what you are being told is complete bullshit. However, you have to be willing to apply some of that critical thinking, engage in some simple research, do a little math and try to understand. However, you have to be willing to leave this single variable view of the world behind during the process.

Grid storage = good?

Current grid design = terrible?

Well, grid storage today means batteries. It does not mean Star Trek dilithium crystals, hydroelectric plants, compressed underground air, spinning masses or the myriad interesting-but-unrealizable ideas people have floated. In the US, in particular, it would take a hundred years to build just one new hydroelectric plant, much less a couple of hundred of them.

Everything sounds great until you start considering scale. A town of 30K people, in an optimal solar region, full solar with batteries at every home? Sure.

I have a 13 kW system at my home that I built myself. I might add batteries at some point in the future, when and if it makes sense. Would I recommend everyone in my neighborhood do the same? No. It's crazy. This was likely the single worse investment I have ever made.

Scale IS a problem. Most definitely.

Scale means that for everyone to have what I have (or will have, if I ever install batteries) you have to be willing to do things like destroy thousands of miles of marine ecosystem to mine the very materials we need to make something like this happen at scale.

Scale is the problem. You have the background to be able to explore and understand this.

Electric vehicles. Calculate the energy we deliver into gas tanks every day through gasoline. Now calculate what that means in terms of total energy delivery EVERY DAY across the US. Make an accounting of our current energy generation capacity. Which, BTW, does not happen to have been built to support a 100% or 200% demand increase. Now translate the total energy delta demanded by a fleet of, say, 300 million electric vehicles, into, say, 1 GW nuclear power plants. The conclusion, if I remember correctly, is that we need somewhere in the order of 100 new 1 GW class nuclear power plants spread across the nation in order to support a full shift into electric vehicles.

The other problem is POWER rather than energy. In other words, you have to be able to deliver a certain amount of energy per unit time simultaneously across geographic areas. If you have 100K or a million cars charging simultaneously you are going to have to build additional POWER delivery capacity in order to service that demand, something that today (in terms of energy) we deliver using a liquid fuel.

When you start considering scale and get beyond single variable reduction of reality, things look very different. Coincidentally, the Los Angeles Times published an article about the mess we are walking into due to our drive to move into electric cars:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-07-21/california...

From the article:

"A mining permit pushed through in the last week of the Trump administration allows the Canadian company Lithium Americas Corp. to produce enough lithium carbonate annually to supply nearly a million electric car batteries. The mine pit alone would disrupt more than 1,100 acres, and the whole operation — on land leased from the federal government — would cover roughly six times that. Up to 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid would be used daily to leach lithium from the earth dug out of a 300-foot deep mine pit."

Seriously?

And this is for JUST a million batteries per year. I assume they mean cells rather than the full car battery. Whatever the case may be, at scale, this is horrific. Yes, I said "at scale" because a million per year is not scale. We need many times that, thousands of times that amount if we are going to electrify the global transportation fleet. If we also want to use the same materials for grid energy storage the problem, again, at scale, quickly reaches apocalyptic proportions.

All I am asking you to do is to invest the time to really get into the details of the issue and use the math and science you understand to develop a true sense of proportion.

My guess is that the current path to electric energy storage is, at scale, a seriously flawed idea. I am not a chemist, so I can't propose an alternative that would be more benign at scale other than to say two things:

First, we need to be very careful and not allow politicians and various interests to lead us by the nose into causing a global disaster of unimaginable proportions.

Second, I have a sense --and the hope-- that a bright young scientist might just discover a path to store and deliver energy in liquid form in a way that will not have us resort to such things as strip mining the oceans and dumping millions of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to leach lithium out of them.

I don't have the answers. I just know we are probably being led down a path that could be far uglier than pumping petroleum out of the ground. We are making dumb decisions, like cancelling the XL pipeline...which means oil will have to be trucked...which will burn millions of gallons of refined diesel fuel to move petroleum at a horrific loss in efficiency. In the meantime, we have no problem dumping thousands of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to get lithium for "clean" electric cars and storage.

Does this really make sense to you? At scale?

I hope not.

> In October 2019, the Tribunal ruled against Yaniv and ordered her to pay $6,000 in restitution... The ruling was critical of Yaniv... stating that she "targeted small businesses, manufactured the conditions for a human rights complaint, and then leveraged that complaint to pursue a financial settlement from parties who were unsophisticated and unlikely to mount a proper defence."

This is a person who deliberately does all sorts of weird shit for the sole purpose of using her trans identity to sue people when they react negatively to it.

For example, she apparently called her local fire department "dozens of times" for "help getting out of the bath" (when in reality she needed no assistance) and "subjected Fire Department staff to "inappropriate and lewd conduct"".

What I mean by prosecution is that if a research body signs a contract with a scientist to do research, then those contracts would need to specify what research actually is, and that is the first step towards penalizing people who aren't really doing it. Indeed the process of flushing more research into the private sector would automatically eliminate a lot of the grey-area fraud that is so prevalent, because it would force a lot more people to write down what precisely they mean by "doing research", as well as continually evaluate that definition via normal management techniques. For example, is a simple modelling exercise "research"? It's often treated as such by e.g. banks, but the big tech labs we're talking about don't engage in a much of that, unless you count AI, but I think that's sufficiently beyond the sort of modelling you find in most science that it's best to treat it separately.

At the moment governments fund science but have no working definition of what science is, which breeds a lot of cynicism of the type I display above w.r.t. sociology. Is gender studies "science"? Most people would say no, but the government says yes. A more subtle example is epidemiology. A close examination of their papers will reveal that it's just plugging public CSV files into a bunch of very over-simplified simulations, and publishing the outputs. Is that science? If it is, can I get paid to play Cities: Skylines all day as long as I write a paper at the end? It sounds like a stupid suggestion but actually yes I can:

https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/2/118

In my view this type of thing is not science, but my guess is at this point the science-y ness of epidemiology or urban planning would split 50/50 or most people would just go with the government's definition of "they receive grants and call themselves scientists, therefore they're scientists".

Would Google exist without the NSF? The specific company maybe not, but there were plenty of search engines around before Google, and Page in particular was already keen on creating a tech company when he was very young so would likely have ended up a startup founder sooner or later. An example competitor was Inktomi, which had already started doing pay-per-click ads. It's all forgotten now but Google nearly didn't survive its early years because they got sued over 'stealing' the PPC ad concept. They were able to argue that their own elaborations on the idea were sufficiently different that it wasn't infringement. It's very plausible that one of these other firms would have struck upon the idea of PageRank; they were certainly incentivized to do so especially once Inktomi had realised that PPC ads were a way to monetize search engines.

"The Deepmind arcade paper and essentially the entire deep reinforcement learning field today is based on decades-old research funded by the UK government. What if that research was locked away in a UK corporation? Would Deepmind even exist?"

Well DeepMind is a difficult example to debate here for both of us because of course DeepMind is or was a UK corporation and they do the exact opposite of locking up their research, if anything they're famously publicity and paper hungry. Google/DeepMind are actually a strong counterpoint to the idea we need academia for long range research: DeepMind is nothing but long range research (of unclear utility!) and of course self driving cars have been driven by Google for the last decade, pun totally intended.

If I were arguing in your shoes I'd be trying to argue Google is the exception that proves the rule and/or trying to distract attention from it, because it shows that companies can and will do long range research. Microsoft Research is another example, although it's less "pure" because it's more or less a little recreation of academia inside of Microsoft. I prefer the Google approach where science and technology are fully integrated.

Now the wider issue of governments needing to fund long range research is one I used to fully agree with. It sounds right and it's easy to find examples where you can sort of link them to government funded research. But as you can see, I changed my mind over time and no longer find myself in that camp, because:

1. Government funded basic research isn't free. We have to weigh up costs and benefits. How much of a contribution does government grant money make to the technological successes we take for granted today? For examples like PageRank, self-driving or DeepMind the initial contribution was quite small and mostly in the form of logistics (grand challenges) or theory work (which is cheap). And how much of a cost does it impose?

2. The costs are not just financial. I guess this is what mostly changed my mind. I concluded a big part of the "cost" of government funded research is actually in terms of intellectual pollution of the literature. If you have to wade through 50 useless, deceptive or outright fraudulent papers to find 1 good one because governments aren't paying attention to what they fund, then that poses an externalized cost on everyone who wants to benefit from research. Moreover this work has to be endlessly duplicated because journals are loathe to retract anything, so everyone who wants to push technology forward in a certain area has to do this work within their own small group because there's no coordination mechanism ... or just give up and ignore the literature entirely (this is what eventually happened to me).

I think a stronger argument for government funded research than the "it would never have happened" approach is that government funded science is usually un-patented and freely accessible. But even this argument is kind of weak because universities do patent the results of tax funded science, maybe not in computer science but it happens a lot in other fields, and also because the results of the research are often behind paywalls too! Although that's been getting better with time and is usually not a problem in CS (which IMHO is definitely one of the better fields).

But overall, to me it's just not clear that the benefits of buying papers en-masse outweighs the costs, both in dollar terms, time terms and of course, the inevitable costs when people put bogus research into production and things go wrong.