Capitalist Science
arxiv.org
Capitalist Science
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: Capitalist Science
#2I am torn between tears and laughter. I wish science belongs to humanity forever.
Re: Capitalist Science
#3Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it.
That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially searching for truth. I'll ignore avenues of inquiry that aren't profitable. It's my job to do so. I'm more of a data technologist, in truth.
Re: Capitalist Science
#4If you edited this abstract to replace Capitalist with some other philosophy and it's concepts (say "Buddhist" or "Environmentalist"), it would have roughly the same level of validity, which is to say, not much.
Re: Capitalist Science
#5Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???
Re: Capitalist Science
#6Don't we already have both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated.
(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually very important. A system that only did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)
Re: Capitalist Science
#7Further discussion from a libertarian (and capitalist) POV: http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/august-2013/who-pays-scie...
Re: Capitalist Science
#8This is daft.
Re: Capitalist Science
#9Contradiction in terms, given that blue-sky, basic research has gone away in industry and academia and it's capitalism's fault. Capitalism is great at technology and incremental innovation, but bad at science. This sort of thing is why a functional society needs some aspects of both (socialism and communism) in it. That's also why I dislike the term "data scientist". I'm not a scientist, because I'm not impartially s…
How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products...
Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general?
Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.
Re: Capitalist Science
#10"The economic structure of basic science is currently socialist, funded by the public at large through taxes for the benefit of the public at large."
Except where the benefit goes to the capital, ready to charge you $20 for a publicly founded research paper.