101–110 of 172 posts
You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.
That timeline correlates well with the corporatization of academic research timeline, which got started in the late 1970s, boomed in the 1980s and has steadily risen ever since. The emphasis in applied science is now on patents and return-on-investment, aka safe bets. This is certainly the direction that much of NIH fundings, as well as DOE funding, has taken. Part of this is that entrenched industries (natural gas a…
This is a fundamental problem with the nature of science and the nation state in that modern science is constituted by the nation state, not merely imposing into or upon it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s because our financial system is controlled by power hungry but small minded sociopaths.
That's an apt way of describing the voter base :). Or the market at scale. That's the major problem humanity faces. Individuals wielding concentrated power are dangerous, but they're also at least capable of thinking about something other than their immediate short-term interest. The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.
The problem is more parochialism than it is short-term thinking. And both sets of entities (powerful individuals and aggregate masses) are capable of parochialism.
You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.
I get that in this context "patents" should be seen as the announcement of a new innovation, a surrogate of the innovation itself if you will, but setting that aside for a moment I'm struggling to imagine how patents could ever do anything but slow down disruption. Take any revolutionary discovery. Compare making it freely available to anyone, or limiting the availability to those holding the patents. EDIT: And perha…
Everyone is free to innovate on top of any pre-existing, current patent. They simply can't profit on their new innovation without licensing the patent. However what they can do with their new innovation is patent the innovation itself. This newly patented innovation prevents the original patent holder from profiting off of the new innovation, and thus incentivizes the original patent holder to license their patent to the new patent holder (or vice versa).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a software developer, I’d want to see a rewrite to clean up the legacy bodges before we conclude we can’t add more. Also, wealth inequality isn’t a problem: how wealthy the people at the bottom are is. Wealth inequality is associated with fewer poor people and a higher standard of living because wealth inequality requires a wealthy society. What exactly are you “fixing”?
I'm not suggesting we can't add more, rather, that I find it conceivable that there is a barrier of technological progress that we can approach, but never reach. So the pace of progress will slow down. Concerning wealth inequality, I do think it is a fundamental problem of society if a fraction of a percentage controls majority of the available resources even if the lowest half has their immediate needs met, but we c…
My concern with your view is that in trying to “squash the gap”, you end up doing so by making everyone poorer — and society worse overall.
Happy to agree to disagree; hopefully we can consider each other’s perspectives in crafting policies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s because our financial system is controlled by power hungry but small minded sociopaths.
That's an apt way of describing the voter base :). Or the market at scale. That's the major problem humanity faces. Individuals wielding concentrated power are dangerous, but they're also at least capable of thinking about something other than their immediate short-term interest. The masses, as aggregated through votes or purchasing decisions? They're structurally incapable of it.
I think this is a dangerous delusion:
Historically, centralized control has been a disaster because those individuals wielding power believed they could think of something greater… but actually lacked the skill. So we ended up with simplistic concepts that failed at scale, ideas that never could work because they missed key details, etc. By contrast, society gets on with the business of building the future in spite of and not due to that meddling by centralized power.
You can't get funding for studies that disagree with existing research.
Albert Einstein failed peer review the one time he was subjected to it. Newton was not subject to it at all.