191–200 of 210 posts
The USA's DARPA program funded important research into - The internet - GPS - Graphical user interface and mouse - Onion routing - Voice assistant Hopefully this program executes well. There is clearly a big social payoff to betting big on credible people doing risky research with high potential impact. https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...
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The internet came out of a US government funded “advanced research projects agency.” It took decades before VCs monetized that research.
The Roman empire created roads, but we don't attribute railroads and cars to them. I think "government spending invented the internet," is the "you like roads, dontcha?" of our time. ARPA wasn't open ended research either, it was to respond to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. Conflating public largess with national defence spending is a category error. Not to belabour it, but I do think this trope need…
I can't find the reference right now, but fairly recently there was a report on the declining ROI of NSF (or possibly NIH) research grants, in that the bias toward proposals that seem likely to produce results was foreclosing high risk high reward proposals, while the funded proposals don't actually fulfill the expectations of the selection committee (in part because what was really being selected for was the ability to write a convincing proposal).
Committees just aren't all that good at their job of picking research proposals (or researchers) that are likely to produce results that advance our knowledge.
Several proposed remedies were examined, but the one that seemed best able to overcome the issue was reserving a tranche of funding for proposals randomly selected from a pool (said pool only excluding the very worst proposals that don't meet basic eligibility requirements).
Why is the government spending tax money on creating new technology with huge risk? Surely this is something that investment funds should be doing, with the investors appopriately aware of the risks? Who is going to benefit from any discovered new tech? Are the benefits going to be socialised, or is it just the risk? If it was supporting pure research - finding great researchers and freeing them from the grant treadm…
> If it was supporting pure research - finding great researchers and freeing them from the grant treadmill - I'd be supportive, but this doesn't sound like that. Same here. I am all for more research but we want more transparency, not less. > Ministers will announce plans tomorrow for an £800 million scientific research agency legally entitled to invest in projects that are likely to fail and which will be exempted f…
Perhaps that is the UK's reason, besides wanting to keep projects related to national security or industry classified from foreign eyes. US government research grants often have pundits pointing out how trivial and wasteful they seem at first glance, and it sometimes leads to grants being redirected or cancelled entirely.
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I'd be fine with this project, just without the FoI exception and under a government that didn't constantly break FoI laws and that didn't have endless examples of giving contracts corruptly to incompetent friends and donors.
I understand the FOI misgivings, playing devil's advocate: (1) DARPA (and NASA) appear to be models. Secrecy and unaccountability are a big part of what makes them them. (2) The state of university grant making is currently terrible. A lot of what makes it terrible is accountability. A agree with the premise that you need independence to pursue high risk stuff. The whole premise is investing in things that most peopl…
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It's a good point, Labour did a bunch of PPI deals that didn't seem to benefit the public as much as the private collaborators. So it's not exclusive to one party, but the Conversatives have been in power for a fairly long time now. Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge.
Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right. Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption. Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The " Boris'…
We aren't.
> Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me.
It's not. In the background schools/hospital/roads are being build/rebuilt just fine.
This is only about the projects personally spearheaded by those at the very top, i.e. Boris Johnson and those close to him. These seem to be almost exclusively ways to funnel money to friends and relatives. Afterwards it usually comes out that the contract was awarded without tender on the personal reccomendation of the minister, or that the advice of the officials on who to give the contract too was overriden. Boris Johnson's former Chief Advisor is currently defending himself in court on this point: https://goodlawproject.org/case/money-for-dominic-cummings-m...
The USA's DARPA program funded important research into - The internet - GPS - Graphical user interface and mouse - Onion routing - Voice assistant Hopefully this program executes well. There is clearly a big social payoff to betting big on credible people doing risky research with high potential impact. https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in...
That’s nice, but this isn’t what this will be about. This will be a means of funnelling cash to party donors without oversight, nothing more. Hence the FOI exception. I mean, just look at how they’ve fared in the last 18 months alone - how many unaccountable tens of billions did they pay out to their donors? I had Tory ministers’ children approaching me about putting together business plans to help them get covid gra…
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The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner. IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is " They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering. " I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the…
> IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Only because he's so enthusiastic and shameless about it. Open corruption is corrosive in a democracy, they deserve to be hit on the head with it until they stop. And there's no point lamenting these poor (!) tories. If you were around when a bunch of ministers and high-ranking politicians were sacked, some of them thrown in jail, for using public funds for their benef…
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The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner. IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is " They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering. " I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the…
I think I disagree. When someone breaks a key moral principle — let’s say they are a murderer – we don’t spend time discussing how they are also good to animals or make a mean chilli. That doesn’t offset their transgression, so it becomes essentially irrelevant. A key moral principle for a democratic government is to maintain public trust in democracy and its institutions. By pilfering public funds to enrich themselv…
Applied as it is hear, unless I'm missing something, your take means that there's no point or legitimacy to any conversation (EG a HN post) about any new UK agency (or sewage plant, school, energy plan, etc.) besides "they're corrupt, look at their other dealings."
I'm sympathetic to the moral principles. In particular, some have made the case that salacious shamelessness itself is the problem. It's corrosive.
But... Are you really at a point where you're calling quits on politics as a whole until this corruption stuff is sorted? Isn't this corrosive too?
I'm not saying that you can't put anticorruption first. It's definitely relevant here. This is a way of distributing money and contracts, after all. It is designed to not be accountable in conventional ways. Anticorruption is relevant and it's good to have people making that their top priority. But anticorruption is not the only thing at stake in anything and everything government related. There's also whatever the hell the thing is supposed to do.
Being uncorrupt, but failing to produce useful technology is also be bad. Maybe not murder bad, but I didn't think this is a useful way of thinking about it.
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Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right. Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption. Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The " Boris'…
> It existed yesterday, last year. I'm sure Winston Churchill's girlfriend also did well out of the deal. c'est la vie. It's exactly this type of dismissal that allows this level of corruption to fester. It was unacceptable yesterday and it still is today. The point is to try and do something about it rather than sit back while they make it harder to punish because "it's already a problem". A research fund where the…
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The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner. IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is " They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering. " I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the…
The problem with this line of argument is that it ignores the specifics of the case and overgeneralizes to a version of the slippery-slope fallacy. If someone were proposing building a sewage plant immune to FOI requests, I'd be feckin' terrified, much less worried about corruption. And I'm pretty blase about corruption in various activities (such as the ever-popular road construction and maintenance) in the US.