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No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
251–260 of 528 posts
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absurd. These universities aren't diploma mills. They're solid institutions in the "directional state U" tier.
Georgia State has an average SAT score of 1070. Nobody with a brain goes there. Just a societally sanctioned diploma scam for people who would be much better served by starting work right out of HS.
That's slightly above the average of SAT test takers which puts them top 1/3ish of high school students. Silly to think they don't have a brain
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absurd. These universities aren't diploma mills. They're solid institutions in the "directional state U" tier.
You clearly aren't familiar. These "universities" are a step above DeVry. They might be worse in that they cost an arm and a leg to attend. I used to tutor CS students at several different universities during my first two years at college. I would bet my arm that none of the ones I taught from KSU wound up with a career in software. The student perspective at these schools is that they're there for the credential, no…
I know several graduates of GA State and KSU. Including one KSU grad that works as a software engineer.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#254There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-…
> The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-shall-not-be-named came along. SpaceX took the breakthroughs that existed in the US in things like control theory, which the same science establishment had failed to value appropriately.
I feel like you're confusing "science" and "engineering". SpaceX is fundamentally an engineering company, not a scientific one. Don't get me wrong, they've done impressive work in engineering innovation, but that's fundamentally different from scientific research. And as the article points out, engineering innovation from the likes of SpaceX is usually reliant on that foundational scientific innovation, which in turn is essentially useless without an engineering partner to realize scientific discoveries.
> It doesn't look like the science establishments of any country are actually successfully feeding their innovation machines, or have done so for decades.
Really? Is it just a coincidence that up until recently the US had some of the most robust scientific funding and was an unbeatable source of engineering innovation? For that matter, are there any real counterexamples where science research is non-existent but engineering excellence abounds?
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#255There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-…
Not only did SpaceX make breakthroughs considered impossible by the "experts" in the industry, they did it by hiring a guy who literally built rocket engines in his garage to design the engines. The key here is personality. And the type of person who actually wants to build things and get things done absolutely recoils at bureaucracy and the type of people who like it. When you build something to the point where ther…
"Building things" is not science, it's engineering. We could certainly compare the outcomes of "bureaucratic" science against the free market variety, but there's basically no free market science going on to support such a comparison.
This isn't a value judgement. Engineering is just as important as science, but just as more science is not a replacement for engineering, neither does better engineering free us from the need to keep pursuing science. And at the end of the day, SpaceX might be an impressive engineering company, but we still need the scientists. And it's weird how often the success of SpaceX is brought up as an implicit argument that we can send all the scientists to work on farms or whatever without any ill effects.
It also seems notable that a company like SpaceX is an obvious candidate to bring back the 20th century style corporate funded scientific research organizations to underpin their engineering efforts in a way that would presumably be free of the hated "bureaucracy". But if they've done so, I haven't heard about it.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programm…
Funding approvals do have to go through partisan bureaucrats. Until recently when the Trump administration killed it, NIH grant proposals had to contain a "diversity statement."
NIH grant officers are not partisans, they are career scientists who manage a fair and transparent process for funding research. Their role is to ensure proposals are reviewed based on scientific merit, not political views. The way you're describing them is the opposite of how they operate.
The existence of diversity statements reflect institutional goals -- namely that the NIH funds science from a diverse set of researchers, to benefit a nation made up of a diverse population, who are funding all of this research.
The only partisans in the picture are the MAGA political actors who are going around saying that the NIH can't do these things for political reasons.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.
It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night. In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institut…
Yeah, that's not really how I view central planning. To me, central planning is when decisions go through a central authority. The only thing centralized here is the money pot. The decision making about what gets funded is mostly distributed though. Yes the Trump administration is wielding influence but the way they are doing it is by exerting control over the purse strings, which is decidedly not constitutional. Indeed, the fact this has never happened before despite successive party changes shows that what Trump is doing is extraordinary.
> In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources
Okay but we are not talking about allocating private dollars for profit, we're talking about allocating public dollars for science. People are still free to allocate their private dollars as they see fit. Notably, given the freedom to do so, most people do not allocate their private dollars for public science, making public science funding all the more necessary.
The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#258> In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done in at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al. This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly B…
This is disingenuous.
The driver behind the buybacks was also the motive to shift from research and manufacturing and into profits.
The massive failure is in inaccurately quantifying the true value of these labs.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing against research universities as good stuff does occur there, but it just seems like it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. I think it helps to have scientists and engineers closer to the problem and who don't have to spend a huge amount of their time writing grants and training grad students.
> it was such a a huge loss seeing those corporate labs disappear. A loss for whom? Society? Of course, and that's exactly why they don't happen anymore -- because while they were a boon for society they were a terrible bet for the company. And when a company has a choice between doing good for their bottom line or doing good for society, 100% of the time they choose their bottom line. I mean, look at the legacy of X…
All of your failure examples are failures of management and “leadership”.
Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not why it can’t be done so much as why it isn’t done. Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price. If we started not doing that, the priorities might shift, but those executives like things the way they are. Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. W…
If companies want to reward executives directly they can cut out shareholders entirely and pay salaries and bonuses. If companies want to reward shareholders (including executives) they can pay dividends (which Apple did do under Jobs). Nothing about the priorities of companies changed with share buybacks.
As others have mentioned that isn't comparable because salaries are taxed. The tax rate on unrealized gains in the US is zero percent from what I understand.