NSF plans end to lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker

You have a lack of imagination. The research lead to Google and OpenAI, but you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding. Furthermore there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding, other than esoteric “America benefits when the research happens in America”

> you can’t imagine such research could have happened without taxpayer funding

In a vacuum, maybe. But if China is subsidising basic research, it doesn’t make sense for private enterprise to do it here. That technology base shifts to where its cost of capital is lowest.

This is practically how America ascended—putting massive public resources behind emerging science and technology before the fractured powers of Europe gathered the conviction to.

It doesn’t even take imagination to see the fruits of this philosophy. There are countries whose governments don’t spend on R&D. Their citizens are poor and unfree, their governments less than sovereign on the international stage.

> there is no return to the taxpayer for the funding

The return comes from taxing the growth the R&D enables. Silicon Valley has more than returned the military funding that kickstarted it.

I can understand disagreeing but it is funny that someone asked for a justification and then downvoted someone providing one, without even knowing if the person actually even endorses that line of thought. Liberalism truly is dead.

Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?

If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?

There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.

If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.

However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.

If your research is funded by taxpayer dollars, you're a public servant and you should welcome public accountability. You should accept that explaining the public benefit of what you do is part of your job, and accept the possibility that the public won't see eye-to-eye with regard to that benefit.

The fundamental problem is that scientists stopped thinking of themselves as public servants, and started thinking of themselves as lecturers whose job it is to scold the public. They stopped working to follow the evidence wherever it lead, and switched to promoting trendy ideologies. Remember during COVID how we were all supposed to isolate, until the Floyd protests started and suddenly the need for isolation disappeared?

"Three-in-four liberal faculty support mandatory diversity statements while 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests."

...

"For decades, college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal), a skew that has become more pronounced over the past three decades.[40] For instance, in the Higher Education Research Institute’s 1990 faculty survey, 6% identified as “far left,” 16% identified as “conservative,” and 0.4% identified as “far right.” In 2020 these percentages were 12%, 10%, and 0.2%, respectively.[41] College students are also predominantly left-leaning, though the rate is closer to 2:1 left vs. right, compared to 6:1 among faculty.[42]"

..."significant portions of faculty say that they would discriminate against colleagues with different ideological views in professional settings (e.g., during anonymous peer-review) or during day-to-day social interactions.[43]"

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/academic-mind-2022-wh...

Now consider that self-described "conservatives" significantly outnumber self-described "liberals" in the US electorate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...

Academics successfully hacked away the branch that they themselves were standing on. Large fractions of the US electorate no longer believe that the research these academics do is a good-faith attempt to advance their interests as voters and taxpayers. And so they're not interested in funding it. Fair play if you ask me. If academia wants funding, it should do deep reforms in order to re-earn the trust of voters.