This questions sounds a bit controversial, but I will ask it anyway.
The USA, India, Canada, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, France, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Japan are spending billions of dollars every year on science.
Some companiesc say their created scientific research centers like Google DeepMind or Microsoft Research. Some billionaires such as Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg are funding scientific research.
Is there any actual evidence that Science lacks money?
That more money would actually help scientists do more interesting stuff?
In PC video games, a gorgeous game called Crysis came out. Everyone was stunned. Since Crysis, video game studios have spent a tremendous amount of money to try to make games more beautiful, but it hasn’t really paid off.
Almost no one notices these small improvements anymore. In fact, many gamers actually question whether studios focus too much on graphics at the expense of gameplay and fun.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Science. I’m happy we are funding Science.
But I’m just wondering whether money is the real bottleneck neck that Science faces.
Right now, do scientists actually have money problems making it difficult to conduct ambitious research?
Would more money actually help them discover new things ?
Is there any actual evidence that Science lacks money?
That more money would actually help scientists do more interesting stuff?
Yes, there is a pretty strong correlation between R&D spending and scientific output. Even so, spending is only in the low single digit percentages of the economy everywhere. Societies could easily decide to spend less on decadent luxury and more on science.
Right now, do scientists actually have money problems making it difficult to conduct ambitious research?
So science is a high-risk, high-reward numbers game. You try more things, hire more scientists, and more science will happen. Most research doesn’t lead anywhere, but the small fraction that does leads to things you could just never get without scientific research. Yes, there are many (such as yours truly) who could have continued to be scientists but take jobs in industry because positions as scientific researchers are extremely competitive and there is not enough money to hire all suitable candidates.
A huge problem in science is the perverse effect of goal-funded research. Big Pharma wants science saying its pills work, Big Tech wants science that says its new toys are safe, and so science that says the pills don’t work or the toys aren’t safe rarely gets done and often gets buried when it is done.
The only counter to this is “pure” research funding. Maybe they’ll find something new, or maybe they’ll just discover that LLMs cause cancer or that weigjt-loss drug doesn’t work.
Science is neither a search for truth nor where useful inventions come from. It’s way more useful and important: a search for falsehoods and useful theories.
Yes. If you don’t give it money, science will stop happening and the universe will fall apart
How else is Science going to pay the rent? They keep raising it. People ask a lot from Science, and to be fair it’s always come through for us in the past, but these days Science is working two jobs just to get by. Science hasn’t even had time to relax and play Crysis since last August.
There isn’t a “science”. There are a ton of individual projects. Some of them are good investments and some of them are bad investments. Ultimately it’s not our money to decide how it’s spent, and if we want something that isn’t currently being studied to be studied, we have to add it on. Really, considering how little % of the economy we need to spend on acquiring what we need to survive, it makes sense to invest our economy into intellectual pursuits.
Speaking in broad strokes, research yields improvements in the world’s quality of life. I couldn’t begin to list the amount of daily-life items built on research from NASA, but I’m pretty sure polarized sunglasses are one of the prime examples of how pervasive it is. Funding science is how we get cures and treatments for previously fatal illnesses. It makes products cheaper and better. It gives countries the advantage in wars, and may soon eliminate the incentive to wage war over oil.
Three weeks ago, my wife would have died in childbirth without a procedure that was studied and refined through research and experimentation, and her recovery was faster, easier, and safer because of new techniques and devices.
I think that it’s going to be hard to provide a meaningful answer. There are a wide range of fields that use the scientific process, the stuff that you’d call “science”.
Some of those, no doubt, produce a strong return on investment. You could say, purely on finnacial terms, that research there makes a lot of sense. Producing, say, the integrated circuit is something that transformed the world.
I am sure that if you looked, you could find some areas that don’t do that.
In some of these latter cases — say, cosmology — I doubt that there are likely direct financial returns, but if we want to understand where the universe has been and where it’s going, we have to place some kind of value on that and fund it to that value.
But…science isn’t a single entity that you fund or don’t fund to a given amount. It’s people working in a wide range of fields. It’s like saying “should we fund sysadmins more” or “should we fund human resource departments more”. The answer is almost certainly going to be “it depends on the specific case”.
Science deals with a lot more than video games little buddy…
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What exactly does this comment achieve? Dude was just asking a question. People would never learn anything if they didn’t ask questions. Judging from this comment, clearly the money spent on your education was a waste.
