A) For the most part, scientists do research because they are curious and enjoy it, not because they plan on making money out of it. Getting a salarys allows them to do what they like, they don't it do for the salary.
B) If there's a little slippage due to lazy, misaligned, or fraudlent people, it might still be worth it. Consider two proposals: "I'll give you money every month if you're a scientist and just hang around studying whatever you like" vs "I'll give you money every month if you hit research metrics XYZ as a scientist" - the former will allow you to pay way less and sciensists will still be happy. It's just getting them for cheap.
C) I'm skeptical that you personally can tell whether the paper linked is pointless or not. Many ideas seem pointless when they first appear. Some are, and some contribute a tiny bit to the progress of understanding.
Well, there are papers that prove people use warmer clothes in winter than in summer. If you want to argue there's a deeper meaning behind such science, then who am I to change your mind.
Are there? Multiple papers? Citations please. Even if true, I have to assume there’s a high probability that you’re leaving out important context, misunderstanding the results, or just plain exaggerating.
That paper seems interesting. Why are you implying it’s pointless? What is your expertise in Mammalian or evolutionary biology? How do you know this won’t contribute or lead to something useful in veterinary or human medicine, or bioengineering, or anything else?
Have you heard of the Golden Goose Awards? The first paragraph on their history page (https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history) can be applied directly to your comment:
“From 1975 to 1988, Senator William Proxmire issued monthly “Golden Fleece Awards,” which targeted federal spending Proxmire considered wasteful. Unfortunately, the awards often targeted federally-funded scientific research for ridicule. Science that sounded odd or obscure was easily singled out, but the awards reflected fundamental misunderstanding of how science works, and how such research can turn out to be extremely important regardless of whether it makes sense to non-scientists. Indeed, such research can have a major impact on society. The nature of scientific research is that its impact is hard to predict.”
You’re demonstrating the fundamental misunderstanding of science the Golden Goose page refers to. It’s expected - and a necessary part of science - that not all papers succeed.
The funny thing about this is that, unlike UBI or whatever, the societal returns on investment in science research are huge and indisputable. Nothing else in human history has improved our condition or knowledge or quality of life as much or as fast. You’re typing your opinions into a box that came out of large numbers of papers, some of which were criticized for their pointlessness. You’re absolutely barking up the wrong tree.
Again, what makes you certain that this paper or any other won’t suddenly get citations and importance in the future?
You simply don’t know that. It’s not even relevant whether your uninformed prediction turns out to be correct later, that would be random luck. You cannot tell what will happen in the future.
And why don’t you understand that having research and papers in the system that don’t lead to anything is actually a good thing, both expected and necessary?
Read a little more about the Golden Goose awards, about research that was ridiculed and languished until it didn’t. There are lots of papers that seemed like a dead end until long after they were published. The entire field of Neural Networks is now combing prematurely presumed dead end research from 40+ years ago.
Maybe you can fix it, but you do seem to be completely missing the point of what science is. Investment in science, and the associated research and experiments, aim to increase knowledge. Science doesn’t necessarily aim for utility, and doing science is always taking a risk that the knowledge gained might not be useful. You can’t actually do science without taking that risk, and we can’t have papers that make huge progress without papers that make no progress.
You can’t tell what investments will pay off until they do. You can only be sure the technology in your computer wasn’t pointless because it already worked out, despite lots of naive people like you claiming it was pointless at the time.
The good news is that our investments in science are paying off big time, and those investments include all the dead end papers ever written. The sum total, even with all uncited papers in the world, is that we are much better off having spent the money on science than not.
Hey I appreciate your comment, but you were doing a fine job! In case it comes up later, here are another couple of resources to defend science funding:
I don’t know why trying to ridicule funny sounding science papers is still such a popular thing to attempt, when the Golden Goose awards exist, and when people who do it have been shown repeatedly for many decades to fail to understand either science or money, yet here we are. Luckily science won’t stop, even with our current administration’s chaos.
> to publicly identify or publish private information about someone especially as form of punishment or revenge
This person literally uses his own name as HN username. Very imaginative use of the word tho.
EDIT: Even though I think that point of view is idiotic, I now worry that if you think like that, other people will too. Would you please report that comment so that a mod can edit it/delete it (I can no longer edit it).
That's ok, you can have this idea for free.