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A comment on CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider. Parent comment

Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by ben_w on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @08:28AM (#23612960)
1. Science is a low-odds, high-reward process; any given piece of work probably does nothing, but the overall impact is literally everything that happened since the agrarian era

2. Even successful research leads to papers with impenetrable names like “An MgB-Superconducting Shield Prototype for the Future Circular Collider Septum Magnet”, whose value I am not even qualified to comprehend unless someone explained it to me with a YouTube video

3. Because I don’t understand it and I can observe the value of it without understanding it, I’ll trust the physicists doing the experiments when they tell me they want a bigger and more expensive tool for their future experiments

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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by sandworm101 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @08:52AM (#23613170)
Supercolliders are low-odds science. Other instruments are pretty much certain to generate new science. A hubble replacement would not be low-odds given that hubble itself is still making discoveries. A 23 billion-dollar push for new antibiotics would not be low-odds either. Dollars should be spent where they are most likely to generate the most science. That isn't new supercolliders.
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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by rowanG077 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @10:19AM (#23614205)
Dollars shouldn't be spend where they are most likely to generate most new science. That is a quick way to find yourself in a dead-end. Imagine we would have ONLY invested in supercolliders after high-energy physics was very fruitful. Many other fields would have been completely starved and we would now be in the (possibly) super collider dead-end while other physics is woefully behind.
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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by drdeca on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @01:18PM (#23617039)
Why not evaluate (estimate) the expected value of sample information of the different experiments, and compare the costs of the different experiments to the EVSIs?

Is it too difficult to estimate the EVSI ?

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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by rowanG077 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @01:47PM (#23617520)
Any metric you can imagine is nothing more then a guess. That's why it's research. The researchers guess and tests. Some guesses can be observably better but that's not quantifiable. At least that's what I think.
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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by newsclues on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:23PM (#23619737)
Surely you see the hazard in funding expensive wildly speculative projects?

If you fail once, fail again but bigger... who cares it’s not our money and the bigger our project the more we pay ourselves...

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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by rowanG077 on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:41PM (#23619954)
That's why scientific projects are still judged by panels. It's not like money is thrown at any random project. It must have merit and be judged to actually be able to test a hypothesis.
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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by HPsquared on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @01:04PM (#23616814)
There's this thing called the 'white elephant' though. History tends to downplay such things.
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Re:CERN approves plans for a $23B, 62-mile long super-collider by adrianN on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @02:28PM (#23618140)
I disagree, money should be spent were it's most likely to generate new science. But the people spending the money must take into account that we're really bad at putting good odds on where that is.
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