I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.
I would argue this entirely the other way; whenever the smartest people are sucked away from foundational work to make money "up the stack", it makes us all the poorer.
The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... The comment you to which you are responding even asserted that basic research does have value - and does not assert that the trade offs go one way or another.
The implication of the comment as I read it was that we should at least critically think about those trade offs rather than just writing a blank check to whatever basic science scientists are requesting to pursue.
Your comment, in contrast, claims that the tradeoff always is worth it - that 'whenever' money is not diverted to basic research, then we are all poorer. You have no evidence for this claim.
In fact - no one really understands much about how best to evaluate this tradeoff. A helpful contribution to the discourse would provide us with tools to think about how to evaluate it, rather than just the endless tribalistic drum beating for one side or the other.
It also happens to be wrong.
If more projects that require nuclear physicists get funded, more people can become nuclear physicists. We're nowhere near the point that we're going to run out of potential nuclear physicists who could be trained if there was more demand for them.
At some kind of abstract level there are a finite number of people in the world so anybody who does something can't be doing something else, but there are more than enough people for whom the "something else" is either unemployment or some net-annihilating occupation like divorce attorneys or advertising that we shouldn't have to worry about people spending their time doing something actually beneficial.
>> It also happens to be wrong.
Wow. The startup guy gave an actual example of the tradeoff. Am I correct that you see that not as a tradeoff but as a loss?
So the trade off wasn't between physics and software. We could've had both of those at the "cost" of fewer divorce lawyers or lower unemployment, neither of which are actually costs.
There is a theoretical point where having people do physics is less productive than having them do anything else they might've done, but we're nowhere near it. We still have people working in advertising only to cancel out the work of other people working in advertising.
This going further down this path only lead to misery
I'm not debating your assessment in an absolute sense, or the direction that resources are deployed, I'm just saying relatively speaking, the world has been approaching an asymptote, so how far does it have to go to be enough? At what point does some disaster that we weren't expecting happen that proves we went too far in being future oriented? Like, I dunno, an actual plague?
Edit: I meant this to express something more than just another "well actually" comment - I think COVID-19 really raises existential questions about whether people in the wealthy countries have gone too far in a future orientation, as if everything was certain and we and our civilization were all immortal. It may not make a bit of difference for some, but I observe it's changing a lot of people's outlooks. Something that has stuck in my mind is how plastic bags were banned in my area just before the pandemic hit, and whether or not there was an actual repeal, everyone has brought them back. Is this something to lament, to cheer, or just to observe and contemplate? If everything is bad, is anything?
COVID demonstrates lack of being prepared and future orientated, we did not have PPE stockpiles and did not takw actions that would contain the virus to save the economy now. The more future oriented you are, the safer you are.
You can use "future oriented" to mean being prescient or omniscient, but I think that's a useless way to define the word, because it's not a thing that exists.
The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy, and I assume we would agree it was a huge mistake, right?
WeWork was a tremendously future oriented company, that wanted to be everything to everyone, but it wasn't, and won't be, the next Amazon.
It would be bad for society for similar projects to suck up all the resources in preference to short term needs.
"it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future" - Mark Twain
Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?
The planning of it, which, you know, happened before "mission accomplished" and all the things that went wrong. It has been widely reported and asserted that the planning started considerably before 9/11, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
That's 6 years before the invasion, so slightly longer than a single election cycle, and significantly shorter than the duration of the war itself. I wouldn't exactly call that 'future oriented', especially since 3 of those years were spent under the Clinton administration; Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled the trigger pretty quickly once in power.
It's also incredibly short-term compared to its contemporaries, like Russia's "Foundations of Geopolitics" or China's "Peaceful Rise".
After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before; both advocating for the invasion and addressing "root causes" in different ways are different forms of that. Either was more focused on the future than maintaining sanctions and occasional airstrikes.
I really can't tell if you're trolling at this point.
Declaring war against an intangible form of political violence, as a knee-jerk reaction to a specific incident, which ends up perpetuating that form of violence, is a classic example of short-term thinking.
“Future” oriented thinking would be Phase IV Occupation plans. That filing cabinet was empty (by design) and “It’s the UNs problem now” is not very future-oriented strategery.
Hard to say.
1) It is unknown what economic impact that the SSC would have had. It could produced more value or less than that which you and similar industries contributed to from the benefit of these scientists. A search shows that without accounting for the impact of the fundamental science, CERN's revenues exceed the costs by ~3bn euros[0] (report seems to also ignore ambiguous contributions like spin-offs). So the companies that benefited from the closure would have to at have near this revenue.
2) Scientific projects are fundamentally long term economic investments. These scientific projects have returns on investment of larger than 20 years and sometimes upwards of 100. These are impossible ROIs for companies, but great for civilizations.
These factors are huge and we're not even talking about the local economy boom because and influx of smart people which typically leads to higher quality schools in the area and tech startups that grow because subcontracting, consulting, and spin-offs. We're also ignoring the cultural impact as labs serve as a form of cultural exportation, which is important in the global game played between countries (the economic value of which is difficult to quantify), and this is what you are directly responding to.
It is fairly difficult to answer these questions, so I think your answer is too simplified.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016251...
We could use a lot less of this, and a lot more Einsteins in research laboratories and universities.
like…graphics software?
I think the trade-off is more than worth it to better understand the nature of our universe.
You seem to imply that basic research has no long-term economic benefit, or maybe that the long-term benefit does not outweigh the short term cost. That seems like a pretty difficult implication to defend.
Maybe this person had better career successes in the SW field than in the Physics field
Plenty of completely economically worthless tech startups.
(of course, this is the comment of someone who painfully gathers 3000 bucks a month, that is who has 0 firepower except a few donations here and there, a few signature, etc. Not everybody is blessed with "the good idea").
Not to mention that they would be paying for an immense and unambiguously good scientific gift to posterity that would be free of all the complications, interest conflicts, mismanagements and so forth that come with building a mega-charity like the Gates Foundation (the conspiracy theories around that alone have been absurd, despite all its excellent health programs for the developing world).
It's always hard for a person to say what they'd really do if they were in other shoes, but if I had the sort of fortune that a Bezos or Zuckerberg has and especially with the relative youth of these guys, it wouldn't be hard to convince myself to make such an investment.
The Large Hadron Collider cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion dollars. Bezos alone saw his net worth grow by a multiple of that in 2020 alone. This huge cost would barely dent anything else they're doing or funding and in no way dent their personal quality of life.
I'm not at all arguing that they owe something like this to the world, or trying to paint any kind of anti 1% resentment, just pointing out that paying for this doesn't even seem like such a bad idea for people like them and their image for posterity (something always important to most billionaires).
The top four or five billionaires in the world could even cover most of ITER's much larger budget without permanently or seriously denting their fortunes.
I do agree that this would be a great PR move. Especially as we've seen Bezos grow his wealth by $65bn in the last 4 months[2] or Elon by $44bn (more than doubling) in the same time frame[3]. But the practicability is also a little naive considering that these numbers do not equate to liquid cash that they have available. Though someone like Gates has much higher liquidity than Bezos or Elon.
But it is interesting. Maybe if my metric catches on someone will build one (or another mega science project) :D
[0] https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?list=billionaires...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?list=billionaires#...
[0] One could even make a concession and let the wealthy choose among a list of approved charities/projects to spend the taxed money on.
Not really. They use the "mob"'s roads and banks to make their business work and store their wealth. They use the "mob's" courts and police to protect themselves and their property. We live in a society, if your worry is that they are too powerful for them to participate in that society (e.g. because their power would let them hide their wealth away), then that just makes the ridiculousness of their wealth all the more apparent.
I mean, super science mega charity is going to have worse conspiracy theories. It's going to be the Gates foundation stuff mixed with the LHC stuff.
Like he's opening a portal to hell to mine energy from or something. No wait that's DOOM.
I mean, first of all, mega-science is just as prone to grift and mismanagement as any other type of mega-project, and far more so than vaccine programs or malaria treatment. And just imagine, what would the absurd conspiracy theory nuts say about a supercollider?
Of course, hey, wait a second, Gates and/or the Gates Foundation already do this (e.g. TeraPower, e.g. CFS), so your whole line of reasoning that it'd have considerable PR benefit is proven false. Fortunately the Gates Foundation isn't very motivated by PR.
So no, I didn't quite prove the idea of its PR value false. Conspiracy nuts will always find a reason to consider anything made by some people or groups as suspect or outright nefarious, no matter how straightforward it is. but foundations oriented towards education, medical research and healthcare for the developing world are easily much more prone to that kind of narrative manipulation than a fixed, specific and extremely complex scientific device that will be used for a more limited range of possible things over a certain period of time.
The same applies to the differences in opportunities for graft and corruption between the two: Dishonest contractors and consultants could find ways to milk a privately funded super collider project during its construction and even during administration, but the scope of their opportunities would be fairly limited beyond a certain point, especially if the (presumably not stupid) billionaire funding it is keeping an eye on details.
Imagine on the other hand how many opportunities something like the Gates Foundation could offer for bad financial administration down the decades after its creator and main benefactor dies of old age or etc. Most of the collider's budget as covered by a billionaire in my scenario above will be a single sunk cost spent during a very limited period of time. The endowment of a giant foundation with flexible goals can on the other hand be managed (or mismanaged) ambiguously for decades.
The two things are not the same either administratively or philosophically.
There were times when countries would actively block maritime routes and steal cargo. A well integrated global economy, with open and secure maritime trade is beneficial for everyone and particularly the USA.
Totally agree on open trade.
And as far as the F-35 is concerned, I think it was an attempt to be the end-all NATO, and global, fighter craft. Didn't work out that good, so far at least.
And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more, but we'll pretend they are the same and that America would be the only one funding a multi-national facility)?
Fun (perspective) fact: any of the top 30 billionaires in the world could personally pay for one of these colliders.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider