
How Should the U.S. Fund Research and Development? - tokenadult
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/us-research-and-development/477435/?single_page=true
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brownbat
A lot of scientific studies (some funded by grants) are never tested through
replication, even though that's a core part of the process.

Replication is the unsexy grunt work that makes science reliable, but it
usually doesn't make anyone famous (or necessarily even get them tenure),
because it's not bleeding edge work creating or advancing new theories.

Maybe the government should treat this like a market failure and generously
fund replication studies.

Planet Money on the replication issue:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/15/463237871/episode-677-the-
experiment-experiment)

Replication crisis (wikipedia):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)

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vph
To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and
evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or
circumstances with human subjects, it's very expensive or even infeasible to
have well controlled repeated experiments.

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Godel_unicode
If you don't have well controlled, repeatable experiments (a.k.a. the
scientific method) are you actually doing science? I think we should come up
with another word for these types of one-off studies.

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gumby
Many fields advance without solid well controlled, repeatable experiments, at
least through various stages of development: cosmology, geology, most of
medicine, philosophy, science of mind, etc. You don't consider those all
"science"?

There's more to science than Bacon.

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freyr
Those fields have scientific and non-scientific components. The non-scientific
parts are not science.

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gumby
Your statement is tautological. You might want to read up on epistemology and
the philosophy of science -- I would start with Karl Popper. As I said, Bacon
is not the definition of science.

Bizarrely, my unremarkable comment was downvoted!

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freyr
> _Your statement is tautological_

You want to label fields that have both scientific components and non-
scientific components (in varying proportions) as "science." The point of my
statement is that some of those fields have scientific aspects, and there may
be sub-fields I'd categorize as "science," but I wouldn't categorize the field
as a whole as "science."

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WalterBright
> computer networking

I've been in computing long enough to know that the first thing anyone does
with 2 computers is to connect them together. The notion that nobody would
have thought of it without Arpanet is absurd. People invented networking
protocols ALL THE TIME before the internet. FidoNET, BIX, Prodigy, MCImail,
AOL, RBBS, CompuServe, Kermit, The $25 Network, etc. Even I designed a scheme
(I never got around to implementing it), even calling it "web" (!).

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vph
I believe that whoever is in charge of federal funding in R&D will have to be
extremely smart and balanced in his views because R&D plays a great role in
the economy and future of this country. The right approach is a balanced
between fundamental and applied research. And it's not just balanced but which
areas to invest money into.

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Godel_unicode
I think that the government would be better served to spend money researching
fundamental science, that seems to me to be the great shortfall of industry.

Intel, Westinghouse, biotech in general, and Dow do a pretty good job on the
applied piece IMHO.

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vph
>Intel, Westinghouse, biotech in general, and Dow do a pretty good job on the
applied piece IMHO.

Private companies are in a great position to do applied research, but they are
often slow or unwilling to distribute the research results for the benefit of
everyone.

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Godel_unicode
They actually do a good job of that as well, it's just that they do it in the
form of patents which means that you have to pay to benefit from their work.

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hartator
I think the question is bit biased. I think we should ask first if the idea of
the fund itself is a good idea.

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drjesusphd
Since the times of Newton, science has always been funded by governments.
Funding agencies are as much part of the real-world scientific process as The
Hypothesis.

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WalterBright
Not exclusively. Einstein wasn't.

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drjesusphd
He was a government employee in 1905 when he published special relativity,
Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. This work was done while he was
a student studying under a government-funded scientist. He was a full
professor by the time he released general relativity.

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WalterBright
He was a patent examiner. Not a government funded researcher.

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joeblow9999
by letting free individuals decide what they want to fund?

