Funding for the sciences is always welcome; it's going to be interesting to see what SETI does with this money.
Seeing this news makes me wish more donors donated to science at the department level, or to every lab in a given department. Money is so incredibly tight in Academia that the entry level job (being a graduate student) typically gives people around minimum wage or less for five years to make a life with. This is an absolutely terrible incentive for attracting some of the best and the brightest to enter the funnel of knowledge production workers (e.g. grad students, post-docs, researchers, and professors.)
I don't know how this can be fixed systemically, but donors could help change the incentives and improve the quality of science for all.
As an adversarial opinion on this, I don't think that good science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of the "best and brightest" in academia, and it should do more to funnel them to other, more directly practical, endeavors.
Interesting point; thanks for providing the opposite opinion. It's not that no one is applying to grad school, it's that brilliant, creative people with good job prospects are being "pre-diverted" away from the sciences.
For everyone who complains about the quality of the scientific literature, the replication crisis, the golden quarter, I think part of it ultimately stems from the way the funnel is set up.
Those problems are real, but they aren't caused by a lack of the best and brightest in the sciences. The problems are structural due to misaligned incentives. Intelligence isn't particularly correlated with ethics or conscientiousness.
All issues are definitely influenced by systemic incentive issues for sure.
But is not graduate school in some broad sense competing with the likes of startup accelerators et al.? Don't get me wrong, I think that's a good thing in the abstract. But 5 years of minimum wage while working for someone who likely has paltry managerial skills, with the prospects of an increasingly shaky academic job market. My point is that it's too bad for society that the competition is so drastically one sided.
> I don't think that good science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of the "best and brightest" in academia
As an adversarial opinion on _that_, what seems to have happened is that the "best and brightest" filter in academia is further filtered to "those who also have the well-off family background to support that". See also the Victorian "gentleman scientist".
Sure, this filter does serve to cut down on the numbers, but I can see problems with using this filter, e.g. the effect on those excluded, and the biases that it will introduce. I would not call it a good thing on the whole.
It's also worth mentioning that many in the academic pipeline leave for Tech or Finance. My point is that the grad students are the ones who go on to become the professors who direct the research our society relies on.
It should be dumped into a trust fund, an endowment that will fund some low level SETI in perpetuity. The goal should be to free SETI from having to worry about funding from one year to the next. Funding such projects needs to be measured in decades, not dollars.
Tax-exempt organizations need to spend 10% of their endowments every year in order to keep their status, pretty much for this reason (avoiding perpetuities).
More seriously, endowments are for specific purposes specified by the donor. Most of the time, this money cannot be spent on anything else, regardless of "need."
They should do it! Desptite centuries of archaeological research we still don't really know how the pyramids were built. A real world test of the various possible techniques would answer a lot of questions. Plus when they're finished maybe the Goa'uld will show up to resolve the SETI issue.
As someone who works in a department that was essentially founded via a gift from some very generous donors, it has been enormously impactful in the nature of our positions, how we approach science, etc. All of them for the better.
The donor class often has very stupid or industrially motivated ideas about what kind of research should be done. In the former case, you're mostly just adding another idiot to your list of pseudobosses. In the latter case, what's really happening is that the rest of the funding is now going to end up subsidizing some private research endeavour. This is a form of capture, and should basically be avoided.
The current state of the system for graduate students is bad, but it is not improved by allowing private investment.
> people who are very good at making money make stupid investments?
Absolutely, particularly when the "investment" is a donation to charity or a university that's more to assuage guilt or plaster a name for posterity than it is for any return.
People that do end up with a great deal of money aren't always the sharpest crayons in the sun - many have luck and good advisors.
No, Walter, it is you who created a false representation of what noqc said when you replied to their comment saying "people who are very good at making money make stupid investments?"
> people who are very good at making money make stupid investments?
Just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean they are intelligent or did so upon their own virtue. And it doesn't necessarily mean they're good at investments and capital allocation.
>> it is not improved by allowing private investment
> wow. Maybe we shouldn't allow things like inventing semiconductors, jet engines, television, etc.
An incredibly sizable portion of technological development in the U.S. in the past 100 years is due to government (i.e., public) funding, not private funding.
> An incredibly sizable portion of technological development in the U.S. in the past 100 years is due to government (i.e., public) funding, not private funding.
Never mind semiconductors, jet engines, television, internet phones, AI, electric cars, engines, steel making, typewriters, the whole textile industry, telephones, CDs, electric guitars, autotune, cameras, need I go on?
> Just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean they are intelligent or did so upon their own virtue. And it doesn't necessarily mean they're good at investments and capital allocation.
Maybe read biographies of Musk, Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Rockefeller, Walton, Sears, etc., then tell me how stupid they are.
I've talked with many professors on the selection committees. They want the best, especially for competitive programs. All of the researchers I've talked with are keen on training the next generation of researchers.
Seeing this news makes me wish more donors donated to science at the department level, or to every lab in a given department. Money is so incredibly tight in Academia that the entry level job (being a graduate student) typically gives people around minimum wage or less for five years to make a life with. This is an absolutely terrible incentive for attracting some of the best and the brightest to enter the funnel of knowledge production workers (e.g. grad students, post-docs, researchers, and professors.)
I don't know how this can be fixed systemically, but donors could help change the incentives and improve the quality of science for all.