[HN Gopher] The decline of unfettered research (1995)
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The decline of unfettered research (1995)
Author : KKKKkkkk1
Score : 141 points
Date : 2021-11-08 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dtc.umn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dtc.umn.edu)
| m0zg wrote:
| What he described in the beginning of that essay is how Microsoft
| Research worked just 15 years ago. Maybe it still does, I
| wouldn't know. Yes, you are judged by your results. But beyond
| that and beyond some flimsy constraints dictated by what "team"
| you were on, there were no limitations whatsoever. This was the
| most productive and enjoyable time of my entire 25+ year career,
| and a staggering contrast to how the rest of Microsoft works. And
| the people were by far the smartest I have ever met, and this was
| not the only lab I worked at. Most of them weren't genius level
| (although they were still unusually smart), but some very clearly
| were, to the point where I'd sit in some meeting and lecture and
| think "what the fuck am I even doing here". Too bad most of the
| stuff they do never ends up in products - the rest of Microsoft
| can't tell a gradient from a hole in the ground, with very few
| exceptions (basically just Bing and some parts of Ads).
| sam0x17 wrote:
| A huge contributor to this imo is the grant system and how it
| works particularly at very large research institutions and
| universities. Typically the only people with the means and time
| to do "just for curiosity" / fundamental research are people in
| long-term professor / research positions where they are allowed
| to pursue whatever they want (as long as they are frequently
| published). Grants work against this, as they create an incentive
| to work on specific, often more short term projects /
| applications rather than fundamental questions. In this way,
| injecting money into academia via grants actually reduces the
| amount of fundamental research being done, because a majority of
| researchers are going to chase the grants aka the short term
| interests of corporations and governments rather than do less
| financially rewarding fundamental research.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Part of this is just the professionalization (bureaucratization)
| of research. Maybe in the future more independently wealthy
| people will simply do science for fun.
| philwelch wrote:
| So I recently came across an interesting idea that I think
| applies here. The idea is that "bureaucratization" and
| "professionalization" are actually opposites. This is a
| semantic argument, but the ideas themselves are interesting
| enough and we need to attach words to them either way, so let's
| just roll with it.
|
| A professional is someone you trust to do their job. Like a
| doctor or a lawyer. If you have a medical or a legal problem,
| you go to a professional and the professional uses their
| professional judgment to make a decision and works on your
| behalf to try and solve that problem. And they take personal
| responsibility for their professional decisions. For instance,
| when a professional engineer signs off on building plans, he is
| saying, "this building is not going to collapse and kill
| people, and if it does, I will take personal responsibility".
|
| A bureaucratic environment is an environment where processes
| and controls have supreme authority and there are no
| professionals. You have to jump through hoop A, fill out form
| B, and have everything reviewed by committee C to do anything
| because you are not a professional and your judgment isn't
| trusted. To some degree, this means doctors aren't fully
| professional anymore.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| This is a nice story but I don't think it makes much sense.
|
| As you observed, by this definition surgeons are not
| professionals but the teenager who's the sole employee at a
| lemonade stand is a professional. The former is extremely
| constrained by bureaucracy while the latter can do pretty
| much whatever they want as long as nothing burns down or gets
| too many people too sick.
|
| Bureaucracy and professionalism are largely orthogonal. There
| are horrible bureaucracies where some individuals have
| immense power. In fact, that's probably way more common than
| not. There are also relative anarchies where no one has any
| real power because the whole org is completely beholden to
| the market in every aspect of its operation; e.g., most
| corner pubs on a crowded business street. Even the owners
| have at best marginal control over their employees and rented
| space.
|
| A professional is just someone who does the same sort of
| skilled work year over year for pay. Most blue collar workers
| think of themselves as professionals, and you'll see plenty
| of discussion of "professionalism" in any trades training
| program.
|
| Historically, the connotative notion of a "professional" that
| you're using here -- basically, upper-middle class
| professions with a certain amount of social esteem -- were
| always the _most_ bureaucratic occupations. Have they gotten
| even more bureaucratic with time? Sure. But they were always
| more bureaucratic than other occupations of their time
| (mostly farming). Medicine or law being more bureaucratic
| than than farming is not a new thing.
| blowfish721 wrote:
| Going full circle then back into the old days when this was
| almost always the case. Sadly no matter if it's the old way or
| the new way of doing research politics, ego and personal
| disputes will still always play a big part.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yes, and for better and for worse. "Science is friendship"
| isn't far from the mark.
| lumost wrote:
| We're going to have a relatively large number of
| children/inheritors to billion dollar scale fortunes within a
| decade or two. These individuals will have more money than
| they would ever need to use - however they will lack for
| prestige and impact.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if some of them choose to create
| university positions for themselves, or otherwise "self-fund"
| their own prestige projects.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| One potential saving grace is in falling costs of tools from
| technological advancement but science is a very broad subject
| where material demands vary greatly. Theoretical physics may
| have minimal material needs. A citizen scientest might be
| theoretically able to do something with CRISPR to say, modify
| e-coli to start producing carbon nanotubes or try to evolve
| plastic eating bacteria. But not making their own Large Hadron
| Collider.
|
| One would need a very complete picture to be able to accurately
| generalize in such an absurdly broad area.
| visarga wrote:
| > Theoretical physics may have minimal material needs.
|
| I don't buy that because it's very expensive to
| experimentally prove the difference between various theories.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Exactly true. physics is an empirical science. The
| separation into "theoretical" and "experimental" (and
| "phenomenological" in-between) is a result of some haywire
| marketing that somehow has divided the scientific method up
| into specialized professions. The field of Physics though,
| is grounded in experimentation and observation. The lack of
| this grounding is called mathematics, philosophy or in the
| extreme case: religion.
|
| Best regards, A purebred experimentalist from the
| theoretical institute of physics at Blegdamsvej 17 (Niels
| Bohr's Institute).
| dang wrote:
| Only one past tiny thread:
|
| _The Decline of Unfettered Research (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2952423 - Sept 2011 (2
| comments)
| quelsolaar wrote:
| A lot of times people are afraid of wasting money by giving
| research grants where it isn't clearly specified what they are to
| be used for. What is missed, is that there is a huge amount of
| waste, when researchers are forced to work on a dead end ideas,
| they know wont work out, just because that's what they have
| promised to do, while it was still looking promising. Scientists
| should be penalized for piloting to something new. unfettered
| research doesn't just let people work on what ever the want, it
| also lets they drop anything they don't believe in.
| temp131 wrote:
| You could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund
| eugenics or something.
|
| There could be a whole range of topics that could be worked
| upon and you could allow the researcher to move freely between
| them,
| quelsolaar wrote:
| The thing that is needed is trust. Its by far the best way to
| do it, it just that going on trust sounds like the worst and
| most irresponsible way of doing it so people don't dare do
| it, and they don't dare argue for it.
| kansface wrote:
| I've often given thought to exactly this problem: trust in
| _all_ American institutions has been and continues to
| decline precipitously. I can not name a single case of
| trust increasing anywhere within the last decade - religion
| and the church (catholic /Catholic/et al), government at
| all levels (SF on up to NASA), academia and the sciences
| and seemingly all forms of education from elementary school
| on up to University, unions, the medical establishment from
| local providers to the CDC/FDA/NIH, the US military, the
| police (although somehow, we went from the Democratic party
| regarding the FBI as Hoover's institute to one safeguarding
| Democracy), Facebook (Big Tech Everyman) went from a beacon
| of Democracy under the election of Obama to whatever it is
| considered now, corporations and Capitalism, the courts and
| even the founding of the country itself. For a more niche
| subject of personal interest, our furniture has seemingly
| purposefully declined in quality as we outsourced
| manufacturing to China via IKEA and forced everyone else to
| do so.
|
| I'd guess that the polarization of our society is self
| reinforcing, and that as it increases, our institutions
| follow along for one reason or another whether it be some
| form of "good business" or internal capture. Its probably
| some Internet Law that any institution not specifically
| devoted to staying out of it will eventually succumb, but
| even then you have the ACLU... and there is non-culture war
| decline in trust - something more like the financialization
| of _everything_ or the injection of metrics into all parts
| of life that can be metered....
|
| We don't value competence and accountability first; maybe
| this was always the case and only our narrative changed,
| but that's hard to imagine when we used to do things. At
| this point, why not Research, too?
| effie wrote:
| Interesting observation. Maybe it's a natural evolution
| of society, that in part it resembles evolution of a
| person - it starts out young, full of ideals and energy,
| trusting the people and institutions around them. Then it
| gets older, loses energy and as perception of corruption
| blows up, trust becomes rarer. This does not have to be
| the end of that society like it is for the person, but
| probably society needs some radical _revolution_ to get
| things "back on track" again.
|
| In research, abolishing the grant system and the business
| model of universities selling credentials in favour of
| direct financing of learning and research institutions to
| teach the best students should be attempted. It probably
| won't come from the academia, it has to come from the
| state.
| coliveira wrote:
| My view of this is that the pursuit of money is leading
| America (and the whole western society) to a dead end.
| Everything now is corrupted by money is a very shocking
| way (it was always like that, but not in the open). We're
| back to the 20s of the previous century, where a few
| people had enormous amounts of money and most people
| barely survived, even in the richest country in the
| world.
| jmeister wrote:
| "Erwin Griswold, who had been the Dean of Harvard Law
| School, had the theory that he knew which people were
| geniuses. If he approved of them, they would certainly do
| good work over time, and therefore they had to write
| nothing."
|
| https://volokh.com/2011/10/02/justice-breyer-on-tenure-
| stand...
|
| "The highest form which civilization can reach is a
| seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just
| totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
| That's the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic."
|
| https://fs.blog/munger-operating-system/
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "You could have a compromise, so you don't accidentally fund
| eugenics or something."
|
| The thing about basic research is that you usually cannot see
| the consequences down the line.
|
| Few of the original researches that discovered ionizing
| radiation could anticipate the enormous destructive power of
| nuclear weapons. And yet their contributions were crucial.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| HHMI grants are unusual, in this respect. The grant is to an
| investigator over seven years, not to specific a project. They
| have to have demonstrated significant research in the usual
| funding system to be eligible, though.
|
| https://www.hhmi.org/programs/biomedical-research/investigat...
| derf_ wrote:
| As someone who sat on a committee handing out (small) research
| grants in the past (usually as no-strings-attached donations),
| the concern was never really that you would not deliver exactly
| what was promised. The concern was that you would not do
| anything at all (or very little). I know it might not even
| occur to an honest person that this would be a problem, but you
| would be surprised.
|
| If you no longer believe what you proposed is a useful thing to
| do... send an e-mail. This may be easier to resolve than you
| think.
| quelsolaar wrote:
| I have no doubt there is a lot of fraud going on! I just
| don't think making researcher write 5 years plans for what
| they plan to do is the way to combat it.
| btrettel wrote:
| What should someone do if they are a PhD student who believes
| their funded project is a waste of resources and their
| advisor agrees, but their advisor refuses to contact the
| funder about that?
| LanceH wrote:
| You continue to perpetrate the academic fraud in exchange
| for your PhD.
| eecc wrote:
| But it's your career and future against what, integrity?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Meaning, do the bare minimum for the project and spend
| your glorious time getting distracted by what matters.
|
| Seriously, a lot more phd students just need to embrace
| their ADHD. Even if you are given a path, there is no
| path.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Yeah, so, I ended up believing that my academic research
| was completely useless, but tried to continue with the
| PhD anyway. Not only was it demoralizing, but my anxiety
| and ADHD just came pouring out and I hated even
| _thinking_ about my research. It grew worse and worse.
| Eventually, my advisor left, I had no funding, and I
| withdrew with nothing to show for the past 3.5 years
| except student loans.
|
| Fun times.
|
| (What was the research? Basically taking Heckman's
| 70s-era selection correction and applying it to nonlinear
| models. Big fuckin' whoop. My advisor had already written
| multiple useless papers riffing on the idea anyway. He's
| probably still doing it to this day.)
| tasogare wrote:
| That's hitting close to home. I'm near end my funding and
| visa time, with not enough publications. The three years
| have been mostly being told no to whatever I proposed and
| not given worthwhile stuff to do instead. And when it did
| it was things already done 3-4 decades ago. My advisor
| even told me the other day things that made it clear he
| was aware of the kind of stuffs I want to incorporate in
| my work, yet didn't seek any middle ground.
|
| On the other side I have multiple projects, the biggest
| one already presented in a conference. I meet multiple
| people my university and other big ones that are very
| enthusiastic about either that project or the official
| one (which got none in my own lab) so it's not like what
| I'm doing was totally dumb.
|
| I'm not sure what to do now. I have 3 more years to write
| the thesis, but would need to find a job to stay in the
| country. Hopefully I used web technologies I can market
| on my CV but I'm bit sour about the whole thing (and life
| in general).
| jcelerier wrote:
| > If you no longer believe what you proposed is a useful
| thing to do... send an e-mail. This may be easier to resolve
| than you think.
|
| eh... I know of one similar instance (student had found that
| what they were looking for has been proven false by another
| team) - the advisor basically said "okay, we're stopping the
| phd there". Two years to the drain.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| Science Mart by Philip Mirowski does a good job of laying out,
| for those in research but also for those who are not, the
| political-economic changes that are responsible for this.
| brainwipe wrote:
| Coming out of Uni with a PhD in the UK in 2003, I went looking
| for some "curiosity driven" research and didn't find any. The
| dotcom bust had sucked budgets dry and no-one was hiring. I've
| dipped my toe back into the market a few times and not found any.
| I'd have to move to the States and even then there was no
| guarantee of doing unfettered research. I carried on in my spare
| time but it's not the same as being surrounded in a melting pot
| of like minded (yet different subject) people.
| [deleted]
| jll29 wrote:
| Sometimes a good manager lets you work on ideas you believe in,
| as long as you continue to pay lip service to "the official
| project" so that one can move forward as well.
|
| The term "under the radar R&D" has not been unheard of in many
| corporate research labs.
|
| But what worries me there are reports that the corporate R&D
| lab as an institution is in decline. I cannot judge whether
| this is true, since I recently switched back to academia to
| have a bit more autonomy after a decade in industry R&D.
| Fronzie wrote:
| In semiconductor-industry related companies, I've seen the
| departments continuing to exist, but the expected time-to-
| market for R&D decrease from 10 to 5 to 3 years. With an
| expected product launch in 3 years, it's effectively
| development, without any research.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If you try making your curiosity a bit more military related
| I'm sure you'll find something pretty quick haha.
| mcguire wrote:
| I got a PhD in 2004 and could not find any non-academic
| research positions in the US. (I was pretty fed up with
| academia at the time, so I didn't look at those.) The closest I
| got was a job offer from a group at Telcordia Research, but
| when I went up for an in-person interview, I found the building
| mostly empty, most of the people there very bitter, and the
| only group that was hiring doing product development, not
| research. (And it was in New Jersey.) I declined the offer and
| went back to contracting.
|
| At IBM. That wasn't a smart move either.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Needs a (1995) in the title.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Not that it's gotten any better in the intervening 26 years.
| Animats wrote:
| (1995)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| berko wrote:
| "It is widely acknowledged that science made this transformation
| possible." Widely acknowledged by scientists, but not necessarily
| true. In the generation since this essay was published, could
| anyone argue that innovation has withered?
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| I recently proposed an idea to create a new data transfer
| protocol that involves drones to carry data in a medium with a
| prong attached to them.
|
| When the drone lands on a platform atop a building, the prong
| connects to a computer connected to the platform and sitting
| inside the building triggering a mount action.
|
| The data gets transferred to the computer. Now, whoever needs to
| transfer data from this building to another will use the same
| method to upload it.
|
| I do not think this will be the best way to move data but if a
| protocol is in place it could be used as a basis for future
| intra-campus data movement.
|
| The proposal was shot down. A schematic of the idea is drawn
| here:
| https://github.com/ketancmaheshwari/datadrone/blob/main/sche...
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| What's the maximum altitude of these drones? It might help you
| get funding if you could pitch it as Actual Cloud Data.
| politician wrote:
| It sounds like you're proposing an improvement to RFC 2549 to
| reduce latency and packet loss.
| teddyh wrote:
| I would suggest using RFC 6214 instead.
|
| But really, for practical applications I would probably try
| to use UUCP.
| h2odragon wrote:
| better yet: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html
| trzy wrote:
| But why?
| topspin wrote:
| Use cases for this are easy to imagine. For example; data
| collected by instruments in remote locations that do not have
| high capacity or cost effective network connections. When
| collection has to be done by a human it could require days or
| weeks, perhaps more. Whereas an automated system could
| perform the task more frequently.
| ncc-erik wrote:
| I took a networks class during college, and there was a
| homework question from the textbook about a scenario like
| this. It had you compare transferring a large amount of data
| over the Internet versus loading it onto a disk and driving a
| physical distance to load it onto the other computer. The
| answer depended on the available bandwidth against the
| distance to drive.
|
| And for other practical applications related to this idea:
| https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
| visarga wrote:
| To actually hear your data buzzing around?
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| A few reasons:
|
| -- Cost: Drones are getting faster, accurate, reliable and
| cheap while storage devices are getting lighter and denser.
| If a protocol is in place, vast amount of data could be moved
| relatively cheaper at a faster rate.
|
| -- Auxiliary Medium: If a campus network is down due to
| security threats or assessment or some other reason, this
| protocol may be used to pass critical data around.
|
| -- Remote, inaccessible (edge) locations: Places where
| conventional network is difficult to setup due to temporal
| nature or hazardous conditions etc.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I'll put this old witticism forward...
|
| Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of
| hard drives.
| jll29 wrote:
| That's what the guys from the Internet Archive and CiteSeer
| also tend to say.
| [deleted]
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Is this a joke I'm tired to understand?
| tejtm wrote:
| So it is like Sneakernet but with wings. A winged sneaker net
| if you will Name it after some mythological hand maiden to
| Athena and you can't go wrong.
| glitchc wrote:
| One could make a good security case for establishing ad-hoc
| point-to-point communications mechanisms.
| jcims wrote:
| Build it for transporting beer and just start attaching SSDs to
| the bottles.
| danans wrote:
| > It will be a long time (if it ever happens) before Netscape
| earns enough profit to justify its initial stock market
| valuation.
|
| Now that a long time has passed, I would be interested in hearing
| an analysis of this exactly as it is phrased: financially, with
| respect to profits vs valuation, and not in terms of historical
| impact.
| allturtles wrote:
| Netscape was bought by AOL for $10B in 1999.[0] According to
| [1], Netscape was valued at $3B after it's IPO. So in that
| sense its early investors did well (not so much those who
| bought at the peak price later in 1995). However the natural
| follow-on question is did AOL actually get $10B worth of value
| out of owning Netscape. I would guess not, but I don't know how
| you'd prove it.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171107021707/http://news.morni...
|
| [1]: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/09/the-ipo-
| th...
| danans wrote:
| > However the natural follow-on question is did AOL actually
| get $10B worth of value out of owning Netscape.
|
| I suppose that at this point it is lost in the digital
| accounting noise, but I bet there are some people left who
| saw it happen and have a perspective on it.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I'd say AOL got $10B out of owning Netscape, and then some.
| They bought Netscape in 1998 and, riding the hype wave,
| were able to buy Time Warner in 2000 -- it was valued at
| $182 billion, but they paid nothing but AOL shares, which
| soon demonstrated their near-worthlessness.
| reginold wrote:
| I find this article a bucolic tale of tech and research.
|
| Right after WWII with the planet in shambles, living in the
| "winning" country, you're working on computers and found
| unfettered access to funds and investment? No surprise.
|
| GE in 1956? To leave out the massive macroeconomic power of GE in
| that day and age is shortsighted. Same with Bell Labs, et all.
| This was an age where military spending rose from 1% of GDP to
| 10%. It was military spending and military might that bought you
| that "unfettered research". Yes, society should be better at
| allocating for the long term regarding research and tech -- but
| 1956 GE was not some sort of utopia.
|
| We're just in a lower part of the cycle right now. Unfortunately,
| the only reliable "reset" button society has found seems to be
| war. Hopefully modern financial markets will be able to create
| those cycles without as much bloodshed.
| whatshisface wrote:
| War only pushes the reset button in a positive way when it's
| WWII and you're America. See the economic consequences of the
| war in Vietnam for a more typical outcome of putting military
| spending to use.
| warning26 wrote:
| Parent did note "living in the 'winning' country" as as
| precondition, so seems that you are probably in agreement to
| some extent
| gilleain wrote:
| Did North Vietnam lose the war?
| whatshisface wrote:
| Okay, economic consequences of successfully invading
| Afghanistan. Or Iraq.
| reginold wrote:
| Is the success of the drone industry an outcome of these
| wars?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| "success" of the drone "industry"
| sushsjsuauahab wrote:
| Do pyrrhic victories count? Seems that the data model is
| not clear cut.
| fwip wrote:
| I'll let you know, as soon as we do either of those
| things successfully. :)
| coliveira wrote:
| If you're talking about America, yes the only "reset" button it
| knows is war.
| whakim wrote:
| Military spending as a percent of national income rose a huge
| amount in the 1940s, but so did spending on pretty much
| everything else. Over the period from 1930 to 1950 the United
| States (as well as many other Western countries) transformed
| themselves from societies with pretty low taxes who spent the
| bulk of their (small amounts of) revenue on defense to higher-
| tax societies which spent (a lot more) revenue on defense,
| education, all kinds of scientific research etc. In fact, while
| defense spending rose a lot during this period, these other
| categories of spending rose significantly more (as percentages
| of national income) because prior to the early twentieth
| century they weren't really considered core functions of the
| state. That is the bigger story (rather than World War II).
|
| > Unfortunately, the only reliable "reset" button society has
| found seems to be war.
|
| In my opinion this claim needs significantly more justification
| even though it is frequently tossed around.
| jamesmishra wrote:
| I was lucky to take a grad-level math course in error correcting
| codes from Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, the author of the essay.
|
| I read a lot of his papers ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ )
| in the hopes that I would learn something to improve my exam
| scores, but he has a knack for asking questions so fundamental
| that they have almost never even been properly formulated before.
|
| If you have some time, I recommend reading a few of his papers.
| He completely changed my view of mathematics.
| akoluthic wrote:
| Wow, what a diverse body of work. Could you give an example of
| a paper that you feel fits your description of having "almost
| never even been properly formulated before"?
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