[HN Gopher] Japan can be a science heavyweight once more if it r...
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Japan can be a science heavyweight once more if it rethinks funding
Author : rntn
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-02-11 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
|
| [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018086 for why]
| TheCleric wrote:
| It can probably become a science heavyweight simply by being
| here at the moment when science funding in the USA is about to
| collapse.
| nickff wrote:
| The USA did quite well in applied research before the federal
| government became the dominant source of funds. That said, it
| would probably take some time (and some pain) to readjust,
| and theoretical/arts research would likely be dramatically
| reduced.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > The USA did quite well in applied research before the
| federal government became the dominant source of funds.
|
| For my own curiosity, when did that transition occur?
| vuln wrote:
| 1950 according to wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
| tomrod wrote:
| DARPA, ARPA-H, etc.
| epistasis wrote:
| Can you share any pointers on this topic about applied
| research success, I'm guessing in the pre-WW2 era? I have
| not heard anything about that and have not been able to
| locate supporting resources by a web search just now.
| ghc wrote:
| Edison, Bell, IBM, Morse, US Steel, Wright, Sikorsky,
| Westinghouse, Marconi, Dictaphone, Goodyear...there's a
| lot, any many of the companies are still household names
| even if they don't exist anymore.
|
| How did these R&D operations get their start? The same as
| universities at the time: they were funded by private
| backers, often family, or the parent corporation of the
| R&D Lab (IBM Research, Bell Labs, General Electric,
| etc.).
|
| It's Vannevar Bush who spearheaded the creation of the
| federal research funding system as we know it today, for
| the sake of the war effort:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush.
|
| As a side effect, basic research is now mostly government
| funded, and the peer review system was created to ensure
| taxpayers were "getting their money's worth".
|
| A more interesting question is: why did it work then, and
| could it work today? My (admittedly pessimistic) view is
| that life-changing innovations were a lot easier (read:
| cheaper) to create back then. Continual breakthroughs in
| materials science, transportation and communications
| technologies left a lot of "white space" to innovate in.
| vuln wrote:
| Perhaps US Universities should tap into billion dollar
| endowments or slash the administrative headcount instead of
| raising tuition yet again.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-
| trump...
| fisherjeff wrote:
| But the point of an endowment is to have a relatively
| stable funding stream in perpetuity - if you start
| dipping into the principal, the funding stream starts
| shrinking and is no longer perpetual.
|
| Harvard's endowment, for example, already funds a little
| less than 40% of its budget, and should be able to
| continue doing so indefinitely. If you bump that to even,
| say, 50% there's a good chance it won't have any
| endowment (or funding stream!) at all in the year 2100.
| criddell wrote:
| Arguably, the USA did even better with the feds funding
| research. I don't know of any program that had a higher ROI
| than DARPA's VLSI Project.
| Jalad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project
|
| > The VLSI Project is one of the most influential
| research projects in modern computer history. Its
| offspring include Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)
| Unix, the reduced instruction set computer (RISC)
| processor concept, many computer-aided design (CAD) tools
| still in use today, 32-bit graphics workstations, fabless
| manufacturing and design houses, and its own
| semiconductor fabrication plant (fab), MOSIS, starting in
| 1981.[2] A similar DARPA project partnering with
| industry, VHSIC had little or no impact.
|
| Wow that's insane, I never knew that
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. (This is in
| the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
|
| It's clear why this happens and of course it's not ill
| intended. The mind naturally follows the most-traveled
| association path from a new stimulus back to something
| familiar.
|
| Unfortunately, that is the anticurious direction. Swapping
| out a specific new topic for the nearest familiar one means
| replacing a potentially new and interesting discussion with a
| repetitive old one.
|
| These large generic themes are like black holes: if you fly
| too close to one, you get sucked in there instead of going
| wherever else you might have explored, and then no new
| information emerges.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| I do get your point, and generally think it makes sense,
| but in this case it seems extremely relevant: There is a
| global competition for intellectual capital, and at the
| moment, the US' position here seems at the very least
| uncertain, given all that is happening.
| caminante wrote:
| _> I do get your point, [...] but in this case it seems
| extremely relevant_
|
| Not sure you do.
|
| At a minimum, they could rephrase for better discussion
| v. a snarky, low effort claim that the sky is falling.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| The sky is indeed falling. You not wanting to look up
| doesn't change that.
| caminante wrote:
| You're still not taking a hint [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018477
| mmooss wrote:
| dang knows HN better than anyone. I was coming here to
| discuss it and don't remember seeing much of it. I don't
| know how you moderate a forum, in this sense, where each
| person sees only a small segment of it. It will be
| overdone to some and novel to others.
|
| (Some things are probably overdone for everyone.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The US is literally cutting funding now for science and
| letting politics get in the way of science.
|
| We can't have an honest discussion about this without
| addressing the elephant in the room.
|
| Japan or some other nation has a chance to step up and fill
| the void that the US is creating. Some other countries
| universities could even partner with the US universities.
| dang wrote:
| Sure, but there have been many threads about that*, there
| can and will be others, and those threads are the place
| to discuss it.
|
| Not allowing large/important/hot/generic/divisive topics
| to drown out smaller/quieter/marginal/curious/specific
| ones is one of the core principles here.
|
| * Edit: here's a partial list:
|
| _What 's happening inside the NIH and NSF_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940257 - Feb 2025
| (1519 comments)
|
| _CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics
| must be pulled or revised_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905937 - Feb 2025
| (719 comments)
|
| _CDC data are disappearing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696 - Feb 2025
| (589 comments)
|
| _NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive
| orders_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886661 -
| Jan 2025 (488 comments)
|
| _' Never seen anything like this' - NIH meetings and
| travel halted abruptly_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42817910 - Jan 2025
| (111 comments)
|
| _NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel,
| communications, and hiring_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42798960 - Jan 2025
| (440 comments)
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| nah. It's not funding. It's more a side effect of japans
| economic problems.
| coliveira wrote:
| At this point is the US that needs to rethink funding if it
| wants to continue to be competitive. The US funding for
| universities has been frozen (adjusted for inflation) for the
| last 20 years. It was enough when the rest of the world
| invested much less in science. But nowadays China is moving
| faster while US funding is still the same. Giving money to tech
| companies is not a substitute, because they only care about
| short term gains.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| We can also improve the efficiency of allocation of existing
| funds.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| It's ridiculous that returns on public basic research have
| been so great and yet funding has been so neglected. The
| chips act was a small positive step.
| coliveira wrote:
| This was the biggest change I expected from Biden, however
| it seems that giving hundreds of billions to big companies
| is the priority, instead of supporting national research
| institutions.
| Danieru wrote:
| This article seems interested in suggestion Japan abandon its
| unique approach and adopt the approach used by other nations.
| That is silly.
|
| Japan is one of the foremost funders of deep research. It funds
| large physics experiments. It has a long history of semiconductor
| innovations. MEXT scholarships have proven a brilliant method to
| attract smart men and women from around the world.
|
| Here in Touhoku I've met so many bright international students on
| MEXT scholarships doing research within those exact project-
| funded teams. Switching to person-focused funding would be silly,
| do you really think a smart guy from Congo is going to be able to
| win funding? That Japan has a system where the product/team can
| focus on an established topic, then backfill with smart
| researches, is a strength not a weakness.
|
| Of course Nature is in the business of publishing papers, not
| science. So it makes sense they would be blind to the reality of
| science: you measure it in results not papers. The academics I
| know are all focused on achieve specific goals, they rarely talk
| about the papers in the way the Canadian Acedemics I know did
| back home. Think "I want to automate boar trap monitoring so that
| farmers do not need to check it everytime, and so that non-boars
| do not get trapped". That is the sort of highly practical
| research you get when a supervisor knows their field and knows
| their country. It might not pay off in papers, but it will pay
| off for Japan as a country.
|
| The world should be taking lessons from Japan, not the other way
| around. Team based funding. Scholarships for bright students from
| any country. Deep funding for physical research other than just
| ITER and LHC.
| Prickle wrote:
| That's interesting.
|
| Japanese discussions I have had, and articles in Japanese seem
| to say the opposite. That Japan needs to invest more; because
| many talented Japanese researchers are emigrating to the USA or
| China.
|
| The main topic that comes up is that both China and the USA
| provide better wages, as well as greater funding for projects
| overall.
|
| But I'm just a local, and certainly not a researcher. Thanks
| for your POV!
| Danieru wrote:
| To be honest, those are all valid points which I think are
| true. I've never met an academic who thinks their country
| should reduce science funding. And the personal incentives do
| push researchers overseas for higher wages.
|
| Personally though, I think how a country uses the money is
| dominates over how much. Most countries have a pretty
| consistent level of funding. Sure some countries might e
| double others, but overall funding tends to follow GDP. No
| country is spending 10%+ of GDP on research, nor do I think
| is that justifiable.
|
| Thus the differences come from effectiveness of spend, not
| volume. Japan has an advantage here in the low English
| proficiency: you cannot be headhunted by the Americans if you
| cannot speak English. Thus when Japan does focus on
| specializations, as it did in the past with semiconductors,
| those researchers cannot be headhunted away.
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