[HN Gopher] Please Fund More Science (2020)
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Please Fund More Science (2020)
Author : ssuds
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-05-24 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| Havoc wrote:
| Ironic given the entirety of tech elites are bending the knee
| (and funding) an administration out to gut funding for it. NSF is
| being gutted:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| We found out that what they really worshipped all along was
| money. I'm sure this is self-evident to many, but I was
| optimistic and naive about it. I saw the good in people that
| have no good inside them.
| kulahan wrote:
| To pretend someone has "no good in them" is weak, and
| essentially always incorrect.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Absolutism doesn't tend to win long term, that's fair, but
| I'm personally content to critique sama's ongoing lack of
| good actions and behaviour.
| vram22 wrote:
| _J. F. C._
|
| ... And _angels_ (how many) can dance on the head of a pin.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_o
| n...
|
| (Something _theologians_ debate about endlessly and
| absolutely uselessly. That is all they are good, er, bad,
| for.)
|
| Yeah, right. _Pontif_ icating much? Pathetic.
|
| How do you know he/she is "weak"? No argument provided. And
| the same for "incorrect".
|
| And who the _hell_ are you to judge them?
|
| Let me apply some of your own judgement "ointment" on you:
|
| >essentially always incorrect.
|
| Your use of the word _essentially_ in that phrase is
| essentially inessential. :) The meaning is equally well
| conveyed without that word. IOW, it 's fluff, and can be
| done away with, fluffy kid. (wags wings at you. hi!)
|
| Grok what I mean?
|
| Grr.
|
| ;)
| libraryatnight wrote:
| It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired
| articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers
| getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to
| work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of
| the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up
| - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be
| different.
|
| A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my
| younger self for being naive there, but it's still just
| embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community
| fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing
| survives shareholders.
| hydrolox wrote:
| money corrupts
| linguae wrote:
| I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who
| embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the
| histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and
| other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of
| FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at
| Google, which were enjoyable.
|
| Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now
| teach computer science at a community college, and I get
| saddened when thinking about the world my students are to
| enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor's degrees.
|
| There are still many good companies and good people in our
| field, but I'm saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use
| tech for dominating people instead of making life better for
| everyone.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| These companies also attract that sort of person. Most
| software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge
| number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have
| a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy
| to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve
| any interesting problem put in front of them and have a
| great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put
| it there or what it will be used for when they're done.
| Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to
| pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the
| reward you can use to keep them building your drone
| assassination algorithms or whatever.
|
| In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long
| been that skillfully solving problems that are personally
| interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet
| significant number of the people who work at for example
| palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little
| eichmanns."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
| tombert wrote:
| I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's
| marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly
| true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will
| last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to
| assume that.
|
| They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think
| it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just
| optimistic.
| tombert wrote:
| I think when you get to a high-enough level of running a
| company, you figure out ways to turn off your empathy, and
| ignore your principles.
|
| Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a
| bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my
| values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I
| keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge
| difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
|
| I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain
| my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I
| actually _could_ do something, but I probably wouldn 't be able
| to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and
| empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be
| worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind
| of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle
| that I don't know about who dies.
|
| I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any
| kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I
| think that they actively taught themselves to value their
| respective companies instead of fellow humans.
|
| That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech
| corporations has shown me that these people are _extremely_
| short-sighted.
|
| [1] Well, if I weren't unemployed :)
| siliconc0w wrote:
| You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think
| you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious
| unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You
| can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right
| things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases
| but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or
| power.
|
| This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that
| society sets the right incentives to align these individuals
| properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies
| so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
| tombert wrote:
| I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming
| too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting
| a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent)
| has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing
| that if you're willing to wait a few decades.
|
| I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires
| should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start
| taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain
| number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're
| not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a
| quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain
| amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with
| what's good for society, because the _only_ appeal at that
| point is seeing a number get bigger. It 's not like you're
| "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming
| they are generating value via real innovation and not
| through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing
| that.
|
| I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like
| 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest
| and build more companies rather than creating socially
| unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
| tombert wrote:
| > They are provably good at allocating resources
| (assuming they are generating value via real innovation
| and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them
| doing that.
|
| I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for
| example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large
| percentages of their _employees_ (edit, correction, said
| "corporations" before).
|
| I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty
| literally) is spend money. They are given money and then
| they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money
| leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off
| 20% of the company. The important part is that the money
| is spent.
|
| > I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like
| 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest
| and build more companies rather than creating socially
| unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
|
| I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100%
| sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of
| consistency.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| We still need a vaccine that stops transmission and stops people
| getting Long Covid. We really badly need a treatment for the 400+
| million people who have Long Covid around the world. The
| situation just keeps getting worse and worse as the years roll on
| and more people die and are disabled and the funding has dropped
| drastically due to political choices.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three
| ways out... we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world
| goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need
| to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract
| tracing, masks, and isolation.
|
| I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop
| caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the
| end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped
| caring that there was a pandemic.
| n2d4 wrote:
| That's not true. The pandemic ended as Omicron became the
| dominant strain, which was by some measures 90% less fatal than
| Delta.
|
| It's selective breeding; because we became careful about
| recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the
| infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore,
| Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer
| deemed as much of a threat.
| agoose77 wrote:
| I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few
| points:
|
| - It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number
| of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine
| + infection induced immunity, etc. - Severe strains with
| latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I
| don't _think_ the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants
| varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound.
| The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely
| to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social
| events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
| EricDeb wrote:
| It's possible private funding could build a better incentive
| structure but still a shame there's far less public research
| being done
| arrosenberg wrote:
| There is no private entity that will broadly fund basic
| research. The most likely candidates, like Harvard, are also
| being attacked. The point of all this is to promote anti-
| intellectualism. No one is coming to save us from it.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Shareholders are not interested in anything that doesn't have
| an obvious and sort-term payoff - the days of companies funding
| any significant degree of basic science research are long gone.
| Our ruling class has become so selfish and myopic that they are
| willing to derail our long-term future for short-term gain.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Rather than asking for "inventors and donors" or the Government
| to do this (not that it shouldn't do it) a few rich people can
| have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?
|
| 1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students
| with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by
| also adding students _randomly_ selected.
|
| 2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from
| identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world
| class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao
| teaching 30 promising students for a month!
|
| 3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where
| scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
|
| 4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg
| Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
|
| 5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative
| learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and
| built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very
| cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers,
| electrophoresis instruments for <$50
|
| 3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman,
| Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the
| philanthropy points.
|
| Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is
| cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
|
| I have always wondered why rich people don't do much of these and
| just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some
| do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for
| high schoolers.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| This seems like a bad idea.
|
| 1. Relying on philanpropy is generally not democratic and
| should be frowned upon. 2. This entire structure is legacy.
|
| Research needs to be an integrated part of society. Something
| people go and out from.
|
| Not something a few elite people get to dedicate their lifes
| to.
|
| This is important to ensure diffusion, especially in highly
| volatile times like we are in now.
|
| The big question should be: how can we get a 40 something year
| old industry professional to do research in a couple of. Years
| between jobs.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Rich people are also humans. Marketing can influence their
| behavior just as well as it influences everyone else.
|
| There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those
| in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or
| you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
|
| When the government takes a greater responsibility of the
| former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of
| funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts
| and sciences. This has happened in many European countries,
| where grants from private foundations are a more important
| source of research funding than in the US.
|
| With less government support, you have large capable
| organizations that provide services and rely on donations.
| Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to
| make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and
| attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and
| prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
| yegg wrote:
| If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the
| other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-
| already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living
| longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself),
| prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth),
| innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for
| future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the
| future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single
| points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate
| change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve
| currency, among other things).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think longevity is a bad goal. No matter what you achieve, it
| won't be enough, and in the grand scheme if things it doesn't
| matter (and is probably a net negative, socially). Hundreds of
| thousands of people are born every day, and hundreds of
| thousands die. It is the natural way of things for older
| generations to die so that younger can prosper.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Hard disagree. Many great people throughout history didn't
| complete the great works they were remembered for until they
| were in their 50s or 60s. Some even kept doing cool stuff
| well into their 90s. If we can keep our health and faculties
| that long and beyond, civilization will continue advancing
| and providing a higher quality of life all around. We lose so
| much experience and hindsight with every death. That
| experience could, for example, be used to make larger
| populations sustainable.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| But you're also assuming that people aged 50+ are
| necessarily inclined to keep contributing to science and
| passing on their "wisdom" (quotes because they're actually
| fallible) to the younger generations. In reality, the vast
| majority of them would just go on to consume, while also
| being content enough to be prepared to die any minute.
|
| And believe it or not, whatever knowledge or discovery you
| think you're losing with one death isn't actually
| contingent to that person. Given enough time, someone else
| will figure it out, and it becomes especially less valuable
| if you believe that AI tools are only going to get better.
| esafak wrote:
| You'll have an older, more conservative, not to mention
| more crowded society.
|
| Old people who want to pass on their wisdom are encouraged
| to record it.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| It's not that people don't support these goals. It's that
| people don't trust the folks who say they're pursuing or
| funding them. There seems to be very little transparency in how
| money gets spent or what the tangible benefits are.
|
| Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot
| further in healing the country than most other solutions being
| proposed.
| babuloseo wrote:
| When this happened I was using my left over gpus from
| cryptomining for Folding@Home was fun knowing that I was helping
| somehow :)
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