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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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"How much will it cost?" "How long will it take?" Who the hell is supposed to be able to answer that on a basic research problem?
Anyone applying for grant money. Anyone working within either the academic research community or the industrial research community or the government research community.
Gentleman scientists working on their own time and money in their ancestral manors are still free to do basic research.
Nowadays, everyone who applies for a grant.
Nowadays, no one does basic research.
The people who are running the LHC aren't doing basic research?
More precisely: no one whose status isn't ultra-high is allowed to do basic research without having to pretend they're doing something else.
You can take them as a calibration exercise. "I don't know" or "Between a week and five centuries" are answers, and the point of asking the question is that some due diligence is likely to yield a better (more discriminating) answer.
Someone who had to pick one of two "basic research problems" to fund, under constraints of finite resources, would need estimates. They can also provide some guidance to answer "How long do we stick with this before going to Plan B?"
These questions are for public proposals, not for someone considering a project by themselves. If you're building a collider or wish to play with someone else's collider, you'd better know how much it will cost and how long you'll take.