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JulianMorrison comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
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Just the weekend before last I was hearing a scientist say "we have 30 projects we know, know, will give good results. That's not even counting the worthy speculative work. We can fund: maybe five."
Science as an institution is absolutely poverty-bound. Find a way of getting it a bigger bite of GDP, and the speedup could be immense.
Find a way to give it a bigger bite of GDP, and new bureaucrats will arise to seize the money for worthless projects, generating more noise in the journals? We could be in a situation analogous to the situation in some countries where giving money to beggars just reallocates more of the economy to begging without increasing the income of the average beggar.
No doubt some of the marginal money would be wasted, but that's always true and is true now. Science is and would be worth it even if the haircut was immense, and I don't see a reason that the additional spending would be that much more wasted.
Also, the begging scenario you describe isn't particuarly scary. If giving more money to scientists meant there were more scientists each with the same funding levels we have now, that seems like a perfectly fine outcome. If it meant there were more fundraisers seeking money for science and each raised the same quantity of funds, that also seems like a fine outcome.
Could you elaborate here?
Are you saying you think the impact of a higher portion of GDP spent on "science" would be negative, more or less neutral, or positive (but with diminishing returns)?
I'm confused a bit. You see existing science funding as being mostly/entirely wasted on worthless projects?
Do you think that a marginal dollar that is allocated to research on, for example, the synthesis of conductive plastics increases or decreases the signal:noise ratio? What fields do you think would have a marginal output of less than $1 of value generated per dollar you invest?
Mostly fields which are producing lots of "statistically significant" results and no universal generalizations (where "This happens to everyone with gene X" is a universal generalization even if not everyone has gene X). Conductive plastics doesn't sound too bad because you can tell whether or not a plastic conducts pretty clearly.
You're only looking at funds for "Science" that get used for something useful. How much of the funds are used suboptimally or completely wasted? Pretty much every funding (science, charities, government etc.) except for capitalist free market (and even that only in case where there's little potential for abuse) is extremely inefficiently spent, as there's no optimization mechanism based on results, so it's optimized for some very indirect proxies (number of publications, emotional appeal, political interest). Basic research almost by definition doesn't have anything to directly optimize on. So no - just giving "Science" more money wouldn't necessarily improve everyone's well-being.
I cannot think of any plausible mechanism how basic research can be funded in a self-optimizing manner. Prediction markets on its long term impact? That's the best I can think of, but considering how unproven real world prediction markets are even in far easier cases I wouldn't really have high hopes for that.
There are optimization pressures from peer review and academic jostling for position. My point above was that things which passed all the quality checks were being stopped for no reason except lack of money. If you expect any good from the existing research, you should expect those unfunded efforts would have been at least as good, giving a linear speedup per added money.
The market optimizes for the aggregate desires of the buying public and for the ability to produce something valued more by the public than its raw materials - if it achieves scientific usefulness, that's a byproduct.
And I suspect a great deal of scientific research is done at companies which then keep it secret. That work isn't wasted, but it isn't doing the kind of good that shared information can.