pbmonster
3d ago
Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?
pbmonster
3d ago
You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced
Agreed. I proposed a solution for that downthread: move all university STEM research to national labs, and have them train grad students. Undergrads stay with their "teaching professors" at the current universities.
pbmonster
3d ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.
Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.
pbmonster
3d ago
So then the question is if we really want to mess with the system that globally is the best at driving fundamental research in the hard sciences - because of a pretty small number of people spreading garbage on TV or through their private blog. Which, arguably, those people would be doing anyways (there's plenty of idiots with normal jobs successfully spreading garbage through the same channels). So really, we would only be changing their title from "Professor" to "Doctor".
pbmonster
4d ago
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities?
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.
So, what's the solution? Don't worry to much about it. Hire already successful mentees from the previous generation of strong links, punish outright fraud (Alzheimer research scandal, ect.) and leave them alone. And then don't trust any of them to much - if you're making policy decisions on their advice, you need a large meta study anyway. Usually, a strong link contrarian will appear.
What you shouldn't do is have a new crop of elected representative fight their way deep into the system every 4 years and topple everything. That actually affects outcomes.
pbmonster
4d ago
one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk)
There's a joke along the lines of "Ah, so you sleep with a bunch of different girls, who each also might or might not sleep with a bunch of different guys - but you really like them, and one of them might be your housemate? Back in my days, we used to call that 'being single in college'."
I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?
My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.
More options
Context Copy link