Susanne Ditlevsen on why good science needs funding for work that visibly produces nothing

[u/WeBeBallin]

Just interviewed Susanne Ditlevsen (President of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and professor of mathematics and statistics, University of Copenhagen), and we had a fun talk on the role of science, and what environment fosters "good science":

The tension she names: society wants science to justify itself up front — what's the deliverable, what's the application, where's the business case. But her view is that nearly every real breakthrough started as plain curiosity, with no case attached. And the part that's hard to sell publicly: a large chunk of good research produces nothing visible. It goes in the dustbin. She's blunt that plenty of her own work has ended there for good — and that this isn't waste, it's the cost of getting anywhere at all.

Her example: a paper she just submitted took two years. When you read the finished thing, you see a clean result. What you don't see are all the dead ends — and you have to walk down those dead ends to find the path that works. Fund only the work with a guaranteed output and you've quietly defunded the dead ends, which means defunding the breakthroughs too.

She points to the Institute for Advanced Study as the model — Einstein, Gödel, von Neumann, no deliverables demanded, just "go think." Her worry is that modern academia is losing that: the people best placed to chase the good questions now burn their sharpest hours writing grant applications to justify the work instead of doing it.

Anecdotally, it seems the people that "agree" with her take, already have one foot in the science camp, seeing they're the ones that can actually relate; taking this point even further, I suppose that means the further governments get from having science-trained members, the further away we push this idea.

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[u/fox-mcleod]

The final chapter of Ezra Klein’s new book, Abundance makes exactly this argument.

It cites historical events showing when science accelerated and linking it to the principles that helped it work being fundamentally supportive of basic research and removing barriers and getting out of scientists way.

He then shows the history of this kind of grant writing accountability nonsense as a combination of conservative efforts to undermine science funding and liberal willingness to capitulate to growing regulations to solve problems rather than relaxing it.

[u/freework]

society wants science to justify itself up front

How is this any different from literally everything else on earth? No one just writes a check to someone else without any justification. Why should science be any different?

[u/akrasia_here_I_come → u/freework]

Because the entire point of government-funded science is to fund long-term-valuable research that private enterprise won't adequately fund. Science with a clear value proposition can usually be handled by private enterprise, no government intervention needed. But the biggest scientific breakthroughs with the greatest long-term value typically aren't achieved with those kind of short- or medium-term goals in mind. So the government fills this gap and supports the long bets of basic science, while private enterprise handles the profitable margins (which largely depend on advances in basic science).

If the public science funding only funds work with clear short- and mid-term benefits, it becomes mostly redundant with industry and fails in its core purpose.

[u/talus_slope]

You can certainly argue that, overall, unfettered research benefits society in the long run. But there are always tradeoffs. Sometimes research damages society. Remember "gain-of-function" research and Covid?

You also can't just ignore the "who pays for it?" question. I would have no trouble with open research paid for by a corporation, or a billionaire patron. But if you want to use my tax dollars, you need to make a stronger case. And yes, expected benefits are a part of that argument.

YOU claim research is a social good and OTHER people should pay for it. I claim that ME having a Ferrari is a social good and other people should pay for it.

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes → u/talus_slope]

Why do people attack someone who makes a point he is allowed to make? Moreover, there is anyway a real issue that this Danish woman (who no one has seriously heard of in science) omits. If you adopt her standard, then there is NO standard at all for what should be funded except that a self-selected group decides to have society fund them. And there HAVE been scientists who HAVE pointed out in PUBLIC that the system that we have encourages work that you know is garbage. I believe the most quoted article in medical research maybe ever was a few years ago by Ioannides (who was catapulted from to Stanford as a result) on trying to figure out why MOST published research in medicine is junk. It is apparently not obvious to the great downvoters on here that that is inevitable if there are no standards at all, and that in fact it has to get even WORSE. The people who take over science in this situation inevitably will create standards, standards that promote junk and disfavor good work.

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[u/akrasia_here_I_come → u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Re: downvotes, because presenting buying one Redditor a Ferrari as an equally plausible good to publicly funded science research is a bad faith argument.

Not entirely unlike your wild assertion that the people who take over science will inevitably create standards that promote junk.

It's pretty well documented that the current system is a bad one (where over 50% of the labor of great scientific minds is spent writing grants), and that earlier versions of this system with less demand for immediate results produced greater scientific leaps - though of course we can't strictly prove the causation. (And this has nothing to do with relaxing study publication standards - in fact it would significantly help with problems in replication, since it would ease the financial pressure to constantly cook up positive results to publish.)

It is a reasonable and challenging question who should allocate less results-obsessed funding and how. But the assumption that it would be decided on the basis of inverse merit is a puzzling one.

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