What's the point of all this useless "science" anyway ? Who cares about anything that doesn't lead to immediate financial gain ? How can we possibly be building spaceships when there are still starving children in the world ?
Yeah, I know there are probably umpteen better posts on the values and virtues of pure research, but I don't care - here's one more.
There is a refreshing passage in Robert Heinlein's Time For The Stars about the Long Range Foundation.
ReplyDeleteWe got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: “Bread Cast Upon the Waters,” and its charter is headed: “Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants.” The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers’ fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn’t enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever … something like how to control the weather (they’re working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.
The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money-“embarrassing” to a non-profit corporation that is.
But I blame all that corporate "increasing shareholder value" nonsense, which encourages corporations to eat their seed corn in order to increase profits for the next quarter, thus dooming the corporation to die in the long term. Of course by then the CEO has departed in their golden parachute.
ReplyDeleteLove the Alice Zhang artwork they used in the image there. Trying to collect all the Doctor Who comic covers she's done. http://www.alicexz.com
ReplyDeleteReminds me of G.H. Hardy "A Mathematician's Apology".
ReplyDeletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy
Hardy preferred his work to be considered pure mathematics, perhaps because of his detestation of war and the military uses to which mathematics had been applied. He made several statements similar to that in his Apology:
"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world."[14]
Alistair Young I mis-spoke.
ReplyDelete"Maximizing share-holder value" is not the problem.
The problem is they are using that as an excuse for criminal short-sightedness.
Much in the same way that in capitalism the mandate for consumer is "to obtain money so that you can spend it".
But it is wrong when that mandate is used as an excuse to go rob a bank at gunpoint.
It is just when CEOs guide their corporations to crash and burn, if you ask they why they did it, the answer is almost always "I had no choice, I was forced to maximize shareholder value."
Rhys Taylor Thanks for the excellent blog. I'm not a scientist but I appreciate that, while some people consider certain branches of science to be useless, the case is far from it because scientists increase our knowledge of things. What an impoverished world it would be otherwise.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor There may be umpteen words on the subject, but you're the guy that can make intergalactic hydrogen clouds fun to learn about. Not just interesting or even awesome, but fun.
ReplyDeleteSo your words on why science matters will be appreciated.
Side note about defence budget: the Pentagon's internal audits regularly point out massive spending inefficiencies. My inner optimist hopes that increasing budget pressures will drive them to take action on them. By cutting those inefficiencies in half, they may very well reach that 8% world defence budget savings.
I propose re-purposing those obsolete B61 nukes as Orion pulse units!