[FRIAM] for the optimists

[Eric Charles]

I can't possibly weigh in on this issue re nano science.  That said,  it's
definitely a thing in psychology.  (Cliques monopolizing grant funding,
centralized federal funding coming under control of the politically savvy
members of the field,  etc.)

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021, 12:44 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
>
> Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly
> accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's
> a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the
> majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history.
>
> > Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for
> actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say
> government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations
> that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960:
> refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and
> washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric
> lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air
> travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the
> telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they
> were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD
> in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive
> 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative
> 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it
> easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of
> a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside,
> non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge
> amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under
> Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the
> fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of
> material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the
> reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for
> the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never
> recovered.
>
>
>
> --
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
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