“Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.” - Thiel 2011 Details

Source: https://bsky.app/profile/takedemocracyback.org/post/3lk4u55a... it's an interview from the September issue of details magazine 2011, has largely been scrubbed from the internet

So in the case of Thiel, he read LOTR and identified with the villains, which is about as large a misreading of Tolkien as one can make

this may be of interest to you

while we spin our wheels trying to displace those of us who have decided to produce culture, our adversaries will invest in medicine, energy production, transportation, etc...

what profound contempt for humanity a culture must have to produce tools such as these

the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted

by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research

to give two examples

1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"

2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.

Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.

So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.

"holding my head in my hands" to quote an earlier poster

it's going to take the management of our shared resources and spaces (orbit) for instance to leave earth, and this becomes especially important as Kessler syndrome risk rises with increasing debris in orbit

private companies launching without public oversight and controls are a recipe for cluttering earth's orbit and leaving us earth-bound for far into the future (same if the public sector launches without care but that seems less likely imo)

Kessler Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?

take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers

Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0

(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")

brandolini's law in full effect

whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research

(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)

their revenue was (and still is) based on taking a percentage of the hired contractor's eventual salary

I'd love to understand a few things about the company and investment excitement:

- How do they handle misclassification risk in the different jurisdictions they hire candidates from? For those unfamiliar, outside the US many governments have the power to look at labor contracts and determine if they are employee or contracting contracts

- How do they differ from TopTal, TryCrew, Bolto, Upwork, etc...?

- How does the mix of contract employments shake out? What % of engagements are for developing AI models vs just hiring a developer for a time-period or product engagement?

This almost reminds me of Scale AI, however instead of low-skilled data labeling for ML applications, it is high skilled expertise generation for the development of LLMs

Would be super interested in other takes