By Thiago V. S. Coelho
As Murray Rothbard warned decades ago, government-sponsored science is simply an extension of the bureaucracy used by the regime to force its policies on others. This is not an accident or anomaly; it is how government works.
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The results of gov funding are insidious even when they are reasonable and well-considered.
Case in point, about a decade ago I was doing work for a non-profit that was focused on medical research. The lead researcher was explaining to me that nearly all govt grants are earmarked for research that has provable improvement metrics....that sounds reasonable (and it is), but it winds up producing counter-intuitive industry wide effects when done at scale.
If you have some novel approach for say curing diabetes its very hard to get a govt grant for it, because the grant making process basically forces you to know the results before you apply for the grant (ie. we show a 6% increase in insulin response)....however for "bluesky research" you don't know that yet....
So the result is, the industry moves towards just tweaking existing pharma recipes hoping to find some incremental gain.
Again, I'm not really blaming govt, but its just when the largest check writer (by far) sets such rules it basically forces the entire industry to take the same approach.
Ah yes, this is an example of
Goodhart's Law: "When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric."I've certainly wondered why scientific breakthroughs seem to have basically dried up.
It would be interesting to somehow link the decline in major breakthroughs to these kinds of research incentives.
Bluesky Research made me laugh out loud
yeah.....sounds odd.... "Increasing Woke Levels By 6%"
100% agree. Reports released are filtered and approved by the politicos in charge at the time.