Comment by whywhywhywhy
4 months ago
Just seems a very idealistic and almost simplistic view of how a thing should work best because it feels like it should work but the reality is academia gets completely outpaced by private companies. SpaceX, GPT4, Ozempic, list goes on.
There is no SpaceX without the ability to build on the (public) advancements of NASA and the public willingness to pay SpaceX taxpayer dollars for speculative flights.
There is no Ozempic without federal funds for basic research to identify GLP-1. (Nordisk started their research downstream of the US taxpayer's contributions.)
GPT-4, as its builders would certainly admit, is a descendant of early work in the field. This work involves a significant amount of work funded by DoD.
None of this is to detract from these products. But there is no point in pretending that e.g. rocket research is not generally funded by militaries (governments), on which SpaceX built.
In general, if you a citing something with a brand name and a trademark, you are talking about something that is not basic research. Basic research in the US is overwhelmingly government-funded for the simple reason that companies do not invest on the time horizons required and in general cannot take on the amount of risk entailed.
All of those are based on basic academic science…
What you’re describing is at least partly engineering and product design, not pure science
> academia gets completely outpaced by private companies
Outpaced? What does that even mean? The whole point is they have different roles and goals. And you need them all, if you cut basic research all the downstream stuff will suffer.