Comment by pdonis
10 hours ago
> this is also a stunning example of survivorship bias.
No, it's an example of why you have to allow people to pursue what at the time look like "curiosities", even though most of them don't go anywhere--because the very small portion that do go somewhere, end up changing the world, and we don't know in advance which ones those are going to be.
It's quite true that the funds we have for this are a finite resource. But that doesn't mean that "foreseeable practical applications" is a useful filter for how to deploy that resource.
Yes you have to allow people to pursue these things. That's not a compelling argument for funding, especially when nobody was funding the people that did invent calculus.
> nobody was funding the people that did invent calculus.
Of course someone was. Newton and Leibniz weren't living in autarky an some island. They had an income stream that was taken away from somewhere else and given to them so that they could afford working on their pet projects.
The fact that it's not publicly funded doesn't change the fact that there's still resource allocation happening.
I think by that definition every mathematician in the current day is funded, mission accomplished.
They worked other jobs, no? No one paid them specifically to invent calculus or anything of the sort.
1 reply →
Correction: you don’t _have_ to, but technological advancement is faster if you do.
That's an empirical question. And you also need to justify why your country in particular should finance that.
For the kind of research where benefits accrue to the inventor (or her employer) and others can be excluded so that the benefits don't 'spill over', then private companies can fund it.
For the kind of research that spills over, you can just let the tax payers of that other country foot the bill. Eg the US can free-ride on Chinese research, and if having mathematicians in the population is good, the US can offer green cards to whatever has a math degree from a good enough university.
There might be some intermediate research that has just enough spill over that a company won't do it, but a country might, should be a rare creature. And differently sized countries should have different sweet spots: some companies are bigger than some countries after all. But I don't think we see different countries select the research (mathematical or otherwise) with an eye towards exactly tailoring spill over.
You know how drunken debates with friends over trivia became pointless with the advent of Google and Wikipedia. The debates didn't get better. But they could. They did. Today we have HN mods and HN citations and upvotes
>useful filter
There's also "useful friction" as _almost_ imagined by Tao here
https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo?t=25m11s
We can't know in advance, but something like the "weird cadence" that arises when 2 skilled humans try to do a threesome with an AI..
could be reified into a local measure (eutripsis) of how likely advances (conceptual or otherwise) are in the midterm